David Bates
Austin Museum of Art
Through January 31, 2010

By Rebecca S. Cohen

Installation view of David Bates since 1982: From the Everyday to the Epic at Austin Museum of Art, November 21, 2009 - January 31, 2010.
Courtesy Austin Museum of Art. Photo: Jimmy Jalapeno.

With few exceptions, the 26 paintings and sculptures by David Bates at the Austin Museum of Art represent a fine and familiar overview of the artist’s oeuvre. There are, as usual, great swathes of color—blinding white egret feathers and magnolia blossoms, umbers you swear smell of earth and decaying wood, lofty blues and fecund mid-summer greens—barely contained by black outlines that insure a controlled chaos. Bates’ subject matter remains straightforward: portraits, landscapes (moist warm swampy environs and attendant birds) and still lifes. The viewer intuits veiled references here and there to his art historical heroes such as Max Beckman and Marsden Hartley—a nod to Manet over there, perhaps, or Picasso—but really it is Bates as Bates. He feels no obligation to hurl himself toward distant horizons. This is an artist who gains ground by staying right where he is.

Self-confidence rather than stasis rules. Texas and the Gulf Coast region in which he has lived and played for most of his life have clearly shaped the wordless narrative of his paintings. The sculptures follow suit. (One imagines the artist as Aztec warrior, reaching his hand into a painting to pull out the beating heart of an image and placing it on a pedestal.) AMOA’s not-so-subtle pairing of magnolia sculpture with magnolia painting, beer and cigarettes sculpture with Mexican beer painting reinforces the obvious.

The exhibition is organized according to subject matter. First the working guys—woodsman, fishermen, firecracker salesman, stone carver—canvases dense with physical activity. Next comes the musician’s corner wherein hangs a very large paean to Clifton Chenier, a painting awkwardly challenging the line between Bates’ sincere affection for outsider artists and his attempt, apparently, to become one. Nearby guitar-shaped constructions similarly disappoint compared to the small, perfect pitch painting of Lightnin’ Hopkins beside them. The rest of the works in the show, all borrowed from public and private Austin and Dallas collections, are similarly melodious.

Like a shimmering oasis, Bates’ paintings and sculptures featuring magnolias, landscapes and birds are hung toward the back of the museum galleries, where they dazzle the eye and sooth the spirit. Several paintings literally burst off the canvas. In some of these, Bates actually builds up the surface using wood and fabric. In others, his facility with paint is such that he simply appears to model feathers, leaves and petals with his brush.

The paintings based on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina are even more compelling. While the rest of us were watching the flood on television, Bates was sketching furiously. Later he visited New Orleans. In the end he produced roughly 60 paintings based on the plight of the people whose lives were lost or turned upside down when the levees broke. From the small screen images that caught his attention come large-scale confrontational portraits, deftly painted and filled with emotion. “I tried them smaller,” says Bates. “They just didn’t seem to get across the magnitude of a million people getting displaced. Like the dustbowl but in a week.” The Kemper Museum in Kansas City is assembling an exhibition of these paintings alone, scheduled to open in May of this coming year.

Finally, three striking works inspired by the loss of his parents, most recently his father to Alzheimer’s disease, depart from the classic Bates style. A pale portrait on canvas, a drawing of two hands on paper and a super-size sculpture of a hand constitute a quiet memorial to the artist’s father. The white and grey painting, far less controlled and more ephemeral than all of the others, speaks volumes. Translucent veils float aimlessly. A lost stare emanates from an unsettling visage. There is no frame around the canvas, just as there are no boundaries on loss.

David Bates, The Deluge II, 2006.

Bates has destroyed other portraits from this series, as well as paintings from other series. He speaks about relentlessly “editing” all his work and destroying the canvases that don’t please him sufficiently. “I was at a dinner with Jim Dine,” said Bates, “and somebody asked him ‘what is your work about, and he went ‘immortality.’ They asked me later what he meant by that, and I said well, you’re going to die and all this stuff is going to be around. It’s like tombstones. It really won’t matter what sells or didn’t sell, it’s like, did you make the best tombstones you could make and leave behind before you die? That’s what I think he meant.”

And that, I think, is what Bates means to do as he carefully edits his work, refines and reconsiders intensely personal subject matter and rarely strays from the region that has shaped his narrative. This is a man who aims to exercise firm control over his own well-deserved memorial corner within the history of art one day.

Rebecca S. Cohen is an Austin-based writer and author of Art Guide Texas, published by UT Press.

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Jade Walker
Austin Museum of Art
Through January 31, 2010

By Claire RuudJade Walker, Spectator Sport (detail), 2009, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

Jade Walker’s sculptures are sexed—penile and vaginal forms abound. But they are not gendered—no “males” or “females” here. Rather, these are androgynes, hermaphrodites and other indeterminate bodies—indeterminate, at least according to our typical binary gender system. The sculptures sit alone or in pairs or triples on imposing bleachers in AMOA’s small back gallery. Many wear braces and bandages. The space is claustrophobic. The bleachers, ensconced in a Band-aid-colored felt skirt and raised to put the front row at eye-level, fill the room to bursting. Similarly colored walls and orange Astroturf add to the effect. The Astroturf scrunches and crunches with every footfall, awkwardly interrupting the quiet of the museum, like the steps of doctors in scrubs and shoe covers in a deserted corridor. In short, the installation walks a disconcerting line between sports arena and hospital ward.

Walker’s installation is an ode to bodies as contested spaces. If her creature-sculptures could speak, their huzzah would take up the feminist slogan, “Battleground, battleground, your body is a battleground!” Their bodies bear both the wounds of this battle and the marks of tender care. Walker sutures a gaping hole here, braces a sagging body there. In her hands, “your body is a battleground” isn’t an issue-based dictum. It’s a statement of fact about all our bodies. We use them, politicians use them, journalists use them. On our bodies, we work out definitions, struggle over rights and imagine new possibilities. Our bodies become fields of play, and Spectator Sport literally puts us in the game.

Cultural reference points for this work exist in abundance. Recently, “Iron Mike” Webster’s once-athletic, prematurely destroyed body has served as a primary playing field in the NFL-Alzheimer’s debate over the brain injuries incurred by football players. Semenya Caster’s powerfully muscular body has been tossed into the match over gender-normativity. Outside the sports arena, American bodies—especially aging bodies and women’s bodies—have been the subject of much attention within the healthcare debate. These public controversies are on Walker's radar; she names Michael Sokolove’s Warrior Girls (2008), a book arguing that young women athletes should be trained and coached differently than their male counterparts, as one starting point for the installation.

Iconic images of bodies in your newspaper feel distant. By contrast, Walker’s sculptures invest bodily forms with tactility and intimacy. At once reminiscent of cuddly teddy-bears and cold anatomical models, they attract and repulse. Pairs of sculptures lean on one another for support, or seem to embrace lovingly. Sharp nails and taught stitches suggest pain. Rubbery bits feel awkward.

The danger is that the attraction and repulsion these sculptures elicit morph into pity rather than empathy. Pity contains contempt; it allows us to disassociate our bodies from the bodies of Walker’s sculptures. Empathy creates room for identification. It allows for the possibility that our fascination with Webster and Semenya is a defense against our own fears of not being “man” or “woman” enough. It enables us to recognize that Warrior Girls reincarnates an age-old impulse to contain the vulnerability of all our bodies within women’s bodies.Jade Walker, Spectator Sport, 2009.

In Spectator Sport, one sculpture sitting in the front row of the bleachers successfully fends off our pity with her gawking stare. Mouth agape, her single eye (the rubber end of a crutch, perhaps) periscopes out at us, reminding that she is the spectator and we are the ones to be looked at. The bodies of Walker’s sculptures merely reflect the ambiguity, messiness and fragility of our own.

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My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love
Women & Their Work, Austin
Through January 7, 2010

By Kate Watson

Katri Walker, State of the He/Art (Macho), 2006, Video Still. Courtesy the artist and Women & Their Work.

Love, that uniquely human quagmire, is riddled with fantasy, illusion and humor. My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love, the current show at Women and Their Work, is filled with all sorts of odd gesticulations and gimmicks that strive towards the belly of the beast. The pieces fail to offer up any sort of unified commentary on this most difficult topic, but I assume that’s the point. There’s a lot of humorously awkward vulnerability in the work, an approach that certainly cuts to the crux of how most of us feel as we dance this crazy, lifelong two-step.

A clumsy sense of desperation radiates throughout the show. Of all the work, Katri Walker’s State of the He/Art (Serenata) (2006) rings most vibrantly. Walker, an artist living and working in both Glasgow and Mexico City, dons a giant sombrero and sings a half-hearted lament in front of video footage of her ex’s mariachi band. She swigs tequila and quietly channels the machismo-laden energy of her former lover’s music. I yearn for the video to culminate in an all-out rage fest, but no catharsis comes. Walker stays coolly on the edge of the breakdown, for better or for worse.

Anthony Romero’s Personal Journeys: Shaman Video Dating Service (2009) also toys with fantasy and character as a means of exploring our desperation for intimacy. Romero explores a wild variety of personas via an artist-fabricated Internet dating service he designed exclusively for other worldly creatures (all played by Romero). The website, on display via computer in the exhibition space, sits adjacent to individual single-channel videos of some of the characters. Romero’s investigation of this cultural phenomenon—the matchmaking site—is intriguing. JDate. Pagan Partners. Philanderers International. As these virtual hunting grounds become more and more sophisticated, the odds that even the hyper bizarre can find their soul mate are increasing exponentially. The work also highlights the tension between the solo act of surfing and that of performing a public persona for potential matches, a conundrum magnified tenfold by the absurdity of Romero’s video profiles.

Laura Ann Meyers, Crush, 2009.

It’s impossible to avoid the gaudy spectacle of Laura Ann Meyer’s hyper pink installation, Crush (2009). This giant crepe paper heart looks like the spirit of Saint Valentine got wasted on Flirtinis and vomited onto the wall; needless to say, the imagery is a bit heavy handed. But after recovering from my pink vertigo, I couldn’t help but fall for the symbolic crux of the piece; as we learn from the curatorial statement, it’s actually a visually deconstructed parody of a prom corsage. What stranger act is there as a young teen than getting “pinned” by your acne-covered neighbor who is just dying to touch your boob? The desperation of that bizarre and antiquated tradition oozes from Meyer’s piece. Crush is equal parts tragic and nauseating. I would drink some Pepto Bismo if it weren’t that same infernal shade of pink.

My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love is an ambiguous gesture towards intimacy. Castro herself expresses a very transparent desire to reach out: for the opening, she mailed invitations, half of them in “love letter” format, half in “break-up letter” format. Like the artists in the show, the curator seems to be tiptoeing towards the personal yet stays planted in the fictional. I say let it all hang out.

Kate Watson is an Austin-based writer, curator and artist. She is the cofounder of Circulatory System and a founding member of Austin Video Bee.

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A Room of Her Own
McClain Gallery, Houston
Through December 31, 2009

By Wendy Vogel

Allison Schulnik, Big Bear Head, 2008, Oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. Courtesy McClain Gallery.

A Room of Her Own at McClain Gallery takes its title from Virginia Woolf’s maxim: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. Woolf’s essay, which details the problems that women artists have faced in terms of representation and education, is addressed literally in this exhibition: McClain gives over most of the commercial gallery (three out of four rooms) to work by a transgenerational group of fifteen female artists. Yet the pressing question is the extent to which this exhibition, along with other recent all-female shows, reflects a larger set of concerns about the positioning of female artists.

Two years ago, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and the Brooklyn Museum’s new Sackler Center for Feminist Art brought the “F-word” back into fresh circulation among art audiences. This renewed interest has worked its way into the gallery world, where all-female group shows have become a framing device for situating new artists in familiar territory. The cynic could call this is a marketing strategy for a conservative market and, in the case of A Room of Her Own, the cynic would be right.

A Room of Her Own is organized primarily by medium: sculpture in the first room, painting and photography in the second and collage and richly layered paintings in the third. Loosely, the work addresses themes of figuration and abstraction and a poetic relationship to landscape, though these motifs do not add up to a definitive curatorial statement. Rather, the exhibition attempts to skirt notions of essentialism by including a token text-based work: Jenny Holzer’s LED sculpture Purple Red Curve from 2005. But Holzer’s sculpture reads awkwardly in a show that otherwise aims to create visual connections between older and younger artists working in a less conceptual vein.

A Room of Her Own forges these cross-generational correspondences to either pretty or subversive effect. The younger artists, most of whom are figurative painters, pick up where their fore-mothers left off. Chantal Joffe’s small, restrained canvases depicting women and children are clearly indebted to Alice Neel, whose painting David (1968) was initially included in the exhibition but was recently returned to its owners. Joffe’s work hangs salon-style with more aggressive works by Kelli Vance and Katherine Bernhardt. Vance’s She Seemed Very… (2009), in which a model seems to scrub herself raw on the canvas, takes Marilyn Minter’s work as an obvious reference. Meanwhile, Katherine Bernhardt’s angular, drippy renderings of hip-hop icons (Lauren Hill and Redhead, both 2005) provide a sassy, welcome contrast to Inez van Lamsweerde’s C-print of Kate Moss installed on the opposite wall. An art-historical one-liner, the photograph depicts the fashion victim as a bride stripped bare, literally, with white roses covering her stubbly pubic area. However, the young standout of the show diverges from female portraiture altogether. Allison Schulnik’s Big Bear Head (2008), a densely sculptural impasto that extends into the viewer’s space, embodies the corporeal tendencies of the older artists’ key works.

Louise Fishman, All Night and All Day, 2008.

What ultimately lacks among the works by older artists in the show is the viscera and vitriol for which they are best known. Louise Nevelson’s black-painted wooden relief, Untitled (1976-8), is reminiscent of work by her Abstract Expressionist cohorts like David Smith. However, Kiki Smith’s River Tree (2007) a delicately expressive wall-mounted bronze, gives little indication of the interest in abject, crouching figures that defined her earlier production. YBA star Tracey Emin, known for dissecting her messy personal life in diaristic neons and large-scale installations, is included with a discreet monoprint of a naked woman bearing the title of her favorite F-word (Fuck Me Blind, 1997). Emin’s print is hung below and visually rhymed with an inoffensive Cecily Brown watercolor landscape. Two recent works by Louise Fishman span the gulf of her current production. All Night and All Day (2008), a more aggressively composed oil painting consisting of long gestural slashes, recalls her important "Angry Women" series of the 1970s, while Copal (2000), a brushy oil on linen, is out of place aside from its visual connection to Cecily Brown’s works. Overall, the representation of works by the older artists in the show is disappointingly uneven—an unevenness that renders it difficult to make sense of cross-generational relationships implied by the exhibition. The curatorial intention behind these groupings begs for clarification within the context of feminist production. As it is, the exhibition simply promotes the younger generation as inheritors of a legacy taken for granted.

The question of feminism-as-such does not enter the equation here. By contrast, in a recent historically-oriented show at Cheim & Read Gallery in New York entitled The Female Gaze, the theoretical implications were made clear from the title to the press release: this was a show that picked up where Laura Mulvey’s excoriating text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” left off. The larger theme of female looking, and the pleasure and transgression contained therein, formed a workable construct for a gallery show looking to situate younger artists in a further-reaching critical dialogue. For the young artists at McClain Gallery, however, an artistic matrilineage may or may not be a foregone conclusion. The continuity (or disjuncture) of feminist practice needs articulation–and not at the expense of the older artists. By distancing the show from “the F word,” this show paradoxically serves to underscore the essentialist notion that all work by female artists needs a (ghettoized) room of its own.

Wendy Vogel is a Critical Fellow in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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Tony Feher
D'Amelio Terras, New York
Through December 23, 2009

By Katie Geha

Installation view: Tony Feher: Blossom, D'Amelio Terras, New York, NY. November 7 - December 23, 2009.

Ed Ruscha, an artist familiar with the theme of banality, once remarked, “Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?” These parameters can be instructive in judging a work of art. Does it elicit an initial punch? Does it linger or is it easily dismissed? Or does the work provoke a slight confusion or disorientation followed by a deeper understanding, a continued engagement? These questions are really about aftertaste—what kind of resonance, if any, does the work create?

Former Texas artist Tony Feher, a master of making the banal beautiful, has a new installation at D’Amelio Terras in Chelsea. The exhibition features five large-scale sculptures made from 38-inch Owens-Corning polystyrene and placed directly on the gallery floor. The material is evident, manipulated only in the creation of the identical fan forms. Feher translates this everyday insulation foam into carefully crafted, almost origami-like blossoms of pink.

Feher’s installation should be considered in relation to two other exhibitions currently on view in the New York area—Urs Fischer at the New Museum and Rachel Harrison at the Hessell at Bard College. Fischer and Harrison also use basic everyday items to create totems of sculpture. They display plastic toys glued together, rotting vegetables hung from the ceiling, or disassembled cardboard boxes piled high up the gallery wall. We could call this post-Duchampian, scatter art, a trash aesthetic. Whatever it is, it has been running rampant in the art world ever since the New Museum articulated the movement in 2008 with its building’s inaugural exhibition Unmonumental.

That exhibition (which featured works by both Fischer and Harrison) heralded a trend so forceful that now galleries are filled with cultural detritus: the playthings that distract us from banality, while simultaneously entrenching us in that very same condition. The objects and images we used yesterday (cardboard, trash bags, tweety bird) are placed in a vitrine and treated as relics of our contemporary moment. Call it forced entropy. Yet, do these trashy sculptures make us more aware of our shared cultural malaise? Or is it, rather, a celebration of waste, the implied obsolescence of the object? Finally, and most pressing, what is the aftertaste? I feel unmoved––bored even, but perhaps that is the point.

Feher was not included in Unmonumental and it is curious that he was not, given his propensity for collecting and organizing throwaway objects such as shards of broken glass or plastic bottles filled with colored water. But there is a quality to Feher’s work that is not shared by the work of many of the Unmonumental artists. Feher creates a sense of restraint and formal stability while still retaining a keen sense of play. There is an unabashed intelligence to his installations. He leaves nothing unconsidered; one senses that the folds of the pink polystyrene that make up the large fans are exactly where they should be. Feher’s everyday art is a careful art. Perhaps two years after the New Museum show, we can start to sift through this trend in sculpture and begin to discern the cast-off gems amidst the trash, the “Huh? Wows” from the “Wow! Huhs?”

Katie Geha is pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.

Jonathan Marshall

By Dan Boehl

In May 2009 Jonathan Marshall asked me to accompany him on a trip to Big Bend National Park in west Texas. Marshall was headed out there to film for his upcoming Art Palace show using the desert landscape as his set. So it was that on an early morning we waited outside Travis Austin’s house for Austin to return from his Whole Foods shift while rain sprinkled the windshield of Marshall’s mom’s CRV. Austin would star as Johan Pilgrim, one of only three characters that populate Marshall’s Quest of Sight (Part One) (2009), a post-apocalyptic cowboy tragicomedy premiering as Art Palace Houston’s inaugural exhibition. I would be the grip.

We spent the first night by the Rio Grande. Thunderstorms threatened in the distance and six-inch millipedes left their trails in the silt where we lay. In the morning we dressed in long sleeves and cowboy hats. We tied scarves around our necks and squinted into the sun. We drove through the washout that passes for a road leading to the abandoned cinnabar mine. The mine, replete with warnings of mercury poisoning, sits on the side of a hill like an ancient temple, gazing over the low desert plain. I followed Marshall, hands loaded with water bottles heating up in the morning sun, as he filmed Austin acting out Johan Pilgrim’s trek to the mine. There, Pilgrim finds the Cave of Wonders and inside it, a vial of psychedelic whiskey. He drinks it, and an animated bird totem assigns him his quest.

Texas landscape is front and center in Quest of Sight (Part One). In addition to the desert plain of Big Bend, Padre Island National Seashore served as one of Marshall’s film sets, so the film is partly an exploration of the Texas spirit forged by the land and sea. The post-apocalyptic timeline is a throwback to the frontier days when newcomers arrived thinking the land was rife with possibilities. If you consider Marshall’s liberal references to outer space to be an allusion to NASA’s strong Texas presence, then Quest of Sight (Part One) becomes a total exploration of Texas Earth, Water and Sky.

Throw in a little mysticism, give nature a strange, mischievous sense of humor, and you’ll start to understand how the film unfolds. There is very little speaking and no dialogue. A few subtitles set the scene in the opening sequence of the film. Johan and Lenny’s otherworldly visions punctuate an otherwise linear storyline. In one scene, Lenny finds a pulsating purple and pink machine on a sea-bound mountain of trash. In another, animated birds flock through the desert. A colorful mass blooms like a lily in the cold depths of outer space. A bone flips through the air.

Except for getting some help with music from Travis Austin, who is involved in a couple Austin area bands, Marshall did all the video production and editing himself. During a scene when Austin enters a tent/sweatlodge in the desert, Marshall had to blank out all the sounds of the camera shutter snapping as I took production stills. He told me it took him hours to find the right buzzing sound for a gate crashing desert fly. Add in the time it took to produce the multiple animations that give the film its painterly psychedelic effect, and Marshall has racked up hundreds of hours of production time.

But all the work Marshall put into making Quest of Sight (Part One) is totally worth it. Two weeks ago, Marshall installed a preview show at the old Austin Art Palace location. I went over there to look at the paintings, drawings, and sculptures that, with the film, form what Marshall considers to be the “complete thought” that encompasses the environment of Quest of Sight (Part One). Marshall screened the film for me and members of the Okay Mountain collective, who were taking a break from property management duties. What struck me was how serious yet goofy the film was. Sad and wondrous. Painterly and narrative. Quest of Sight (Part One) uses everything in Marshall’s toolkit to create a sparsely inhabited and imaginatively engaging world that expresses offhand and obliquely the struggles involved with exploratory art making. In creating its own artistic realm, the film pleases the senses and amazes the mind.

Jonathan Marshall: Doubled Vision opens at Art Palace, Houston tonight (Friday, January 15) from 6 - 8pm. An excerpt of Quest of Sight (Part One) may be found on Marshall's website.

Dan Boehl is a workshop fellow in the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. His chapbook Les MISERES ET LES MAL-HEURS DE LA GUERRE will be available from Greying Ghost soon.

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