Interrupted Landscapes
Champion Contemporary, Austin
Through October 16, 2010

By Allison Myers

Interrupted Landscapes (exhibition view) at Champion Contemporary.

When gallery goers won’t let the taco truck leave, you know it’s been a good opening. Last month Champion Contemporary opened its doors with the group exhibition Interrupted Landscapes, and the Austin art community turned out in full force to welcome it. One of the more salient aspects of Champion’s programming is its dedication to displaying both local and international emerging artists—a strategy that succeeds here, despite the otherwise uninspired theme.

The exhibition takes a long view of landscape by setting nature-inspired images against conceptualized or politicized views of the land. Many of the works play nicely off each other. Shay Kun’s Ammunition (2007), a painting of a surreal warship at the foot of colorful, Lisa Frank-esque mountains, suggests the absurdity underlying the political landscape in Richard Mosse’s well-known documentary photograph of soldiers stationed at Iraq’s Uday Palace. Barry Stone’s circular, middle-gray intervention in an Ansel Adams photograph (2010) is especially compelling when compared to Scott Hocking’s Ziggurat (2010), a photograph documenting a pyramidal sculpture the artist built from decaying wooden blocks in an abandoned factory. Both Stone and Hocking use iconic images and appropriated materials to disrupt landscape. For Stone, this leads to questioning the truth-value of representation; for Hocking, it leads to an awareness of forgotten places and lost histories. Stone’s middle-gray intervention also engages with Adam Schreiber’s Lac du Flambeau, a photographic tondo placed directly opposite Stone’s. Where Stone’s circular form interrupts Ansel Adam’s photograph with its blankness, Schreiber’s work fills in the circle with a lush, leafy landscape—making for a fun visual game.

All in all, however, Champion’s inaugural show is more of a whisper than a roar. Despite the presence of some strong work, the exhibition feels too safe. On the whole, Austin is a city that values experimentation, and Champion would have done better to debut with something that had a little more punch. Even keeping the tried-and-true subject of landscape, a larger presence of sculpture or installation inside the gallery would have helped enliven the space. Also, though the show includes a video by Ben Rivers (I Know Where I’m Going, 2009), the work is cloistered next to the office area and doesn’t read visually as part of the exhibition. Rather than a cutting edge break into the scene, what Champion ended up with is a collector-friendly exhibition that doesn’t muster the kind of general excitement the gallery needs to survive.

I would like to add a word of clarification here: being collector-friendly is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a feature that makes Champion stand out. Alongside the gallery, Champion advertises an art advisory service, which includes representing clients at auction and placing works in the secondary market in addition to helping collectors and companies invest in contemporary work. Owner Sonia Dutton comes to Austin from New York, where she worked as a curatorial advisor for the Artist Pension Trust—a position she continues to hold from her new homebase in Texas. Her experience with the politics of collecting and her interest in placing these services at the front may prove to be the boon that keeps the gallery alive.

And really, beyond the first show, this is the question at hand for Champion: what does it need to survive? Austin has a quick turnover rate—of both galleries and artists—and only a handful of the galleries that have opened have stuck around long enough to become community staples, such as Women and Their Work or Lora Reynolds. Many people complain about Austin’s art scene being too small, too incestuous, too not-New-York-or-L.A. I’ve only been in the city three years and I’m already tired of hearing it. The first task in attacking this problem would be to ask ourselves, “Do we really have a problem?” Austin is small, for sure, but that smallness affords a community structure that is close, supportive and friendly. If that’s not enough, then we have to ask ourselves a second question: “What can we do to change it?”

According to Champion, what needs to change is contextualization and exposure. Showing Texas artists alongside international or national artists engenders dialogue and establishes our currency within a larger conversation. Likewise, introducing Texas artists to more collectors and museums produces exposure, which provides more opportunities for contextualization. Right now many Austin-based artists find gallery representation in New York, bypassing any chance for the city itself to become an arm in the game. Champion aims at making the Austin art scene more self-sufficient and in turn, stronger. This is something I heartily applaud.

Despite the flatness of the first show, I have high hopes for Champion. Dutton has a fine program lined up for the coming months; a solo exhibition by our own Sonya Berg is up next. Let’s keep the openings packed.

EDITOR'S NOTE: We regret that this review was initially run with fact-checking errors, which have been corrected here.

Allison Myers is pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Texas Austin.

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Shaping the History of Photography
Harry Ransom Center, Austin
Through October 2, 2010

By Barry Stone

Collections, like histories, are inherently abstractions, pieces of a whole and subject to distortion. As part of its biennial Flair Symposium, the Harry Ransom Center hosted a three-day conference entitled “Shaping the History of Photography,” held in conjunction with and inspired by the exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: the Gernsheim Collections. Acquired in 1963 by the University of Texas at Austin, the collection of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim consists of approximately 35,000 photographs, including what is considered to be the first photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, ca. 1826.

Contained in a dark reverent cubicle-like encasement at the HRC, Niépce’s heliograph must be viewed behind glass and at various angles in order to discern its ghostly image reflected by its mirror-like pewter surface. The “First Photograph,” like all the photographs in the collection, is at once an image and a revered object. Upon its discovery, Gernsheim was at pains to create a suitable reproduction that matched his grandiose visions for his collection. In an effort to offer a corrective for Gernsheim’s own extreme retouched graphic distortions, the HRC teamed up with the Getty Conservation Institute in 2002 to produce a more faithful, albeit inscrutable, digital iteration. This final reproduction, by virtue of its static nature, also fails to describe the object whose fidelity undulates with different angles of view. Seen in aggregate in the HRC exhibition, four variants of the “First Photograph”(1952-2002) offer a close description of the illusive experience of viewing the piece itself. In doing so, this process parallels the murky process by which a history of image/objects is constructed.

Helmut Gernsheim was a man with a mission. Through his prolific writings and the gathered material support of his collection, he worked tirelessly and polemically for over 25 years to advocate for photography as a field of academic study and aesthetic inquiry. Gernsheim literally wrote the book(s) on photographic history. His descriptions of photography’s beginnings and techniques are considered invaluable and still stand as definitive.

In addition to the pursuit of legitimacy, Gernsheim had another agenda. He wanted to show a teleological aesthetic progression of photography as art form. For him, the legacy began with the naïve pictorial images created by the medium’s early practitioners and ultimately culminated in the New Objectivity movement. This problematic historiography was rarely dealt with head-on at the symposium, with the exception of Steven Hoelscher, the Academic Curator of Photography at the HRC, who offered a mild rebuke of Gernsheim’s methods in his concluding remarks.

Many of the symposium’s attendees and panel members were party to and inspired by Gernsheim’s struggle. While prejudices still remain toward the medium (and Gernsheim’s historical methodologies) today, it is in part thanks to his efforts, along with those of the speakers and organizers, that photography is finally recognized as a bona fide academic discipline and fine art. In this light, the conference itself could be considered a victory lap taken by the organizers of the event (David L. Coleman, the Curator of Photography at the HRC, and Roy Flukinger, the HRC’s Senior Research Curator of Photography, whose 354-page fully illustrated catalogue The Gernsheim Collection was published to coincide with the symposium and exhibition).

The symposium panels covered various topics concerning the important roles collections play in creating a place for critical and cultural inquiry. Alison Nordström, the curator of Photographs at George Eastman House, suggested during the panel on historiography that despite the panelists’ varied biases and occupations, their interests meet at the study of the object: the print. James B. Colson, the longtime documentarian and educator, responded provocatively by raising the question of the move away from an image/object discourse into a digital conversation, causing the crowd to collectively gasp and laugh in unison.

This symposium was a celebration of physical material: image/objects that have been coveted and canonized. The collection consists of hard-won beautiful fragments from which Gernsheim assembled a linear narrative of an autonomous and insular field of artistic production. Through its sheer mass and breadth, the Gernsheim collection offers a myriad of possible opportunities to excavate new histories from within its important holdings. There was so much to be discussed of the remnants of the past, however, that there was little time left for the consideration of the medium’s present state, much less its future or interaction with other media. If photography was once the misunderstood underdog that now commands the museum floor, must it only be evaluated in relation to itself?

Indeed, photography is an extremely popular endeavor; arguably everyone who owns a cell phone is a now a photographer. At auction houses, contemporary art photographs fetch millions of dollars. Gernsheim would no doubt be happy to note that even art historian Michael Fried has turned his critical pen toward photography. The medium is so omnipresent today that we are seeing a backlash of sorts in the form of pronouncements of its imminent demise, as evidenced in SFMOMA’s recent symposium held last April, “Is Photography Over?” As we tread more deeply into the digital age, it is ironic that as we celebrate its historical arrival, object/image-based photography breaks the tape at the finish line of legitimacy only to stumble and fall into its own grave.

Barry Stone is an artist based in Austin and Assistant Professor of Photography at Texas State University, San Marcos.

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Ruth Van Beek
Okay Mountain, Austin
Through October 16, 2010

By Wendy Vogel

What’s with the rock coozy? I asked myself in front of Le monde sans soleil (2009), the black-and-white series of Inkjet prints tacked to the walls of Okay Mountain’s back room. The most straightforward work in Ruth van Beek’s exhibition The Great Blue Mountain Range (the Dutch artist’s first in the United States), the series contains images from the Spaarnestad photographic archive that are enigmatic, seemingly flatfooted, strung together in an amusing visual sentence. The image of a black, smoothly glazed stone tucked snugly into a knit case (a pet rock’s sleeping bag?), third from left, found itself among four images of disembodied human hands clutching various minerals, a picture turned on its side of two boys atop a boulder, a cluster of diamonds twinkling against a solid black background, a crumpled crossword puzzle and three lace handkerchiefs worked subtly into improvised sculptural gestures. The formal rhythm between the oblong prints echoed the subtle equivalence between body, earth and gesture contained therein: images of a search for empirical knowledge played against each other with a decidedly female trickster’s hand.

Images of rocks are present throughout The Great Blue Mountain Range. Megaliths ordinarily are mute, but as Robert Smithson remarked in “The Artist as Site-Seer,” his unfinished 1966-67 essay, these “prime objects” could contain not only precious resources and records of geologic time, but J.G. Ballard’s “noise of history” encoded by a mysterious language. Van Beek’s stones, rather than holding the symbolic keys to a prehistoric language, operate visually as playful surrogates of objecthood and occlusion itself.

Le monde sans soleil functions as a visual key to the rest of the exhibition. Two more small clusters of photographs, a brief two-channel digital slide projection, and vitrines of photo/objects round out the show. The vitrines, containing what might be considered photographic specimens culled from a swath of geologic time, contain snapshots of pets truncated into rock-like forms from vertical folds, domestic hobbyists and blown-up Internet printouts of crystal shapes collaged onto foamcore backing. Two re-photographed collages, untitled (orange) and untitled (yellow) (both 2009) depict simple interventions by the artist to existing images. Van Beek inscribes her authorship by gluing watercolors of rock-like shapes to found photographs, covering (in orange) what appears to be a cake stand and (in yellow) a sculpture atop a pedestal. In so doing, she strips the original meaning from both a domestic and an artistic trophy-stand, reclaiming pride of place through her blocky additions. Such collagist gestures become more complex and deft in her manipulation of tourist book pages and hand-sized apocalyptic scenes into stone-shaped origami, photographs of which are shown on the opposite wall.

Van Beek’s treatment of the photographic archive as a space for play and sculptural refashioning (particularly of such feminized, hand-sized objects as leisure tourist books and—in the vitrines—baby pictures and images by nature enthusiasts) hearkens back to the history of female collagists such as Hannah Höch and Martha Rosler. Yet instead of a deconstruction revealing the terror of the beauty industry or war, her images show an easy affinity for the techniques of scrapbooking and handicrafts and, in turn, a stubborn alliance with a material world and its possibilities for smart and critical permutations. Her interventions, subtle and low-tech, become (re-)photographs that enter the cycle of exchange and distribution of her archive. There, they allow her stone shapes’ muteness to speak once more, not the language of history, but a more personal, perhaps anthromorphic slang, like what you might imagine a pet rock whispering from its sleeping bag.

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

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Sarah Oppenheimer
Rice Gallery, Houston
Through December 5, 2010

By Rachel Hooper

Photographs cannot convey the effect of walking around Sarah Oppenheimer’s architectural interventions. The first time I encountered her work, my senses were heightened dramatically as I looked down through a hole in the gallery floor at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh to glimpse the backyard of a neighboring house four stories below (610-3356, 2008). The intense awareness of my place in space was unforgettable, so I eagerly awaited the opening of Oppenheimer’s installation at Rice Gallery, expecting a similarly mind-blowing alteration of the gallery space. However, upon walking through the front door, I was surprised to find myself sheltered under a matte white aluminum structure that gently sloped from the window above me down through the facing glass wall into the main gallery space. As I circumnavigated the construction, however, there were two spots where its forms coalesced to frame specific scenes. From inside the gallery, at the point at the base of the slope, you can see sunlight, sky, and treetops through an asymmetric polygon cut in the window above the front door. And in the lobby to the left of the entrance, you can look through the sculpture into the glass wall separating the reception area from the gallery and see treetops and sky reflected back to you as if in a mirror. With such peaceful views and subtle optic manipulations, the artwork is a more mature statement from an artist known for more startling works.

D-17 is unique among installations I’ve seen at Rice in that it utilizes the full length of the museum from the front door to the back of the gallery. Previous installations, such as those by El Anatsui, Wayne White or Michael Salter, have only occupied the main gallery space behind the glass. It is the first time Oppenheimer was asked to work with an extant glass wall, and according to her artist talk, she came to realize that the glass is more translucent than transparent; consequently, glazes on the windows and interior glass wall filter the light coming into the gallery. The “hole” she built is not a puncture in the exterior wall as much as it is an alteration to the gradation of light that comes from the natural light (or darkness) outside the museum through the transition of the lobby to the incandescent light in the gallery. The matte coating on the aluminum catches the changing light throughout the day, while the channel through the middle of the construction pulls natural light into the main gallery space where it would otherwise be filtered by two glass walls.

Oppenheimer’s installation at Rice is less shocking and more ambitious than previous works in her series of holes. Visitors must rely on their careful perception to notice the muted colors and shadows cast by lighting that we would normally take for granted. Only then can one understand how the artist has inverted the normal viewing situation by bringing outside light in. The cut in the window also departs from the voyeuristic appeal of some of her previous works. Here, it frames a peaceful, natural scene instead of the legs of people walking above you as in VP-41 at Art Basel in 2009. D-17 is the kind of art that asks you to spend time with it. It provides a space for quiet contemplation distinct from the information overload that is all too common in museum exhibitions and installation art in general. Like James Turrell’s Skyspace (2001), which is newly reopened in the Heights, or Robert Irwin’s scrims, Oppenheimer has opened up a direct interaction between viewers and light, and D-17 is left as merely a trace of her intervention and an introduction to the conversation.

Rachel Hooper is the associate curator and Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellow at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

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Movies About [and made out of] the Internet
The Internet
Fall 2010

By Katie Anania

Social Network ; Catfish (stills from the movies).

The Social Network and Catfish’s primary audience will be Facebook fence-sitters—a group in which I include myself. Ambivalent folks like us are driven to madness by the fact that, while the website is a timesuck that destroys organic human relationships, looking at pictures of your married high school friends is just so damned compelling. Caught between indignant distaste and prurient delight, we convince ourselves that the only way we prevent losing our soul to the experience of something like Facebook is that our soul is extremely robust to begin with. Yes, we triumph over the machine. We have real lives and just augment them with this tool. We are solvent and whole. We will win.

This mantra rehashes the Rousseauian principle that institutions are corrupt and people are pure, and these two recent films about Facebook (or, rather, that use Facebook as their respective structuring principles) argue the same thing. David Fincher's biopic The Social Network is both an origins narrative about Facebook and a bildungsroman about its founders, and shows us that Facebook was co-invented by a flawed human being who was eaten by his own machine. Ariel Schulman's documentary Catfish invites us to see social networking as a web of seductive deception that strives to ensnare innocent young men, with only the purest of heart emerging unscathed. Each film first tricks us into thinking that all relationships are destined to be mediated in some way. At the end of each, though, the redemptive messiness of real-time interactions reveals online social networks to be legible, artificial and a thing against which true personhood is defined.

Catfish, the movie serendipitously released four weeks before The Social Network, was shot by the main character's brother. It was edited on Itunes and uses a Helvetica font and shots of Google Earth to illustrate the characters’ peregrinations. It has a gentle, instructional quality, like the how-to videos for Mac software. The Social Network, by contrast, is all pulsing synth beats and imperial dread; Trent Reznor's soundtrack has us convinced that Harvard undergraduates are going to hack into our bedrooms and steal our underwear. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, played in The Social Network by a terse and intense Jesse Eisenberg, is a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore cobbling together a Frankenstein of a program that destroys the few tenuous friendships with which he began college. Nev Schulman, the 26-year-old New York dance photographer who has a relationship over Facebook with 19-year-old Wisconsin horsewoman Megan Faccio in Catfish, is so dreamy and genuine that we plead for him to be all right in the end.

Both characters are believers, delicately dancing with the online tools that help and beckon them. Both are men, which is significant. Their battles with The Internet reveal and produce different permutations of masculinity (the tortured outsider, the naïve romantic), in a backdrop composed by The Internet itself—specifically, shots of Facebook’s blue-and-white interface. Ultimately it is Marc Zuckerberg's character that rejects Rousseau's plea for innocence and purity, confirming to Facebook fence-sitters that Facebook is a foreign system to be treated with caution.

Proposing online social networks as a natural backdrop for coming-of-age stories bears consideration for the art world, because its institutions have quickly assimilated social networks into exhibition programming. MoMA's current collaboration with the Conflux Festival, for instance, in which the museum and surrounding areas will become sites for a “stealth” augmented reality exhibition, will take place during an Abstract Expressionism show drawn from MoMA’s collection. The Conflux project, whose premise is derived from Situationist notions of psychogeography, seems to tow the line between empowering viewers to create new realities, and making those realities contingent on purchased tools like smart phones. It will be interesting to see whether the Ab-Ex show will problematize the Conflux project or be assimilated into it. Facebook fence-sitters will certainly enjoy the concession that even a movement like Ab-Ex that wholly rejected group participation can be better enjoyed through social networks. These two recent Facebook parables, though, confirm for us what we suspected all along: this tool is most productive when it remains estranged, or at least legible from a distance. You know, to stave off the corruption of our robust souls.

Katie Anania is an art critic and doctoral student in Art History.

The Third Site of Land Art

By Jennie Lamensdorf

Images of ‘60s and ‘70s land art feature colossal works in epic landscapes that are easy to imagine as pilgrimage sites. Most of us, however, will only ever know these works from a handful of archival photographs. Other than the chronicling of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) since the Great Salt Lake first swallowed it in the early 1970s, documentation of land art rarely portrays the work as changing or as an active system. Nevertheless, over the past few decades land art has eroded, cracked, grown, and even in some cases, such as Walter de Maria’s Las Vegas Piece (1969), all but disappeared.

When Smithson articulated his theory of Site/Nonsite in 1968, he invested the site and its referent, the nonsite, with equal weight. Site/Nonsite relationships overcame the impossibility of displaying an earthwork in a gallery. Today, this duality expands to include a third site revealing the temporal nature of land art. The third site is the current reality or configuration of the work.* The third site is not static and its manifestations are rhizomatic, nourishing and emboldening each other.

Land art is active artwork. As such, one cannot accurately describe or know it from one moment to the next. In that sense, it is non-objectifiable beyond specific impressions. The descriptions below are linked to the conditions under which I visited them in September 2010.

Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) is cut into Mormon Mesa in the Mojave outside Overton, Nevada. The archival photographs show either an expansive aerial view of the mesa that emphasizes the thrust over the ravine that Double Negative bridges, or are framed to accentuate the size of the excavated space. An iconic image features a solitary figure contemplating the precipice, completely engulfed by the space.

What first struck me about Double Negative was how negligible its size really is when compared to the scale and vastness of the surrounding landscape, particularly to the Virgin River Valley to the North. Today, standing on the mesa, you don’t feel like Heizer conquered the land. Instead, you notice how nature is reclaiming what is hers. The wind erodes the once-sheer wall faces to reveal hidden layers of stratified geology. Huge boulders rest in Double Negative and creosote and sagebrush grow inside and up the ramps. Due to all the collapsed rock, the ramps are no longer forty-five degrees but resemble terraced staircases. The walls of Double Negative create the only shade on the mesa; rattlesnakes, lizards, insects, scorpions and human visitors seek shelter within. At night, the horizon is illuminated with light pollution from Las Vegas and Mesquite, Nevada. Looking upon Double Negative you might think that you are visiting the traces of an archeological site.

It’s fair to say that nature succeeded in taking back Las Vegas Piece. The work is gone save for a few unnaturally straight lines of rock that edge what was once a six-foot-wide bladed line in the Tula Desert northeast of Las Vegas. It is important that viewers still return to this site despite the near total disappearance of the work. The third site preserves the memory of Las Vegas Piece and provides material for dialogue beyond the entrenched rhetoric of the era.

The go-to image of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) features the solstice, when the tunnels line up and encircle the sun with a concrete halo. Today, Neo-Druids worship here and gun aficionados tattoo the industrially fabricated tunnels with unintentional black and grey drawings. Evidently, they rest the barrel of their weapons against the interior wall of the tunnels and fire -- the bullet paths are legible from the impact point then swirl through the tunnel leaving trails that conjure skateboard wall rides and cave paintings. This unanticipated life of the work is part of the third site experience.

Holt still owns and maintains this work; patches on the tunnels reveal recent restoration. The collective knowledge of past Land Arts of the American West journeys uncovers more interventions than my visit alone could reveal. A year ago the tunnels’ center point was disturbed and their foundations exposed. Since land art is an active system, the third site operates as an archive and collective memory that preserves its innumerable iterations.

In “serious” conversation about land art, we limit ourselves to the era of a work’s creation. But there are forces operating beyond the intentions of the artist that do not regularly appear in the discourse. The third site is an archive of land art’s mutability and it grows with time as the sites evolve. A simple Google search will reveal a host of images that document recent travels to many of these sites. The third site creates a space for richer dialogue that we otherwise inhibit by having an immobile perspective of land art. The conversation should expand to include an active and experiential way of reading works that are too often portrayed as fixed.

* My concept of the third site is indebted to the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Jennie Lamensdorf is a graduate student in Art History at the University of Texas and a 2010 participant in the Land Arts of the American West Program.

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