from the editor
As a follow-up to this week's Letter from the Editor and in support of David Wojnarowicz's work and the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Fluent~Collaborative has released a statement from Dan Cameron, which can be accessed here.
For many art enthusiasts, the first week of December entails an abrupt shift of gears: familial bonding over turkey and stuffing quickly gives way to hobnobbing with the glitterati at Art Basel Miami Beach. We at …might be good, however, are staying put in Texas to bring you coverage of “another life of the made.” This title implies the idea of reception itself as a participatory process—to paraphrase Duchamp, that it is the viewer (or critic) who completes the work of art.
Circulation, through word of mouth or in print, can give a work a fresh spin and make it visible to another audience. Take Mike Smith’s unmissable “Year in Education” in December’s issue of Artforum, which includes a huge shout-out to Fluent~Collaborative and installation shots of his project with Jay Sanders for testsite. Yet through the process of critical reflection, much can also be lost (or gained) in translation. Ultimately, it is our collective responsibility as a public to sustain the conversation.
The most interesting writing about art acknowledges a dialogic relationship between the artwork and its interpretation. Fittingly, this issue features multiple exchanges. The interview section includes my conversation with Vija Celmins along with two dialogues between practitioners: Mike Osborne talks with fellow photographer Adam Schreiber about his show at Artpace, and Kate Green brings a curatorial perspective to her interview with Nicolaus Schafhausen. In the reviews section, Ursula Davila-Villa considers the first volume in the Conversaciones/Conversations series published by the Fundación Cisneros, while Erin Kimmel discusses the relationship between latency and visibility in the works of Immaterial. Katie Geha and Noah Simblist respectively consider the works of Ewan Gibbs and Vernon Fisher through nuanced and historically minded perspectives. Finally, Jennie Lamensdorf concludes her project The Third Site of Land Art, bringing “unintentional sites” into provocative dialogue with more easily recognized works of land art.
As much as I want to believe in criticism’s role to inspire intelligent dialogue, we must also acknowledge that institutions have the power to support or silence the life of the made. It is equally our responsibility to speak up in response to censorship. This week, the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian decided to remove David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1987) from the group exhibition about queer portraiture entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire. The four-minute video montage was pulled after the Catholic League and members of the House of Representatives complained that a sequence depicting ants crawling on a crucifix it was offensive to Christians. As Blake Gopnik pointed out in his impassioned response in the Washington Post, the disappointing decision to institutionally self-censor comes 21 years after Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment was canceled by the Corcoran Gallery. That controversy ignited the culture wars and led to significant cuts in state-sponsored cultural funding, the ramifications of which we are still grappling with today. The idea that such an action of cowardice and homophobia could take place in the same city today is saddening, but it also speaks to the power of art’s message and to the potential for radical counteraction. In 1989, Mapplethorpe’s exhibition tour led to a critical debate about identity-based work and an increased knowledge of the repercussions of AIDS that helped shape at least a generation’s worth of policy and creative production. Today, in a climate where the art world often bemoans the lack of political intention or possibility of creative work, the controversy over Wojnarowicz’s piece reminds us that there are still marginalized voices that we should advocate, and that we must be vigilant to stand against those who would have them muted.
Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.
interviews
Adam Schreiber
By Mike Osborne
DMC-12, 2010, 2010, Archival inkjet print, 42 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Austin-based photographer Adam Schreiber recently completed a new body of work based around the DeLorean DMC-12, entitled Diminishing Return, during his three-month residency at Artpace San Antonio. Mike Osborne sat down for an illuminating conversation about his process and the genesis of this project for …might be good. The International Artist-In-Residence New Works 10.3 exhibition is on view at Artpace through January 9, 2011.
…might be good […mbg]: Congratulations on your new Artpace show. You're showing a new group of photographs that revolve around the DeLorean and its peculiar history. How did the project come about? Serendipity? Research? Serendipitous research?
Adam Schreiber [AS]: It’s difficult to say. Probably I’d call it accidental research. I think the long answer begins with this really beautiful Katrina Moorhead piece lodged in my mind. It is of two plywood replica DeLorean doors laying on a gallery floor beneath an off-white enlarged text replica of the first page of Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, in which the author recounts an institutional daydream he had in the early ‘90s. I love that piece and I always wondered about the origin of the doors.
A few years later I was reading about General Motors and came across the story of John DeLorean. I was surprised to find that he had quit General Motors to pursue the realization of this vehicle. The enterprise was short-lived; about 9000 cars were manufactured between 1981-82. I soon discovered that a Houston-based entrepreneur had purchased the stock surplus parts in 1997 and eventually opened a facility in Humble, Texas in 2008. I went there in May and met with the VP of the newly incarnate DMC. After touring the warehouse facility, I proposed that I come and make pictures. For reasons I still don’t understand, he went from saying “absolutely not” to giving me free reign. I returned soon after and it was true: not only did they leave me alone to make pictures, but also many of the employees went to great lengths to make the pictures possible with the help of forklifts. It kind of evolved from there.
…mbg: A lot of your past work has drawn on subjects that you've encountered in various archives (the Harry Ransom Center, the LBJ Library, etc.) Other pictures relate to a recurring preoccupation with technology and obsolescence. You entitled your show in New York earlier this year Anachronic, which I took as a reference to the way in which both an archive and a photograph pry an object or its image away from its native temporal context. How do the DeLorean pictures relate to these various threads in your work?
AS: There’s a dual aspect to the warehouse of parts. On the one hand it functions as the reservoir for the creation and servicing of new and existing DeLoreans. On the other hand it’s an archive of original parts, many of which will never be used because they are damaged. The inadvertent preservation going on there is conspicuous and rather interesting. It’s similar in ways to the LBJ Library, where thousands of items are preserved by virtue of association to the former president. The contingency of most of those items is glaring. It’s a controlled mess inside. But the mess is useful as a default collection that conceals some deeper institutional dysfunction.
I like to think of the DeLorean pictures as part of a more diffuse collection of images that I am developing. I have framed them as unused pieces of an incomplete catalogue whose existence in time has for the most part been marked as aftermath. The pictures were made with the knowledge that the parts are specific to the car, but they remain partially non-specific, disconnected from the whole.
Generally, I’m interested in this re-organization of objects as a constellation of signatures, non-chronological and in process. In a sense, the tension between image and object, date and design, integrity and debris, unhinged from their contexts, allows for a selective organization of contents without meaning into a collection.
Collections are the evidence of misremembering, determined by chance and seizure. The implications vary, but technology is integral to this fluctuating syntax of value. Despite shifts in it, I think the Proustian model of recollection is most apt: the present unfolds unexpectedly in the future, while the past holds the present hostage and shapes it. By that logic, I expect the DeLorean pictures to change in relation to other pictures, past and future.
…mbg: At least three pictures in the show were shot in the exhibition space. The first image, of a DMC-12 shot from behind and framed in relation to the architecture, is a knockout. The picture's virtual space connects to the physical space where we stand to view it, but there's also a temporal blip in this recognition: when we turn from looking at the picture, the car isn't there. Alternatively, the picture seems to offer up a kind of fiction—as though you were giving us a glimpse into the gallery-like garage of some Russian oligarch in a William Gibson novel. Tell me about the decision to shoot in the exhibition space and about the process of making this picture. And whose car are we looking at?
AS: The car in the picture belongs to the new incarnation of the DeLorean Motor Company in Humble. It was recently built from new-old stock parts—meaning newly assembled from parts manufactured around 1981.
The picture came out of thinking about how to use the exhibition space as a framing device. It was clear to me at the beginning of the residency that I wanted the exhibition space exhibited in some way, and to have the DeLorean there without having it there. Eventually I was able to organize the delivery of a car from Humble. I made several pictures, eventually settling on the most idiosyncratic view of the space: the view one has upon entering. I installed this photograph on the immediate left as one enters, as that’s the picture most typically passed over. One sees it most clearly on exiting.
Before Artpace came into being, the building was used as an automobile showroom and garage, so there was an architectural incentive to open the garage door and drive a vehicle in. The architectural history was something I thought about a lot during the residency. There are subdued marks everywhere in the live/work space from past projects. In this way, temporal displacement is built into the residency. The new-old stock DeLorean seemed to fit an architectural change from auto-shop to art container.
But I prefer your fantasy of a Russian oligarch. It really is a garage-like gallery.
…mbg: The other two pictures shot in the space are nearly identical and displayed as a diptych. They show the car, very tightly framed, with its gull wing doors up, apparently in the process of being photographed by a view camera. A studio strobe is slightly visible in a reflection on the view camera's ground glass. The second picture differs from the first only in the inclusion of a bit of fog or smoke in the lower right corner. Can you talk about these pictures in terms of their theatricality? Are they shot differently from the other pictures in the show?
AS: They were shot digitally, whereas the others were shot on large format film. It matters to the degree that the diptych is a clunky reflection on the technology of representation. But that would be true anyway, digital or not. I think something about the similarity of the two images references the digital format.
In a way, it felt so excessive to have a DeLorean in the space that it seemed wasteful to not also have a smoke machine. And then, it seemed pertinent to attach this secondary act of viewing—positioning the view camera to be seen—and then to double it. In retrospect, it was a series of gestures that reenact the vanity of the objects self-consciously.
Both the gull wing doors with leather straps and the elaborate adjustables on the camera outfit seem overdone, theatrical, hollow. Both are machines of specific vintage bent on ideas of refinement and control. In the stiff theatricality of the frame, they become synonymous. Their function for the picture is vanity. The DeLorean was designed for a 6’4” driver. It’s very difficult for shorter people to drive it. Its surface is stainless steel, which records every hand that touches it. Everyone in the DeLorean community agrees that the hardest part about owning the car is cleaning its surfaces.
The pictures were hung close together to make it difficult to look at either individually, reinforcing the viewer’s need to differentiate or choose. When shooting digitally, choosing is inseparable from exposure. The pairing is thus a deliberate redundancy.
…mbg: When you first arrived at Artpace, we were exchanging some emails and you mentioned to me: "The rooms have cable. Robocop is on right now. Forgot how many times I watched that as a kid. I remember going to a movie theater birthday party of a friend when that came out. I never noticed […] there are a few scenes where you see the skyline of Detroit out of windows and it's literally a gray architectural model." And you attached a jpeg of Storage (Southeast), Humble, DMC, 1980-, which shows a bunch of stainless steel exterior panels and transmissions lined up on some heavy duty shelves. There’s something anthropomorphic about this inventory. If you're resistant to the idea that the work is topical, to what extent is it autobiographical, steeped in the time-travel of Back to the Future, the dystopian sci-fi of Robocop, Terminator, etc., and birthday parties at Milwaukee cineplexes?
AS: I remember being traumatized by Back to the Future. I was eight years old and couldn’t wrap my head around a past that would suddenly cease to exist. The absurdities of the movie didn’t register at all: I was pre-judgment, the perfect sponge for a rift in the space-time continuum.
One of the best things about photographs is that they are never strictly autobiographical. One can always refer. But they simultaneously bring up the mystery of recurrence. And they do shape a sense of biography through the associative language of reference. They are as messy as any pre-demeanor, despite the thin perfection of their surfaces.
…mbg: Also, did you notice that Robocop's streets look very similar to Dallas, circa 1985?
AS: It’s funny that Robocop actually was filmed in Dallas. At the time, it was a very futuristic looking city.
Mike Osborne is an artist based in Austin, Texas.
Vija Celmins
By Wendy Vogel
Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964, Oil on Canvas, 24-1/2 x 34-1/2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of John Elderfield, 2005. ©Vija Celmins.
Vija Celmins, an artist renowned for her painstakingly rendered paintings and drawings of night skies, deserts and oceans, began her mature career in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. From 1964-66, she focused primarily on representing images of death and catastrophe, such as war planes, smoking guns and fires. These works are the subject of Television and Disaster, her solo exhibition currently on view at the Menil Collection. Just a few hours before the opening, ...might be good spoke to Celmins about this period and her response to seeing these works brought together again. Television and Disaster remains on view at the Menil Collection through February 20, 2011.
...might be good [...mbg]: You often say you don’t ascribe to a particular school or style. How do you respond to your work here in the Menil Collection being more or less juxtaposed against the California Cool artists in Kissed by Angels the group exhibition in the gallery next door?
Vija Celmins [VC]: I went to school in California and I know those artists and their work well, but there’s a lot of sculpture in there and I'm not a sculptor. I’m a painter through and through. Even when I make objects, I’m a painter, and those people were interested in other things. On the other hand, you could also link my work to theirs by saying that nearly everybody of my generation turned away from Abstract Expressionism. Not that I didn’t think that it was the most fantastic painting around, but because I wasn’t in New York and I had always seen it secondhand, I felt that I wasn’t somehow capable of doing it.
I was a talented young painter, but I turned to looking. It was like the belief system broke down there. I didn’t have that incredible belief that the paint itself was the character, and that the painting was really about the paint. Of course, now I would say that it really is only about the paint. Maybe I didn’t want to compose back then. I couldn’t stand those composition exercises in school. I began to turn away from those things one by one: bigness to small, from abstractness to image, from color to no color. I think I was trying to fit it more with a thing that I had in myself.
...mbg: This might segue well into my next question, which is about the subject matter of your work vis-à-vis different kinds of Pop and photorealist painters that were working in the ‘60s. Was it important for you, in retrospect, to address political imagery or other kinds of childhood imagery as a European?
VC: Well, I didn’t think of myself as a European, but when I look back at this painting, it does seem more like European painting. First of all, I didn’t know that much about American culture, whereas the Pop artists had grown up in American culture. I didn’t really participate in the commercial part of the subject matter, and I also didn’t use commercial techniques like Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein did, but obviously almost everyone had turned to subject matter.
I think I was more influenced by people like Malcolm Morley, who was a little bit more of a “painter” and not a commercial artist and didn’t use commercial techniques. And of course, I also looked to Jasper Johns, who was so tactile and fabulous. He was obviously a true painter and a really clever artist. I never thought of myself as a really clever artist, unfortunately or fortunately.
I think my work has always remained sort of somber. I was always attracted to the flatness of the painting, and the fact that if you put an image on it, you have to come to terms with it. I have a whole history of trying to come to terms with that idea after I made this work, especially work like Burning Man (1966), a very illustrative, jazzed-up work. I decided that I couldn’t do this work anymore and I dropped the whole thing. I went back to just describing a very flat surface like the ocean, the ocean also being a very flat surface.
I have come back to painting in different ways since the 1960s, like all my black Night Sky paintings, which are very layered. Some paintings in this show were done from life, i.e. T.V., 1964, and then I started doing these drawings of clippings that I’d been collecting. They no longer show the object, but still they have a single image that I wouldn’t have to compose.
The paintings in this exhibition are very dense and they don’t show any strokes. They’re very concentrated and packed with energy. They often have these disastrous things happening in them which have been subdued. That’s the sort of emotional tone that now I see in retrospect, but back then was intuitive.
...mbg: So you say you allow the image but not the idea to come first in your work.
VC: I think I am very thoughtful and I see mind in my paintings. I’ve often tried to be less mindful but with no real effect. I wanted to let my hands do some of the stuff without my brain interfering all the time with composing and pushing and pulling. I always talk about it like a step backwards. And then I dropped this period, but I think I have some paintings that have this residue of a very unique kind of feeling that seems to touch people.
When you’re working, though, you don’t really think about affect. I didn’t think about money, I didn’t think about showing, I was just going from one inspired thing to another. If someone gave me a gun, I would paint the gun. I’ve never shot a gun, so I got a gun magazine. I looked at the clouds of smoke; I liked the clouds. I looked at Magritte; I liked his clouds. All for a couple of months. When you’re a student you run through art history like it’s on fire.
Some of the work seems to have a children’s quality, like some of the houses, even the paintings of the gun going off and fires. What kid doesn’t like fires? I used to love fires, even when I saw them in the war. For that reason, I’ve always thought of this period as reaching back and taking care of these memories, which were not in southern California, but in Latvia, and sort of connecting with myself. So I could feel like I wasn’t just dreaming up paintings that were not a part of my emotional life, but that were sort of connected with me, knowing that the subject matter comes and goes.
...mbg: You said in an interview with Chuck Close that “the photograph is an alternate subject, another layer that creates distance and distance creates the opportunity to view the work more slowly and explore your relationship with it.”
VC: You know why I like painting? Because it’s against the wall and you can turn away from it. You have to build a relationship to it with your body. You have to go up to those giant paintings where you can roam around and float, like a Pollock. I concentrated my paintings into this stone against the wall. Some of them are more open, but some of them are quite tightly closed off.
...mbg: I am interested in the way that you describe a bodily relationship to the painting. What do you think about our relationship, or lack thereof, in the contemporary era with the object quality of photographs?
VC: My feeling is that photography is more image-related and painting is more about how it’s made. Photography is still manipulating a machine. You still don’t have your touch, and your dog’s hair, and your hair, and the millions of nuances that you can get with dust and oil. I like photographs that I find and sometimes they have a wonderful grayness that is printed that I fall for, but photography is another world.
When I use the image, it’s sort of like a trap. Somebody in the image says, “Come look at me.” And when you go to see you realize that it’s something made, you get to see another life of the made and sometimes you have to look really close because it looks like it’s just appeared and not made. I like the idea that somehow you close off the painting and it’s sort of restrained, but it asks something of you. I hope.
...mbg: I like that. That it’s asking something from you and it’s different than what we experience—
VC: Because it’s made by another human being. It’s not nature, so there’s a totally different human element, and of course there’s the intellectual part of fitting into art history. That being said, I’m in no way symbolic or spiritual. I know art can be good for the spirit, but I’m a very secular artist. Art is so segmented. This is work I did 45 years ago, and I’m happy that it stands up at all in this fabulous museum.
Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.
Nicolaus Schafhausen
By Kate Green
Photo by Steffen Jagenburg.
Nicolaus Schafhausen, Director of the Rotterdam-based contemporary art center Witte de With, delivered a talk at Arthouse as part of its Visiting Lecture series on November 11th. For ...might be good, Kate Green followed up with more questions about his institution, its programming and the challenges of fundraising and building an audience.
…might be good [...mbg]: During your Arthouse talk, one of the main issues you raised was your desire for the Witte de With to engage more than just the arty audience who will come to the museum regardless of what is on view or happening. Can you talk about the challenges of engaging a wider audience?
Nicolaus Schafhausen [NS]: The problem is location. Rotterdam is not a destination city. It is not a tourist spot, nor is it a “global” city. Another problem is that the Witte de With is a contemporary museum. The works we show are unfamiliar to many who live in the city, and people generally want the familiar in their viewing experience.
…mbg: In your talk you emphasized the role that programming can play in reaching a wider audience. Can you say more? You mentioned teen programs, web-based dialogues…
NS: Yes, and also academic conferences and lectures. All of these programs reach completely different audiences.
…mbg: What about programming for kids?
NS: I think that there is a little too much focus on museum programs for kids in the United States. I think that it is almost impossible for children to connect with contemporary art.
...mbg: I don’t think that this is true. In my experience, kids are often much more open to unfamiliar art than adults. Perhaps this is because, for them, almost everything is unfamiliar.
NS: I don’t want to seem negative. Perhaps I am just more interested in programs for teenagers and young adults.
...mbg: What about exhibitions? How does your thinking about audiences play into your curatorial choices?
NS: At the Witte de With we do topical exhibitions that address cultural or political issues, but we also do solo shows. When I am selecting an artist for a solo show I am not thinking about the audience. That comes later.
...mbg: With the exhibition’s programming?
NS: Yes. Programming is part of extending the audience—branding.
...mbg: I see what you mean in the way that educational programming can be used to make more people aware of the museum or its exhibitions. Programming is often used as part of fundraising efforts too. Donors like to fund education programs, hence the growth of education departments. Do you think programming and funding are intimately linked?
NS: Yes.
...mbg: In your talk you alluded to big funding changes on the horizon at the Witte de With. Will the changes affect programming?
NS: I was referring to a recent shift in political power in the Netherlands. With the new party in power government funding for art institutions has been drastically reduced. Some institutions have had their funding reduced by 50% over the span of a year. And you have to remember that in the Netherlands there is no history of individual or corporate funding. So when state support evaporates, there is no natural way to fill the gap. How will the cuts affect programming? It is too early to tell.
...mbg: Can you say more about how the cultural funding structure in the Netherlands compares to cultural funding structures elsewhere?
NS: In the United States, museums are mostly funded by individuals or corporations. In Germany, there is a mix of sources—private and public. This is the healthiest model.
...mbg: Is the Netherlands’ government-funded model unhealthy because it is not sustainable in the changed political climate?
NS: Yes, but it is also unhealthy because individual artists get a tremendous amount of direct support from the state. This turns them into little companies rather than political bodies. Choosing to fund individuals is a populist gesture. Choosing to fund institutions is a political decision. The latter is much more important, I think.
...mbg: And is funding for individuals receding under the new plan in the Netherlands?
NS: No. Under the new plan, funding for individual artists remains the same.
... mbg: I wonder whether the differences in funding structures in the Netherlands and the United States result in different types of programs and exhibitions in their respective museums.
NS: I don’t think so. Do you think that critical discourse is more relevant in the United States than it is in the Netherlands? Are issues of representation talked about more in the United States than in the Netherlands?
.. mbg: I don’t think so.
NS: There are not a lot of people who are interested in those issues anywhere. What we are doing is completely elitist, though there is nothing wrong with it.
...mbg: So what about efforts to engage more audiences?
NS: I think there is a maximum number of people that can be reached; I aim to reach that maximum number.
...mbg: What if an institution’s satellite or educational programming brings a lot of people to the institution, but those people are not engaged in the issues in the exhibitions? Is that okay?
NS: It’s totally fine.
...mbg: Though I have organized plenty of programs like that myself, I worry about it sometimes. If more energy goes into programs, then less goes into exhibitions, right? Do exhibitions just become something extra?
NS: Yes, they become less important. I don’t know whether that is okay. It is a burning question.
...mbg: If you believe that a visual artwork is not more important than a film or a lecture, then maybe it is okay. The problem is that we conceive of these spaces primarily for the display of visual art. And sometimes they don’t seem to revolve around visual art anymore.
NS: Is the café supporting the exhibitions, or vice versa? The problem is that contemporary art is so abstract. It is not easy to explain. It is not easy to contextualize.
...mbg: I disagree.
NS: For many, that which is unfamiliar is irrelevant. But audiences are not stupid. I think that they are much more intelligent than education programs often give them credit for. This has to change.
...mbg: Isn’t the burden on us, as curators and programmers, to figure out ways to make contemporary relevant with smart prompts and programming? I think that when we figure out ways to help audiences talk about contemporary art, audiences realize that they have a lot to say.
NS: Yes, okay, maybe. But is what we do important?
...mbg: I don’t know. I personally don’t think that art is more important than anything else. I do think that what I do is important, but not more important than what anybody else does.
NS: Yes, but it is different. We critically analyze. Everything we do in institutions is really education.
Kate Green is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation project about Vito Acconci’s performative videos from the 1970s. She has written for several publications including ArtLies, ArtPapers, and Modern Painters.
reviews
Ewan Gibbs
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Through January 8, 2011
By Katie Geha
Ewan Gibbs, Austin, 2010, Graphite on paper, 11-11/16 x 8-1/4 inches.
One winter when I was living in Chicago, my best friend was squatting in a tiny apartment with no heat. We spent many lazy nights wrapped in blankets, smoking grass and listening to records. Her TV sat prominently in the room but she almost never turned it on. This changed one evening when her roommate, a fellow art student, placed a remnant from a sculpture—a metal grid the exact size of the television—in front of the screen. “Just wait,” he said, and casually taped a large piece of vellum paper to the front of the grid and turned on the television. Blended hues of yellow, blue, orange and magenta danced across the paper. We were amazed. The television was seemingly de-pixilated into digital abstractions that morphed and moved into one another. What was once a commercial for diapers was now a stoner’s dream of light and color.
If my friend’s makeshift de-pixilated TV was the catalyst for the detached associations of a drug experience, then Ewan Gibbs’ recent drawings on view at Lora Reynolds, guided by the grid, are more akin to a tension headache. The tightly compressed renderings of architectural sites in Austin (in the front room) and everyday hotel rooms (in the back room) highlight the grid’s rigorous precision. Whereas in that apartment in Chicago I witnessed the grid’s expansion into something loose and amorphous, in this exhibition, Gibbs’ works contract into obdurate objects, unyielding to the viewer’s gaze. There’s just no give.
The compactness of the images work best in his Typical Interiors, flat-footed images of hotel rooms that he’s drawn from photos in brochures. The airless nature of a hotel room, with its seemingly identical vast expanses of beds, sliding glass doors and side tables with lamps, reflect the taut nature of his process. The non-specificity of the site, that is, any old hotel room, works well in relation to the gesture of such accurate, specific mark making. Like Ed Ruscha’s Gas Stations, the Typical Interiors’ accumulation of architectural effects makes the images appear uniform and boring. The dullness in Gibbs’ interiors is enlivened by his system of marks, the small Xs and Os placed in their designated box that recall the seriality of the arrangement of the rooms.
Unfortunately the works featuring Austin landmarks do not fare as well. Take, for example, the sectioned image of the dome of the Capitol building with two flags billowing nearby. The architecture of the building is astoundingly realized, unmoving and monumental in its detail. Yet the flags also share in this solidity, almost as if they too were carved out of lifeless stone. It felt like a gimmick, these easily recognizable images of Austin for an Austin gallery. I would have preferred a show featuring only the interiors, displayed like the methodical marks on the paper, one after the other after the other.
Gibbs is upfront about his process. Having done away with his former use of graph paper, he now embosses the grid onto the page. The resulting image begins to look a little like a sewing sampler, something you might affix to a pillow. However, the sweet naïveté of a hand-sewn pillow is nowhere in this exhibition. These works impress in their cool precision, in their blatant use of the grid, and in the tiny pencil smudges that add up to a recognizable image. Yet Gibbs is not the first to pay homage to the grid, and these works don’t end up doing a lot more than what Vija Celmins or maybe Chuck Close have already mastered. They simply dazzle and then quickly fade. It’s a neat trick for sure, the artist as magician, but how long can we be awed by rigorous skill alone?
Katie Geha is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin.
Vernon Fisher
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through January 2, 2011
By Noah Simblist
Vernon Fisher, Bikini, 1987, Acrylic on canvas, 11-1/2 x 18-1/2 feet. Collection of the Krannert Art Museum. Courtesy UT Press.
It’s not a common thing for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to program solo exhibitions of North Texas artists. K-Mart Conceptualism, a survey of Vernon Fisher’s career, is an exception. Fisher, who lives in Fort Worth and taught at the University of North Texas for thirty years, has exhibited internationally. His work is included in prestigious collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and LACMA. Yet Fisher is an artist who lives and works at the periphery of an art world that is primarily concentrated in New York and Los Angeles. He is an artist of contradictions, cosmopolitan in his influences, who speaks with a long thoughtful southern drawl and makes literary paintings and installations replete with visual puns.
The exhibition’s curator, Michael Auping, was interested in the aspects of Fisher’s work that incorporate intersections between Pop and Conceptualism, crossing between painting and installation. The artist began his career in the 1970s when Conceptualism was king and matured as painting began to reemerge in one of its many rebirths in the early 1980s. This context set up a practice that continued for decades to slide in and out of media and easily definable movements.
Much of the work incorporates a grid, which Fisher has described as “a site where ideas are tentatively explored.” This roots his practice in a similar terrain as Conceptual artists who emerged from formalist roots. Modernists such as Piet Mondrian or Agnes Martin used the grid to allude to the space of the picture plane, but through their reductive processes, it became a territory for expression in itself. Conceptual artists like Mel Bochner, Sol Lewitt and Fred Sandback also incorporated the grid, but purged their forbearers’ penchant for transcendental aspirations. While Warhol’s Campbell soup cans weren’t purely abstract, they still embraced a kind of modernist literalism, equating the utilitarian function of the grid with everyday decisions like what to have for lunch. Fisher’s works fill the space of the grid with appropriated imagery and a symbolic narrative lexicon that flies in the face of the purities of both Conceptualism and Pop.
Works like After Malevich (1991), which combines a sculptural black cross and taxidermied raccoon, and Heart of Darkness (1986), which is composed of a black and white metric cube with a landscape painting on one corner, speak to the histories of modernism and their aftermath. Fisher seems self-conscious of his post-modern condition, taking an almost gleeful approach to playing with the detritus of what is left behind after the belief in universal truths and strategies of essential reduction have both been exhausted.
The Raw & the Cooked (2006) also uses a grid to lay out what Fisher has called “a metonymic slide” of images surrounding a copy of a head from a Raphael portrait, including stills from Tarzan movies, a chimp in the wild and a host of colonialist hunters. The title of the painting refers to a text by the structuralist French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that “savage” and “civilized” cultures shared the same underlying characteristics. The notion echoes the modernist belief in the universality of formalism and the one-size-fits-all approach of the grid.
Perhaps the most striking piece in the exhibition is Boat, Island, Ape (1991), an installation where Fisher cuts the word “KONG” into the wall. The resultant letters of discarded drywall lie in a heap on the floor, and a tiny boat, like the one that brings King Kong back to “civilization” in the famous 1933 movie, sits amidst the rubble. The sculptural elements are accompanied by sound effects usually heard in cartoons when someone has fallen off a cliff or is hit over the head with a skillet. This allusion to the ridiculous is a tragicomic gesture, showing us that cartoons, Kong and Tarzan movies, anthropology and the purity of abstraction all are narratives of failure. What’s most important to Fisher is that we can recognize this and laugh at our own hubris.
Noah Simblist is an Associate Professor of Art at SMU and a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas, Austin.
Immaterial
Ballroom Marfa
Through February 20, 2011
By Erin Kimmel
Immaterial (exhibition view), 2010. Courtesy of the artists. Photos by Mike Bianco.
Immaterial explores art’s potential to transcend conscious states without privileging Immanuel Kant’s monumental formulation of the metaphysical over the sensuous. Though the twelve featured international artists work in various mediums, they are all united in process-based practices that lie somewhere in the interstices of abstraction, formalism and minimalism—essentially postminimalism. The artists are heirs to Eva Hesse’s pioneering practice, shedding the solipsistic claims of classical minimalism while retaining its reduced formalist language. As such, the strongest pieces are a handful of sculptures that evoke a strong psychic space outside the work, one that is almost as tangible as the physical space inhabited by the object itself.
Heather Rowe’s All Day Light is one of four pieces commissioned for the show. Assembled from found materials in Marfa, the two large folding screens (roughly six by eleven feet) confuse interiority and exteriority. The raw skeletons are comprised of metal and wood while voile, mirrors and wallpaper drape the panels separately. Most panels are left blank or empty, cutting up the space in a decidedly architectonic manner. As the viewer circumambulates the work, rectangular mirrors fastened to the hinges fracture the sightlines and vanishing points created by both the screen and the viewer’s reflection, thus allowing for fleeting moments of self-consciousness.
The mirror is a metaphorically rich material. It plays a cardinal role in both psychoanalytic and cinematic theory, as it represents the gap between the illusory unity of self-reflection and discordant emotional experience. The deconstructed screens thrust the viewer beyond a well-defined subjective framework—one that manifests the impossibility of establishing a link between what is seen and felt. Slavoj Žižek terms this unsayable abyss the “uattainable kernel of the void,” which threatens the integrity of one’s psychic space because it points to the inadequacy of the discursive realm. Thus, the more the viewer interacts with Rowe’s dismantled screens, the less she will be able to express the what she is experiencing—echoing the ambivalent masquerade that characterizes inter-subjective relations.
Across the room is Australian-born Rachel Khedoori’s Cave Model (2009), another material exploration that evokes and produces an immaterial space. Sinewy and uncanny, the meandering plaster paths of the sculpture, representing a cave’s interior, resemble a design for a surrealist rollercoaster. A number of critics have noted that the form recalls brain matter. This is fitting, considering Khedoori’s inspiration for the work grew out of an interest in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Khedoori’s practice appears, however, to eschew Plato’s concept of philosophical clarity, which privileges the realm of forms (ideas) over the material world of change (perception). Instead, the two inform each other in her exploration of an otherwise hidden space—that of the mental.
In the north gallery Erin Shirreff’s four untitled, unobtrusive but striking sculptures hug, brush and lean precariously against a long wall. Though the sculptures look like thin limestone slabs, they are compressed from local wood ash, hydrocal and armature. An adjoining room features a 32-minute video documenting the slow movement of shadows over a full, crater-faced moon. Shirreff composed the video from 500 stills. Together, the video and sculptures create one of her trademark “hybrid scenarios.” In these, she explores the ways in which 2-D media, here photography and video, inform our encounters with sculpture and architecture. Shirreff’s textured but flat sculptures mimic the grainy resolution of the video screen. In foregrounding the often overlooked material qualities of the screen, Shirreff forces her viewers into a negotiation between real and virtual space.
It is perhaps the exhibit’s focus on physical and psychic tensions that led executive director and curator Fairfax Dorn not to broadcast the fact that all twelve of the artists featured in Immaterial are women. Female psychic space is a loaded subject, and gender tokenism equally limiting. In keeping with Immaterial’s theme and borrowing from Russian critic Victor Shlovsky’s idea of the purpose of art, Dorn’s non-qualification underscores “things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”
Erin Kimmel is a freelance writer based in Marfa, Texas.
Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez
Fundación Cisneros
Released September 2010
By Ursula Davila-Villa
Ambientación Cromática (Chromatic Environment), Aeropuerto Internacional Simón Bolivar, Maiquetía, Venezuela, 1974.
Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel ed. Carlos Cruz-Diez in Conversation with / en conversación con Ariel Jiménez. New York, NY: Fundación Cisneros, 2010, 248pp. w illus.
CONVERSACIONES / CONVERSATIONS, published by the Fundación Cisneros, is a new bilingual series of in-depth conversations between modern and contemporary artists and scholars and curators from Latin America. The first book in the series of ten was recently released. It presents a sequence of intimate and profound exchanges that took place over a span of thirty years between Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Diez, a pioneer artist who was a leading practitioner of color theory, kinetic and Op art, and Ariel Jiménez, Chief Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC).
This handsome volume opens with an insightful introduction by the CPPC director and series editor Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro. In his opening text, Pérez-Barreiro highlights the pleasure and richness that conversing with an artist affords, underscoring the importance of this book (and those to come as part of the series) in understanding the layers of meaning behind the work of such influential figures as Cruz-Diez. The subsequent conversation traces the artist’s life and career from his childhood in Venezuela to his present practice in Paris, engaging in themes that matter most to the artist through an uncensored and casual voice that makes for an enjoyable and rich read.
The beginning and ending of a conversation is difficult to define. We normally engage in deep exchanges without noticing. As if encountering the artist and curator in an informal gathering, this book opens with a conversation that seems to have started before we become a third participant in the dialogue. It is evident that Jiménez has a deep understanding of the artist’s work and life, and so the questions and comments that lead the conversation allow for a fluid and thorough examination of ideas. The volume’s seven sections offer a fascinating understanding of Cruz-Diez’ production through his views on history, painting, personal doubts as an artist, color, the relationship between art and reality, the urban presence of art and time.
The book’s format is a refreshing lightweight and compact hardcover of an elegant and dynamic design. Along with the conversation, this publication includes a great number of illustrations that trace the span of the artist’s oeuvre, from his early career in the 1940s and his first experiments in geometry and use of color during the 1950s to his large-scale public sculptures and interventions. These include works like Ambientación cromática (1974), a work at the international Simón Bolivar Airport in Venezuela that transforms the sometimes tedious experience of being in an airport into a playful encounter with geometry and color, and his Cromosaturaciones—works that alter spaces through colored light, modifying our perception of volume and depth. The careful documentation (and placement of illustrations) enriches the experience of reading the artist’s voice, especially when he expressed doubts or, to the contrary, when he clearly envisioned a visual experience that resulted in powerful works. The vibrant conversation, which is liberated from cryptic theory or obscure concepts, offers a close encounter with a stimulating artist.
For many years the Fundación Cisneros’ mission, through the CPPC, has focused on the advancement of scholarship and understanding of Latin American art. Some of the foundation’s greatest contributions to the field have been the support of new scholarship by experts in Latin American art, paired with programs for non-experts, in order to create a better and richer understanding of the history and contemporary practice of artists from or working in the region. The power of this published series is the chosen format of a relaxed yet in-depth conversation with an artist, an event normally reserved for very few. The joy of reading Conversaciones lies in its tone and intimacy. Towards the end of the book Cruz-Diez states: “The important thing is for the concept to be expressed effectively and the work, in the purity of its concept, to outlast all of us.” He leaves us with a strong idea: that of permanence through the power of art.
Ursula Davila-Villa is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art.
project space
The Third Site of Land Art: Unintentional Sites
By Jennie Lamensdorf
There are sites of land art that are canonical. Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels and The Lightning Field literally and figuratively defined a movement. There is land art, such as Cabinetlandia, that doesn’t need the land to be effective. And then there is land art that was never intended to be art. These unintentional sites can be just as revealing about the landscape as any intentional work.
This is true of the New Mexico Mining Museum in the town of Grants, home of the “only underground simulated uranium mine in the world.” Located in the heart of the Grants Mineral Belt, a uranium-rich province that at its peak supported approximately 2,000 mines, this little museum and its star attraction are both fascinating and terrifying. They reveal the fraught history and reality of the desert through myth, monument and collective amnesia.
The Mining Museum propagates the pervasive myth that the nuclear industry brought nothing but jobs and economic stability to the area. If you ask one of the women working at the front desk what the most radioactive object in the museum is, she will cheerfully point out an innocent-looking stone in a glass vitrine in the entry hall. In a room down the hallway, a series of dated videos documenting the region are shown. The video about the Jackpile Mine on Laguna Pueblo Reservation (the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine, in operation from 1953 to 1982), was probably shot in the late 1970s. In the video, no one in the mine wears Hazmat suits, let alone masks over their faces. An excited overseer explains the extraction process to the camera, while sticking an ungloved hand into a train car of uranium ore.
The monument to the golden age of nuclear mining is also the museum’s highlight: an interactive, self-guided, underground tour of “Sector 26” at the Jackpile Mine. At several points throughout the “mine” you can press a button to hear audio of former miners describing the scene before you. It’s the little things here that get under your skin. In the lunchroom, for instance, you realize that everyone just relaxed in the radioactive mine and had a sandwich at noon. Or, you may notice that dynamite was pushed into the walls using ordinary wooden sticks. The faux-mine is decked out to the nines and you cannot help but wonder where all the drills, train cars and equipment came from. Was it just transferred over from the original mine? Is it still radioactive?
By co-opting the Mining Museum and framing it as unintentional land art, my intention is to walk the line between the traditions of appropriation and institutional critique, revealing what Joseph Masco describes in Desert Modernism, as the “tactical amnesia” needed to coexist with the western landscape. “This ability to reinscribe desert ‘purity’ requires constant effort, as the pursuit of utopian potential is predicated on a continual emptying-out of dystopian realities—in this case, those of nuclear weapons, waste and war.” The undesirability of much of the western landscape makes it highly desirable to industries that want to be invisible, and the image of the desert as a wasteland allows for it to be used as a national sacrifice zone.
In the spirit of mythologizing the west, the Mining Museum makes no mention of the health or environmental consequences of uranium mining or the nuclear industry. The history painted by the institution is one in which the nuclear industry brought thousands of jobs and great wealth to the area, and then it was suddenly taken away for no good reason. The institution’s policy of only offering official history rather than opinions about the repercussions of the mining industry belies a secondary set of intentions. What is this museum’s agenda? In a community with more empty storefronts than businesses, who can support a museum? The answer may lie in the one exhibit that I noticed for its slickness and high-tech gloss in opposition to the museum’s overall low-budget DIY feel: it’s sponsored by and extols the virtues of clean coal.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes: “Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map’s information is what’s left out, the unmapped and unmappable.” The New Mexico Mining Museum maps an incomplete history of the Grants Mineral Belt landscape. As landscape intervention, however, it provides an in-depth, if unintentional, lens onto the traditional narrative of western land use. Like the blank spots on a map revealing the edges of knowledge, the Mining Museum reveals the edges of official history.
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.
Announcements: exhibitions
Austin Openings
Kale Roberts
Co-Lab
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 4, 7-11pm
The installation will focus on the discrepancy between value and worth, taking into account labor and comfort as intrinsic components of monetary value. The exhibition features a bed, a dollar bill quilt setting, television, sound installation and the smell of money highlighting the creation of the quilt.
Devon Dikeou
Domy Books
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 11, 7-9pm
The exhibition is about connections—how they are made, where they lead, or don’t, and the value of those connections, plus the various ways those connections are made, or conversely lost, destroyed, outdated. The works examine this through my practice of differentiating the contexts of the artist, viewer, and critiquing viewing contexts—gallery, store, museum, office, street, magazine—and elsewhere.
Amanda Ross-Ho
Visual Arts Center (Vaulted Gallery)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 28, 2011, 6–9 pm
During the course of this evolving on-site work, Amanda Ross-Ho will invite viewers to become participants in an ongoing examination of the boundaries of the white cube, the direct and indirect products of creative expression, and the connectivity of the visual world. Her site-specific installation will transform the Vaulted Gallery into an active worksite dedicated to producing three basic elements: blank stretched canvases, simple hand-built ceramic vessels, and handmade paper. Ross-Ho collapses the life cycle of the creative process through the performative act of embedding the gallery with the energy of production. The three manifestations of the ‘empty’ space produced—canvas, vessel, page—will create an environment that both formalizes the ability for massive potential and serves as witness to mass activity.
Natasha Bowdoin
Visual Arts Center (The Arcade Gallery)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 28, 2011 6–9 pm
The Daisy Argument by Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin is the third incarnation of a project that documents her transcription of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Over the past few years, Bowdoin has used language as an organic material to explore the unpredictable presence of words. Her site-specific installations are composed of an ever-changing number of components, including drawings and phrases carefully cut from paper that are re-appropriated with each new exhibition.
Austin on View
Mequitta Ahuja
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Also on view at Arthouse, Automythography II (2010). Enamel and glitter on paper. Located on the first floor gallery. Check out her interview with Wendy Vogel in Issue #157.
Ryan Hennessee
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Commissioned specifically for Arthouse’s second floor video projection screen, Austin-based artist Ryan Hennessee has created a looping video animation that cleverly reimagines and collapses the past, present, and future of 700 Congress Avenue.
James Sham
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Close Caption, a witty video that addresses issues of language, translation, and mistranslation via DJ Kool’s song “Let Me Clear My Throat,” inaugurates Lift Project, a series of short video works shown in Arthouse’s new passenger elevator. Part of LIFT Projects, located in the elevator.
Jason Middlebrook
Arthouse
Through January 16, 2011
For his Arthouse commission, New York-based artist Jason Middlebrook transforms detritus from the building’s renovation into sculpture, dining furniture, and other functional objects, all of which combine to evoke the history of the Jones Center and its longstanding importance as a gathering place for the Austin community.
American DREAM
Women and Their Work
Through January 6, 2011
Without ever revealing a face, photographer Lupita Murillo Tinnen creates powerful portraits of undocumented students. The obscured faces suggest the invisibility of their personal plight and the precariousness that their undocumented status creates. Using the students’ rooms as a lens to view their Americanized identities, Tinnen creates poignant images of lives constantly threatened by joblessness and deportation. Tinnen puts a human face on the statistics and titles each image with the student’s academic interest and the age they were brought to the U.S. This work is presented against the backdrop of pending legislation: the Development, Relief & Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act that would provide a pathway to citizenship.
Drawn Together
grayDUCK Gallery
Through January 9, 2011
grayDUCK gallery is pleased to present work by artists Allen Brewer and Pamela Valfer who both draw their inspiration from the discarded, forgotten and the ignored.
10th Anniversary Group Show
d berman gallery
Through January 22, 2011
d berman gallery is celebrating our 10th anniversary this year! To cap the year, we’re having a giant, rollicking 10th anniversary group show…. with a little bit of everything fabulous.
Advancing Tradition: Twenty Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press
Austin Museum of Art
Through February 13, 2011
Imagine a place where artists Terry Allen, Michael Ray Charles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Melissa Miller, James Surls, and Julie Speed, among others, collaborated with master printmakers to stretch the limits of their practice and the media. That place has thrived for twenty years in the form of Austin-based Flatbed Press, an active laboratory for innovative printmaking.
New Works: Eric Zimmerman
Austin Museum of Art
Through February 13, 2011
New Works exhibition series introduces fresh contemporary art by innovative artists. Eric Zimmerman’s painstakingly rendered small and large-scale graphite drawings, functional sculptures, and archival sound works consider the history of American exploration and industry, progress and failures.
Dan Rushton
Champion Contemporary
Presenting new and never seen before works at Champion, Dan Rushton's paintings are visceral compositions in vibrant hues that encompass otherworldly meditations on life, growth, and decay. Rushton employs an exacting collage technique in his works that involves the layering of multiple swathes of painted paper to create both seductive and jarring imagery. Don't forget to check out Chris Sauter's Exploding Silos in the Project Room.
Tony Feher
Arthouse
Ongoing
For his Arthouse commission, New York-based artist Tony Feher has activated and transformed a typically overlooked architectural space - the void between the ceiling and supports - through a carefully considered deployment of everyday objects.
Austin Closings
Cyprien Gaillard
Arthouse
Through December 5
Continuing the Paris and Berlin-based artist’s longstanding exploration of the built environment, this non-narrative film focuses on Cancún’s anachronistic and decaying landscape as a symbolic site of memory and loss.
Ry Rocklen
Visual Arts Center (Vaulted Gallery)
Through December 18
Ry Rocklen’s installation of sculptures seeks to venerate the everyday materials and objects of the urban landscape, transporting an investigation of discarded domestic detritus into a constructed space of exaltation within the Vaulted Gallery. The marriage of traditional arts materials, such as highly polished tile and a patchwork floor quilt constructed from locally discarded pieces of used carpet, display his innate interest in geometry and the domestic space. The grouping of sculptures reflects Rocklen’s artistic processing of found components of the city, incorporating elements of Thai Buddhism and mystic rituals to explore our contemporary connection to commonplace objects.
John Kingerlee
Visual Arts Center (The Arcade Gallery)
Through December 18, Closing Reception: December 3, 6:30–9 pm
The Visual Arts Center is proud to present a solo exhibition of abstract, narrative and figurative paintings and mixed-media works by Anglo-Irish painter John Kingerlee, curated by UT alumnus William Zimmer. This survey of Kingerlee’s work includes paintings the artist executed after moving to the remote Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland in the early 1980s.
Combined
Visual Arts Center (East and Mezzanine Galleries)
Through December 18
The VAC presents Combined, featuring recent work by faculty artists in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition will span both the East and Mezzanine Galleries to showcase a large number of works over a diverse range of themes and media that offer a rich survey of recent activity by the Department’s faculty artists.
Anthropogenesis
Visual Arts Center (Center Space Project)
Through December 18
Anthropogenesis showcases the work of six contemporary artists who use animal imagery in ways ranging from exercises in draftsmanship to explorations of non-human consciousnesses. Jonathan Keats’ ballet for honeybees assumes an insect audience and performers. Jules Buck Jones’ new paintings of birds, reptiles and amphibians reference mankind’s taxonomic organization of animal species. Other artists, like Margot Holtman and Kelly Rae Burns, merge totemic human and animal forms, while others relate human and animal identities. Anthropogenesis considers animals and animal behavior as an artistic source.
San Antonio on View
KUU
Unit B Gallery
Through January 1, 2011
Unit B is pleased to present KUU, a group exhibition featuring recent works by Estonian artists, Juri Ojaver, Jaan Paavle, Paul Rodgers, and Jaan Toomik, organized by Riley Robinson (San Antonio, TX). The four artists working primarily in video and sculpture, have all in some way made observations on the change (or sometimes lack of change) to the Estonian psyche and society during recent years
Matthew Ronay
Artpace
Through January 2, 2011
Matthew Ronay's art occupies a space where illustration, tableau, sculpture, and installation all intersect in harmonious indifference to one another. Since 2004, his arrangements of discreet, colorful, mutated objects have evoked wild manifestations of surrealist imagination and hallucinogenic visions, with distended narratives designed to provoke or even outrage viewers through their irreconcilable compositions and outrageous imagery, such as drooping anuses skewered on a pole. Indeed, like Dada and Surrealist artists earlier in the 20th century and American Funk musicians of the 1970s, whose work employed metanarrative, metaphor, provocation, and fantasy as devices for addressing human behavior in times of social upheaval, Ronay's work has been a manifesto of the spirit, screaming back at us with pieces that suggest that fear, pain, and violence have replaced pleasure in a society increasingly indifferent to war and terrorism.
IAIR 10.3: Henning Bohl, Roy McMakin, Adam Schreiber
Artpace
Through January 9, 2011
Berlin-based artist Henning Bohl's work is an investigation of the language and structure of painting. He often pushes his vividly hued paintings into the realm of sculpture through collaging curled paper onto canvas or utilizing canvas supports in unconventional ways. Roy McMakin's woodwork defies categorization. His skillfully designed tables, chairs, and sofas fit as easily into a domestic space as they do into an art exhibition, and the degree of an object's functionality is often determined by the environment in which it resides. Adam Schreiber is an Austin-based photographer who mines the potential meanings of cultural artifacts and abandoned corporate spaces. Concerning his philosophy, Schreiber states that he is "more interested in how the medium of photography invents something than how it records something." Curated by Michael Darling.
James Castle
Lawrence Markey
Through January 28, 2011
Exhibition of handmade books by James Castle. Castle was a self-taught artist, born profoundly deaf, who created drawings, collaged objects and books with consummate dedication throughout his lifetime.
Houston on View
What We're Up To
Box 13
Through December 16
BOX13 ArtSpace is pleased to present What We’re Up To, the first ever exhibition featuring all of our resident artists. Seventeen artists will fill the BOX13 gallery spaces with new pieces they have been working on in their studios. This show will give viewers a chance to catch up with long time members and get acquainted with some new faces.
Emilio Perez and Myungjin Song
CTRL Gallery
Through December 23
In More Reasons Than One, the intrigue of Emilio Perez' paintings lies in their ability to so successfully, and beautifully, contradict themselves. They are as flat as maps yet as voluminous as a volcanic plume; as still as stained glass yet as full of movement as churning river rapids; as exuberantly sensuous as a Baroque masterpiece yet as analytical and detached as a Lichtenstein brushstroke painting. Myungjin Song's solo show, Being in Folding, will be her first US gallery exhibition. Since earning her MFA from Hongik University in Seoul, Song has developed an immediately recognizable style of painting that combines ambiguous allegorical narrative with a tendency towards flatness and an obsession with chromium oxide green.
Kirsten Pieroth
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through January 2
Berlin-based artist Kirsten Pieroth plays with the materials and histories of everyday objects—books, maps, bottles, maps, and furniture parts. Looking for loose connections and unexpected possibilities in and between commonplace things, she uncovers new opportunities for transformation and communication.
Weasel
Inman Annex
Through January 8
Weasel features work by Maurizio Cattelan, Mads Lynnerup, Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Jim Nolan, Brina Thurston, Karla Wozniak and Joe Zane. Curated by Kurt Mueller and Chelsea Beck.
Sigrid Sandström
Inman Gallery
Through January 8, 2011
Three different videos by artist, Sigrid Sandström, will be screening in the North gallery.
Yuko Murata
Inman Gallery
Through January 8, 2011
Yuko Murata, born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1973, lives and works in Tokyo. Over the past ten years, Murata's practice has focused on small oil paintings, deceptively simple in both subject matter and execution. Spare landscapes rendered in a muted palette or (usually) solitary animals predominate her imagery. Lively, considered brushwork animates the surfaces of these intimate works: a view in raking light reveals the rich expressive strokes.
It's better to regret something you have done...
Art Palace
Through January 8, 2011
Art Palace presents, It's better to regret something you have done..., featuring the works of Jillian Conrad, Nathan Green, Kara Hearn, Jim Nolan, Linda Post and Barry Stone. While each artist explores an individual path with their work, together they create a shared dialogue around the punk rock sentiment that it's better to regret something that you have done than to regret something you haven't. The keen wit that unites these artists showcases the gallery's affinity for presenting unconventional work and sets the stage for the fresh perspectives and projects slated for the coming year.
James Drake
Station Museum
Through January 9, 2011
James Drake’s videos, drawings, sculptures, poetry, and installations reflect his understanding of Man’s place in nature and the presumptions and the psychological struggle that often result in tragedy. In his works of art, James Drake’s personal journey across the harsh desert of self-reflection reveals the starkness of the political and social unrest afflicting Man.
Benjamin Patterson
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through January 23, 2011
Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us is a retrospective of the artist’s career, which now spans nearly fifty years. Emerging in the early 1960s with work that fell under the rubric of Fluxus or Neo-Dada, Benjamin Patterson co-organized the first International Festival of New Music, which debuted at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden in 1961. One of the last surviving members of that constellation of artists whose works were featured at the festival—John Cage, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Philip Corner, David Tudor, and Nam June Paik, among others—Patterson helped to revolutionize the artistic landscape of the times and usher in an era of new and experimental music.
Houston Closings
Brent Green
DiverseWorks
Through December 8, 2010
Pennsylvania-based artist and filmmaker Brent Green returns to DiverseWorks on November 5 with his latest work Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, a whimsical installation of video, sculpture and sound featuring an opening night performance by Green and his collaborator, musician Donna K. The exhibition, named after Green’s first feature length film, is inspired by the true story of Leonard Wood, an eccentric hardware store clerk from Louisville, Kentucky.
Dallas Openings
Dan H. Phillips
Webb Gallery
Opening Reception: Sunday, December 5, 3-7 pm
The art & craft of Dan H. Phillips. The show includes paintings, drawings, furniture, and early American installation. Check out this youtube video and don't forget to check out the ceramics upstairs by CW Block.
Mike Osborne
Holly Johnson Gallery
Opening Reception: January 8, 6-8pm
Mike Osborne's Papers and Trains brings together two distinct but subtly interconnected photographic projects. Press Pictures revolves around the newspaper production process while Underground focuses on the subterranean waiting areas of a German metro system.
Dallas on View
Garland Fielder
Holly Johnson Gallery
Through December 18
Garland Fielder’s work is meticulously crafted invoking a minimalist tradition. Keeping the palette to a minimum of elements and colors, his methodology is elegant and refined. His art explores mathematical and geometric principles and is primarily concerned with the optical decision making process. The extraction of line and the flattening out of structural elements are ways in which he plays with the phenomenology of formal expectation. The exhibition, Modulations, is inspired by this formal play between both two and three dimensionality.
Liz Ward and Susie Rosmarin
Dunn and Brown Contemporary
Through December 18
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Liz Ward, Deep Time, and Susie Rosmarin, New Work.
Art + Object
Marty Walker Gallery
Through December 23
Marty Walker Gallery presents Small Works: Art + Object -a small sculpture invitational featuring strange and fantastic small art objects from a selection of 16 stellar artists. This assembly of sculpture debunks the trend that “bigger is better,” and by working within a small format, these artists have created a mess of random creatures and fascinating objects that demonstrate the power of big ideas imagined in scaled-down and accessible forms.
Todd Camplin
Holly Johnson Gallery
Through December 24
Todd Camplin has been working with abstracted text since 2003. His recent work borrows words and phrases from greeting cards, poems from friends, and quotes from other artists. The ink drawings on paper are built up with layer upon layer of abstracted texts. From afar they appear like multi-colored geometric abstractions yet upon closer inspection one can see compressed letters and phrases creating a completely new narrative.
Vernon Fisher
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through January 2, 2011
Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism is a survey of the artist’s entire career to date, incorporating paintings, sculptures, and installations from the late 1970s to the present, from both public and private collections in the United States and Europe.
Erik Parker
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through February 6, 2011
Erik Parker has described his work as “fragmented samples of our culture.” His complex fantasy portraits elicit the poignant, melancholy, grotesque, psychological, provocative, and almost always comical and surreal, baggage of our time.
Bret Slater
Free Museum of Dallas
New York artist Bret Slater, earning his MFA at Southern Methodist University, works in a diverse range of pragmatic materials, including cardboard, dry wall, staples, screws, nails, and tape. Whether painting within the aesthetic parameters of manufactured items, reinforcing tape installations with industrial fasteners, or floating rugged cuts of drywall in front of its plastered-over brethren, Slater’s work is a first responder to the language of functionality.
Marfa on View
IMMATERIAL
Ballroom Marfa
Through February 20, 2011
Ballroom Marfa is pleased to announce the opening of Immaterial, an exhibition that will focus on the physical and psychic tensions between form, color, and space across varied visual and structural mediums. Curated by Executive Director Fairfax Dorn, the exhibition seeks to examine the metaphysical aspects of artistic production through a selection of artworks that challenge the use of material and space, formalism and abstraction. By using the exhibition as a forum to contemplate process-driven practices, Immaterial will consider art's potential to transcend conscious states through a plurality of visual languages.
Announcements: exhibitions
Austin Openings
Storytelling
L Nowlin Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 15, 6-8pm
A curatorial collaboration between L. Nowlin Gallery and Austin Photography Group, Storytelling is a group exhibition featuring the work of close to 40 Texas photographers. The work explores and interprets the narrative; an important element in human connection and communication.
Erin Curtis
Champion Contemporary
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 20, 7-10pm
Paintings by Erin Curtis.
Amanda Ross-Ho
Visual Arts Center (Vaulted Gallery)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 28, 2011, 6–9 pm
During the course of this evolving on-site work, Amanda Ross-Ho will invite viewers to become participants in an ongoing examination of the boundaries of the white cube, the direct and indirect products of creative expression, and the connectivity of the visual world. Her site-specific installation will transform the Vaulted Gallery into an active worksite dedicated to producing three basic elements: blank stretched canvases, simple hand-built ceramic vessels, and handmade paper. Ross-Ho collapses the life cycle of the creative process through the performative act of embedding the gallery with the energy of production. The three manifestations of the ‘empty’ space produced—canvas, vessel, page—will create an environment that both formalizes the ability for massive potential and serves as witness to mass activity.
Natasha Bowdoin
Visual Arts Center (The Arcade Gallery)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 28, 2011 6–9 pm
The Daisy Argument by Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin is the third incarnation of a project that documents her transcription of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Over the past few years, Bowdoin has used language as an organic material to explore the unpredictable presence of words. Her site-specific installations are composed of an ever-changing number of components, including drawings and phrases carefully cut from paper that are re-appropriated with each new exhibition.
Austin on View
Devon Dikeou
Domy Books
Through January 13, 2011
The exhibition is about connections—how they are made, where they lead, or don’t, and the value of those connections, plus the various ways those connections are made, or conversely lost, destroyed, outdated. The works examine this through my practice of differentiating the contexts of the artist, viewer, and critiquing viewing contexts—gallery, store, museum, office, street, magazine—and elsewhere.
Advancing Tradition: Twenty Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press
Austin Museum of Art
Through February 13, 2011
Imagine a place where artists Terry Allen, Michael Ray Charles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Melissa Miller, James Surls, and Julie Speed, among others, collaborated with master printmakers to stretch the limits of their practice and the media. That place has thrived for twenty years in the form of Austin-based Flatbed Press, an active laboratory for innovative printmaking.
New Works: Eric Zimmerman
Austin Museum of Art
Through February 13, 2011
New Works exhibition series introduces fresh contemporary art by innovative artists. Eric Zimmerman’s painstakingly rendered small and large-scale graphite drawings, functional sculptures, and archival sound works consider the history of American exploration and industry, progress and failures.
Dan Rushton
Champion Contemporary
Through January 15, 2011
Presenting new and never seen before works at Champion, Dan Rushton's paintings are visceral compositions in vibrant hues that encompass otherworldly meditations on life, growth, and decay. Rushton employs an exacting collage technique in his works that involves the layering of multiple swathes of painted paper to create both seductive and jarring imagery. Don't forget to check out Chris Sauter's Exploding Silos in the Project Room.
Jason Middlebrook
Arthouse
Through January 16, 2011
For his Arthouse commission, New York-based artist Jason Middlebrook transforms detritus from the building’s renovation into sculpture, dining furniture, and other functional objects, all of which combine to evoke the history of the Jones Center and its longstanding importance as a gathering place for the Austin community.
10th Anniversary Group Show
d berman gallery
Through January 22, 2011
d berman gallery is celebrating our 10th anniversary this year! To cap the year, we’re having a giant, rollicking 10th anniversary group show…. with a little bit of everything fabulous.
Tony Feher
Arthouse
Ongoing
For his Arthouse commission, New York-based artist Tony Feher has activated and transformed a typically overlooked architectural space - the void between the ceiling and supports - through a carefully considered deployment of everyday objects.
Austin Closings
Mequitta Ahuja
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Also on view at Arthouse, Automythography II (2010). Enamel and glitter on paper. Located on the first floor gallery. Check out her interview with Wendy Vogel in Issue #157.
Ryan Hennessee
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Commissioned specifically for Arthouse’s second floor video projection screen, Austin-based artist Ryan Hennessee has created a looping video animation that cleverly reimagines and collapses the past, present, and future of 700 Congress Avenue.
James Sham
Arthouse
Through January 2, 2011
Close Caption, a witty video that addresses issues of language, translation, and mistranslation via DJ Kool’s song “Let Me Clear My Throat,” inaugurates Lift Project, a series of short video works shown in Arthouse’s new passenger elevator. Part of LIFT Projects, located in the elevator.
American DREAM
Women and Their Work
Through January 6, 2011
Without ever revealing a face, photographer Lupita Murillo Tinnen creates powerful portraits of undocumented students. The obscured faces suggest the invisibility of their personal plight and the precariousness that their undocumented status creates. Using the students’ rooms as a lens to view their Americanized identities, Tinnen creates poignant images of lives constantly threatened by joblessness and deportation. Tinnen puts a human face on the statistics and titles each image with the student’s academic interest and the age they were brought to the U.S. This work is presented against the backdrop of pending legislation: the Development, Relief & Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act that would provide a pathway to citizenship.
Drawn Together
grayDUCK Gallery
Through January 9, 2011
grayDUCK gallery is pleased to present work by artists Allen Brewer and Pamela Valfer who both draw their inspiration from the discarded, forgotten and the ignored.
San Antonio on View
IAIR 10.3: Henning Bohl, Roy McMakin, Adam Schreiber
Artpace
Through January 9, 2011
Berlin-based artist Henning Bohl's work is an investigation of the language and structure of painting. He often pushes his vividly hued paintings into the realm of sculpture through collaging curled paper onto canvas or utilizing canvas supports in unconventional ways. Roy McMakin's woodwork defies categorization. His skillfully designed tables, chairs, and sofas fit as easily into a domestic space as they do into an art exhibition, and the degree of an object's functionality is often determined by the environment in which it resides. Adam Schreiber is an Austin-based photographer who mines the potential meanings of cultural artifacts and abandoned corporate spaces. Concerning his philosophy, Schreiber states that he is "more interested in how the medium of photography invents something than how it records something." Curated by Michael Darling.
James Castle
Lawrence Markey
Through January 28, 2011
Exhibition of handmade books by James Castle. Castle was a self-taught artist, born profoundly deaf, who created drawings, collaged objects and books with consummate dedication throughout his lifetime.
San Antonio Closings
KUU
Unit B Gallery
Through January 1, 2011
Unit B is pleased to present KUU, a group exhibition featuring recent works by Estonian artists, Juri Ojaver, Jaan Paavle, Paul Rodgers, and Jaan Toomik, organized by Riley Robinson (San Antonio, TX). The four artists working primarily in video and sculpture, have all in some way made observations on the change (or sometimes lack of change) to the Estonian psyche and society during recent years
Matthew Ronay
Artpace
Through January 2, 2011
Matthew Ronay's art occupies a space where illustration, tableau, sculpture, and installation all intersect in harmonious indifference to one another. Since 2004, his arrangements of discreet, colorful, mutated objects have evoked wild manifestations of surrealist imagination and hallucinogenic visions, with distended narratives designed to provoke or even outrage viewers through their irreconcilable compositions and outrageous imagery, such as drooping anuses skewered on a pole. Indeed, like Dada and Surrealist artists earlier in the 20th century and American Funk musicians of the 1970s, whose work employed metanarrative, metaphor, provocation, and fantasy as devices for addressing human behavior in times of social upheaval, Ronay's work has been a manifesto of the spirit, screaming back at us with pieces that suggest that fear, pain, and violence have replaced pleasure in a society increasingly indifferent to war and terrorism.
Houston on View
Benjamin Patterson
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through January 23, 2011
Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us is a retrospective of the artist’s career, which now spans nearly fifty years. Emerging in the early 1960s with work that fell under the rubric of Fluxus or Neo-Dada, Benjamin Patterson co-organized the first International Festival of New Music, which debuted at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden in 1961. One of the last surviving members of that constellation of artists whose works were featured at the festival—John Cage, Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, Philip Corner, David Tudor, and Nam June Paik, among others—Patterson helped to revolutionize the artistic landscape of the times and usher in an era of new and experimental music.
Houston Closings
Emilio Perez and Myungjin Song
CTRL Gallery
Through December 23
In More Reasons Than One, the intrigue of Emilio Perez' paintings lies in their ability to so successfully, and beautifully, contradict themselves. They are as flat as maps yet as voluminous as a volcanic plume; as still as stained glass yet as full of movement as churning river rapids; as exuberantly sensuous as a Baroque masterpiece yet as analytical and detached as a Lichtenstein brushstroke painting. Myungjin Song's solo show, Being in Folding, will be her first US gallery exhibition. Since earning her MFA from Hongik University in Seoul, Song has developed an immediately recognizable style of painting that combines ambiguous allegorical narrative with a tendency towards flatness and an obsession with chromium oxide green.
Kirsten Pieroth
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through January 2
Berlin-based artist Kirsten Pieroth plays with the materials and histories of everyday objects—books, maps, bottles, maps, and furniture parts. Looking for loose connections and unexpected possibilities in and between commonplace things, she uncovers new opportunities for transformation and communication.
Weasel
Inman Annex
Through January 8
Weasel features work by Maurizio Cattelan, Mads Lynnerup, Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Jim Nolan, Brina Thurston, Karla Wozniak and Joe Zane. Curated by Kurt Mueller and Chelsea Beck.
Sigrid Sandström
Inman Gallery
Through January 8, 2011
Three different videos by artist, Sigrid Sandström, will be screening in the North gallery.
Yuko Murata
Inman Gallery
Through January 8, 2011
Yuko Murata, born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1973, lives and works in Tokyo. Over the past ten years, Murata's practice has focused on small oil paintings, deceptively simple in both subject matter and execution. Spare landscapes rendered in a muted palette or (usually) solitary animals predominate her imagery. Lively, considered brushwork animates the surfaces of these intimate works: a view in raking light reveals the rich expressive strokes.
It's better to regret something you have done...
Art Palace
Through January 8, 2011
Art Palace presents, It's better to regret something you have done..., featuring the works of Jillian Conrad, Nathan Green, Kara Hearn, Jim Nolan, Linda Post and Barry Stone. While each artist explores an individual path with their work, together they create a shared dialogue around the punk rock sentiment that it's better to regret something that you have done than to regret something you haven't. The keen wit that unites these artists showcases the gallery's affinity for presenting unconventional work and sets the stage for the fresh perspectives and projects slated for the coming year.
James Drake
Station Museum
Through January 9, 2011
James Drake’s videos, drawings, sculptures, poetry, and installations reflect his understanding of Man’s place in nature and the presumptions and the psychological struggle that often result in tragedy. In his works of art, James Drake’s personal journey across the harsh desert of self-reflection reveals the starkness of the political and social unrest afflicting Man.
Dallas Openings
Mike Osborne
Holly Johnson Gallery
Opening Reception: January 8, 6-8pm
Mike Osborne's Papers and Trains brings together two distinct but subtly interconnected photographic projects. Press Pictures revolves around the newspaper production process while Underground focuses on the subterranean waiting areas of a German metro system.
Dallas on View
Erik Parker
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through February 6, 2011
Erik Parker has described his work as “fragmented samples of our culture.” His complex fantasy portraits elicit the poignant, melancholy, grotesque, psychological, provocative, and almost always comical and surreal, baggage of our time.
Dan H. Phillips
Webb Gallery
Through February 6, 2011
The art & craft of Dan H. Phillips. The show includes paintings, drawings, furniture, and early American installation. Check out this youtube video and don't forget to check out the ceramics upstairs by CW Block.
Dallas Closings
Art + Object
Marty Walker Gallery
Through December 23
Marty Walker Gallery presents Small Works: Art + Object -a small sculpture invitational featuring strange and fantastic small art objects from a selection of 16 stellar artists. This assembly of sculpture debunks the trend that “bigger is better,” and by working within a small format, these artists have created a mess of random creatures and fascinating objects that demonstrate the power of big ideas imagined in scaled-down and accessible forms.
Todd Camplin
Holly Johnson Gallery
Through December 24
Todd Camplin has been working with abstracted text since 2003. His recent work borrows words and phrases from greeting cards, poems from friends, and quotes from other artists. The ink drawings on paper are built up with layer upon layer of abstracted texts. From afar they appear like multi-colored geometric abstractions yet upon closer inspection one can see compressed letters and phrases creating a completely new narrative.
Vernon Fisher
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Through January 2, 2011
Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism is a survey of the artist’s entire career to date, incorporating paintings, sculptures, and installations from the late 1970s to the present, from both public and private collections in the United States and Europe.
Marfa on View
IMMATERIAL
Ballroom Marfa
Through February 20, 2011
Ballroom Marfa is pleased to announce the opening of Immaterial, an exhibition that will focus on the physical and psychic tensions between form, color, and space across varied visual and structural mediums. Curated by Executive Director Fairfax Dorn, the exhibition seeks to examine the metaphysical aspects of artistic production through a selection of artworks that challenge the use of material and space, formalism and abstraction. By using the exhibition as a forum to contemplate process-driven practices, Immaterial will consider art's potential to transcend conscious states through a plurality of visual languages
New York Openings
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Premiere: January 8, 2011
Premiere of Melies, the most recent film by the photography and video artists, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler. The work explores the residue of cinema and social terrain around the site of a mountain in the Chihuahua Desert in West Texas named Movie Mountain. According to local residents, this mountain near the border town of Sierra Blanca is named Movie Mountain because a silent film was shot there in the early 1900s. Searching for the origin of the mountain's name, the artists embarked on a journey traversing the landscape of early silent-era film production.
New York Closings
Peter Saul
Haunch of Venison
Through January 8, 2011
A survey of Peter Saul's work-- check out this interview with Peter Saul and Irving Sandler and Phong Bui here.
Announcements: events
Austin Events
Experimental Reading and Installation by Andy Rihn
Domy Books
Saturday, December 4, 2-6pm
For those who missed Andy Rihn's gonzo installation at the Monofonus compound – which featured, among other things, a pigeon room and readings by a vibrating pile of denim – Andy's installing a reconstruction on December 4. It's all in celebration of Andy's first book, The Tiger's Last Tooth, available at Domy and through the Monofonus website now. (The book is also available to read in its entirety here.)
Stars and Hearts For Lyric
Birdhouse Gallery
Sunday, December 5, 7pm
Birdhouse Gallery hosts a benefit at the Scoot Inn (E. 4th) for Lyric Grossman, a tiny new baby in need of several heart surgeries. There will be live music and a silent art auction. Click here for deets.
Houston Events
Rice/Menil Lecture Series: "Comic Modernism"
Menil Foyer, 1515 Sul Ross
Monday, December 6, 7 pm
Michael Leja studies the visual arts in various media, primarily in the United States, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (1993), and Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004), he has taught American Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia since 2005.
Conversation with Mark Dion
Houston Arts Alliance
Monday, December 6, 7-8:30pm
Mark Dion's work goes against the grain of dominant culture to challenge how rational scientific methods and subjective influences shape our understanding of the natural world. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the investigation of knowledge about nature, he questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society.
Announcements: opportunities
Call for Entries
17th SESC_Videobrasil Art Festival
Universe in Universe
Deadline: March 10, 2011
The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil will be held in September and October 2011. As suggested by its new name, a deep, intense model shift marks this edition when compared to previous ones. Aligned with the nature of contemporary artistic practices, the new competitive exhibition expands its ability to soak in diverse manifestations, such as video, installations, performances, book-objects, and other artistic experiments. For more information and how to apply, click here.
Residency Opportunities
John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Residency
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Deadline: Friday, April 1, 2011
Arts/Industry is undoubtedly the most unusual on-going collaboration between art and industry in the United States. Hundreds of emerging and established visual artists have benefited from the Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co. since its inception in 1974. Participants are exposed to a body of technical knowledge that enables them to explore forms and concepts not possible in their own studios as well as new ways of thinking and working. Artists-in-residence may work in the Kohler Co. Pottery, Iron and Brass Foundries, and Enamel Shop to develop a wide variety of work in clay, enameled cast iron, and brass including but not limited to murals and reliefs, temporary or permanent site-specific installations, and functional and sculptural forms. For more information and to apply, click here.
Employment Opportunities
Chairperson of Film/Video for the School of Art & Design at Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
The newly re-organized Department of Film/Video at Pratt Institute seeks exceptional applicants for the position of Chairperson. The ideal candidate will bring the vision and experience necessary to assume the academic and administrative leadership of the department and build upon the current BFA program. The Department is located on Pratt's historic 25-acre Brooklyn campus in the culturally diverse neighborhood of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. This administrative appointment carries a twelve-month per year workload and a three-year contract that may be renewed. The responsibilities of the chair will include: oversight of budget and course scheduling; curriculum development, program reviews and assessment; recruitment of faculty and students; participation in fundraising and development; and establishment of linkages with relevant professional organizations and leading practitioners.
To Apply: Review of applications will continue until position is filled. Please submit your cover letter, CV, and the names and contact information for three professional references electronically to:
Chairperson Search Committee: Film/Video
FVChair@pratt.edu – Use subject line A&D Film/ Video Chair
Call for Applicants
Duke University Experimental and Documentary Arts MFA
Duke University
Priority Deadline: January 30, 2011
Duke University welcomes applications to its MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFAEDA), a new program and the first-ever Master of Fine Arts at the university. For the inaugural class of Fall 2011, applications will be accepted until all spaces are filled, with priority given to those candidates applying by January 30, 2011. The MFAEDA is a unique initiative that couples experimental visual practice with the documentary arts in a rigorous two-year program. Building on the University’s existing strengths in historical, theoretical and technological scholarship, the MFAEDA offers a distinct learning environment that sees interdisciplinary education as a benchmark for innovation. The program’s curriculum blends studio practice, fieldwork, digital media authorship, and critical theory, culminating in the completion of a thesis paper and an MFA exhibition. The central home of the program is The Carpentry Shop, a state-of-the-art facility in a former industrial building that once housed the university’s carpenters and cabinet-makers. Please click here to apply.
Employment Opportunities
Associate Curator
Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
The Associate Curator will: Work directly with the Director and Senior Curator to research, develop and produce museum exhibitions, publications, and programming. BA in Art History or related field is required; MA in Art History or Curatorial Studies is preferred. Three to five years related experience or equivalent combination of education and experience. Applicants are required to submit an application, cover letter, and resume through Penn’s Online Employment System at https://jobs.hr.upenn.edu/.
Call for Proposals
Art in Public Places: African-American Cultural & Heritage Facility
Austin Art in Public Places
Deadline: January 10, 2011
The City of Austin Art in Public Places (AIPP) program of the Cultural Arts Division, Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office (EGRSO) seeks to commission a professional visual artist to create a work of art for the African-American Cultural & Heritage Facility Art in Public Places project. The goal for the public art is to showcase a work of contemporary public art that honors the cultural heritage of the African-American community in Austin. To read the complete Request for Proposals, please click here.
Employment Opportunities
Adjunct Professor at Texas State
Texas State University School of Art and Design
The School of Art and Design at Texas State University in San Marcos is looking for an adjunct to teach Introduction to Fine Arts (ART 2313) in Spring 2011. The course meets Tuesdays/Thursdays from 12:30-1:50. The minimum requirement is a master’s degree in art history or a related field (an MFA is acceptable as well). The pay is between $3000-3500 for the semester and the cost of a parking permit will be reimbursed. For questions or to apply, please send a C.V. and letter of application to Erina Duganne at ed17@txstate.edu.
Fellowship Opportunities
Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowships in the Humanities
Harry Ransom Center
Deadline: February 13, 2011
The Harry Ransom Center, an internationally renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, annually awards over 50 fellowships to support research projects that require on-site use of its collections. The fellowships support research in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history. Click here for applications and guidelines.
