Advancing Tradition: 20 Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press
Austin Museum of Art
Through February 13

By Kyle Schlesinger

Advancing Tradition: 20 Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press,  (exhibition view), 2011.

Printmakers have always been the bastard siblings of the art world family: the toothless hicks whose interests in ink, paper and the purely technical aspects of their trade make them subordinate to the “real” artists who are primarily engaged in conceptual, political, aesthetic and intellectual problems. The printmakers’ practice is presumed to be inferior because it is situated somewhere between commercial and fine art; because printmakers cannot decide among themselves exactly what it means to make original multiples (or multiple originals?); because they are technicians employed to realize and perfect the prints of real artists who have been somehow coerced into making an edition; and because they cater to amateur collectors who don’t have pockets deep enough to purchase paintings or sculptures. Now nestled in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there is no doubt that ‘print’ is an archaic term and an obsolete medium. One wonders what printmaking could possibly teach us about contemporary art?

Advancing Tradition, Flatbed Press’ exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art, celebrates two decades of innovative printmaking by a team of master printers whose deep knowledge of the history and technique of the craft is engaged in a fruitful dialogue with the concepts and constructions of trends in digital and multimedia art. Museum visitors should not expect to see dark, sterile rooms filled with connoisseurs peeping through monocles at flat prints under glass. This exhibit features a spectacular range of prints produced through traditional methods such as monotype, woodcut, etching, lithograph, and silkscreen, often tweaked to create unique or hybrid effects. They join sculptures, paintings, and an array of tools, artifacts and materials that reveal some of the processes behind the products.

Collaboration is an essential ingredient in the alchemy of printmaking. It’s what Gregg Biglieri likes to call the “cuckoo effect”: one bird lays an egg in another bird’s nest. Near a print by Margo Sawyer, a caption reads, “Among printmakers, there is a saying that sculptors make the best prints.” Produced in collaboration with Flatbed, this print (Index for Contemplation #4, 2001) preceded Sawyer’s related bright, multicolored cubic sculpture on the floor before it. Mastering printmaking takes years of experience and lots of specialized equipment, so few artists who are invited to collaborate with Flatbed possess the skills they need to realize their objectives independently. The exchange of images and ideas in the art of conversation that ensues is perhaps the most compelling variable in the printmaking process—there’s no telling exactly what the outcome will be when a meaningful dialogue gets one out of his or her own head.

The concepts and processes of printing can be rather abstract, but this exhibition strives to demystify the tools of the trade. To enlighten those of us who have no experience with relief printing, for example, a vitrine displays the tools of the trade: roller, block, ball-bearing baren, medium U chisel, small U gouge, and V gouge. The lithography display is equally thorough and suggestive, while the copperplates and helpful gathering of literature at a table in the back make this intimate space a place where one can wander and learn. The exhibit is not chronological, but arranged by shape and color. The towering, yet slender Vine Line Suite: Mason Dixon Line (2000) by Dallas sculptor Linda Rigdway appears opposite Katie Van Scherpenberg’s 22 x 90 inch triptych Furo (2004). Furo depicts a hazy cinematic seascape in or out of time, in or out of focus. A mysterious red stain bleeds into the sand and surf while the boys darting in and out of the frame (taken from a single vantage) appear unfazed. James Surls is an artist from Texas who has been working with Flatbed since 1990. There is a particularly striking correlation between Surls’ Heartland: A Suite of Eleven Gravures (2005), a deluxe artist’s book in the tradition of the livre d’artiste, and Hanging Flower (c. 1990), a large sculpture hanging in the far corner of the first gallery. Bringing a poem by the artist and eleven images together on Twinrocker handmade papers, Heartland is an ambitious boxed edition that echoes many of the motifs and nuances of Hanging Flower (and vice versa).

Part of the challenge of making art is discovering what’s not working and using it to one’s advantage. For all of the charges that might be pitted against printmaking, Advancing Tradition demonstrates how hand and machine can work together with fine papers and textures to make multiples, to move print off the page, and to remind us that collaborations often yield results that no one could have foreseen or accomplished alone.

Kyle Schlesinger’s most recent book is Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book 1946-1981.

---

Keren Cytter
Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin
Through January 23

By Wendy Vogel

Keren Cytter, Cross.Flowers.Rolex. (still), 2009, 3-channel digital video installation with sound, 15 min. 11 sec. Courtesy of SCHAU ORT, Christiane Büntgen, Zurich. © Keren Cytter.

“The screen is not black.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry.”

“The screen is black but the walls are white.”

“Genius.”

This flatly delivered exchange opens the third and final five-minute vignette of Keren Cytter’s Cross.Flowers.Rolex (2009). The video departs in significant ways from Cytter’s earlier work, not least because the three-channel, sequentially projected installation is intended for an art space setting—what Cytter coyly alludes to in this reflexive snippet of dialogue. Yet despite leaning on schmaltzy conventions that seem to want to draw the viewer in before pushing them away, Cross.Flowers.Rolex’s experimental, arrhythmic structure keeps viewers at a frustrating emotional bay.

At the age of 32, Berlin-based, Israeli-born Cytter has already garnered international praise for her post-postmodern films, videos, novels, dance and theatre works that bombard the viewer with cinematic and theatrical clichés without delivering any narrative cohesion. Cross.Flowers.Rolex is similarly jumbled—part murder mystery, part infidelity vengeance scenario, part suicide attempt. Against swerving, fuzzy camera work, melodrama and horror commingle in lines spat out by bored-looking professional actors: “My head explodes when I hear the words that come out of your mouth.” “Blood. Sweat. No tears.” “I wish he would jump.” It becomes difficult to determine who (if anyone) has done violence to whom, save for the film’s dénouement where a man plunges from a window. His partner, standing over him, works through the stages of grief in unnatural, rapid-fire succession: “You dumb piece of meat. I guess I don’t miss you. I guess I don’t forgive you.”

In short, moments of Brechtian distancing compose the film’s entire syntax, not just its punctuation. But as the curatorial text accompanying the exhibition states, Cytter constructed her film systematically, reinterpreting three incredible events reported on the Internet in early 2009: a man is stabbed eleven times in five seconds, a man survives two falls from a second-story window, and a woman serves tea after being shot in the head.

Cytter, of course, is far from the first artist to mine sensationalist faits divers to construct a psychological portrait. Even Gustave Flaubert famously lifted the plot of Madame Bovary from a gossipy news bit in a daily newspaper about a petite bourgeoise who poisoned herself. But Cytter does not stop there, nor with the “psychologization of the image” in freeze frame that characterized 1970s postmodern works such as Dara Birnbaum’s stuttering Wonder Women or Jack Goldstein’s short films that mimicked cinematic loops. Instead, she creates a melancholy “docudrama” that doesn’t offer a clear way in, for artists or critics.

Of course, this ambiguity is the critics’ dream, and much ink has been spilled either glossing the surface of her films or decoding the more obvious points of reference. Cytter’s films ultimately have value, however, because in their mingling of fact and fiction, they reflect our shortcomings as viewers and critics. They operate as much inside the society of the spectacle as from critiquing it, a slippery position to occupy. I’m not convinced, however, that I can come up with a pat conclusion to add to the rest. I’ve rewritten this text more than four times now, trying to dredge up the hidden details of the film that remain stubbornly lodged in my subconscious, and I still can’t come up with a proper ending. For Cytter, however, this sputtering out might be the best critical response of all.

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

---

Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Billboards
Artpace, San Antonio
Closed December 31, 2010

By Leslie Moody Castro, Noah Simblist, and Andy Campbell

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (The New Plan), 1991, Billboard, Dimensions vary with installation. Installation in San Antonio, Texas at Wetmore and Loop 410 for Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Billboards at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, 2010. Photo by: Todd Johnson. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

In conjunction with the organization’s fifteenth anniversary, Artpace San Antonio organized a Texas-wide exhibition of thirteen billboards created by artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres between 1989 and 1995. Developed with special permission from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, this presentation was the first-ever comprehensive survey of Gonzalez-Torres' billboard works in the United States. The billboards were on view throughout 2010 in various locations in the cities of Dallas, El Paso, Houston and San Antonio. Major underwriting for this Billboard Exhibition was provided by the Linda Pace Foundation, with generous in-kind support from Clear Channel Outdoor.

During the run of the exhibition, Artpace also facilitated a series of conversations between Leslie Moody Castro, Andy Campbell and Noah Simblist. This material was originally meant to serve as an educational component to the exhibition, but has remained unpublished until now. We wish to thank Artpace San Antonio and education curator Alex Freeman for making this project a reality.

In this issue of …mbg, we are pleased to include two excerpts from the conversation about queer activism in the 1980s and how we might read Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ activist gestures today. In our February 4th issue, we will feature a second installment of this conversation, focusing specifically on the politics of display surrounding Gonzalez-Torres’ work.

Queer Activism: Then/Now

Leslie Moody Castro [LMC]: Why don’t we start with queer activism, specifically in the historical moment when these billboards were made. How you think that translates to the current political and historical moment?

Noah Simblist [NS]: One thing that’s interesting to me is the state of the AIDS crisis then versus now. Obviously it’s different today because people can live with AIDS much longer, so there’s not the same kind of animosity surrounding the disease that there was during the Reagan-Bush era. But at the same time, I wonder what it means for a contemporary artist to make an activist gesture in the way that these billboards were originally conceived, as opposed to them being restaged curatorially in this exhibition. Are they still activist images? Is the activism represented in the original action that Felix Gonzalez-Torres staged; is the activism inherent in the images; or does the activism take place when these images are presented in public spaces?

Andy Campbell [AC]: To me, I feel there’s been a real shift in the center of queer politics, so locating queerness in terms of the activist agenda is very different now. In the late 1980s, the struggle was actually mentioning—verbally discussing—people living with HIV/AIDS in any capacity, whereas now when the big political struggle is the normalization of queers (although I wouldn’t call that agenda a “queer” agenda, necessarily). I share your same question: is the curatorial restaging a blip or rupture of mainstream gay politics now, or does it reify them? Are we normalizing the billboards in the city?

NS: It made me think of this conversation that I heard between Gregg Bordowitz and David Getsy about queerness on Bad at Sports. It was fantastic! They talk about defining queerness by making the choice “yes/and” as opposed to “yes or no,” and I think the billboard project, like all of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work, is often about that. In that sense, queerness does not necessarily have to be about the politics of sexuality. Queerness can also be the approach to questions like: what is an artwork? What is beauty and the relationship between beauty and politics, or the relationship between art and politics? All of these things can be “queered,” and this billboard project is very much doing that. I think it can also help us get outside of this “us vs. them” binary, which was very much a part of the discourse and debate of the ‘80s and ‘90s, where conservatives would lambast “those dirty people, those dirty prostitutes...”

AC: And homosexuals.

NS: Yes, conservatives would say that the dregs of society were getting sick because of their own actions, and that they would perform those actions in “their” spaces, but that “our” spaces were safe and pure and clean. The billboards were a total queering of that notion of “us and them,” in the way that their politics intersected and politicized “our” space. At the same time, this was done in a way that didn’t subscribe to the clichés of what “they” looked like.

AC: I feel like the work is important in a different way in terms of queerness: that it can blend but it can also be a disruption. It’s not an “either/or,” as you said, Noah, it’s more of a “yes/and” thing. How can we aggregate these choices together rather than shutting down a radical voice that seems to be a little bit more unpleasant?

NS: The AIDS crisis has also shifted geographically over the past 30 years. New York and San Francisco became the centers for it in the ‘80s, but now it is much more prevalent in Africa and Asia. I wonder what it would mean for these billboards to be seen in Johannesburg or a township in South Africa.

Pluralism and Activism: Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his Contemporaries

LMC: I know that you were interested in the relationships between Group Material and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Could you speak about that, Noah?

NS: Group Material was an artist collective in New York that involved up to 20 people between 1979-1996. At any given time the numbers were changing, as people were joining or leaving the group. In the end the main participants were Julie Ault, Doug Ashford and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ault and Ashford were the most consistent within the group, along with Tim Rollins. Ault recently published a book called Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material, one of the best documentations of the entire project. Essentially their artistic practice comprised curating exhibitions around various political themes, like the U.S. involvement in Latin America in the 1980s or the AIDS crisis.

The latter was something that Felix Gonzalez-Torres also addressed in his own work, particularly after the death of his lover Ross. I think that he had various ways of mediating the experience of mourning. There are many ways that he used to ritualize mourning, both physically and visually in space. This was something that he needed to do for himself, while at the same time realizing that the personal act of mourning had a communal implication. I think that he was also very aware of the fact that his public mourning had a political implication.

LMC: So he’s dealing with being a homosexual male in public, mourning in public, openly stating that this work is created for Ross while fully aware of the consequences, all amidst the beginning of the AIDS crisis in which the art word is literally dying. There was no advocacy; there were no clinics; there was no knowledge being disseminated to stop this and deal with this issue.

NS: Yes, and the context of the 1980s is so interesting. This is this moment when Reagan had been elected and a wave of conservatism emerged from the country. There were people like Jerry Falwell who were becoming very powerful and acting against perceived subversives who were against patriotism and Christian American values. AIDS was a health crisis affecting a particular segment of the citizenry of the U.S. that was deemed immoral, and so it was ignored. It was ironically an antidemocratic action to ignore it and to pretend that this thing didn’t exist. I think that there were a lot of activists that became very much engaged in reversing silence, in becoming very loud and reversing this erasure by becoming very visually bold. In addition to Group Material, groups like ACT UP with people like Gregg Bordowitz were very much engaged in starting the conversation. I find it interesting that in his solo projects Felix Gonzalez-Torres would take an angle that was so political and bold, by transferring something that is as private as a bedroom, like “Untitled” (1991), into the public space of a billboard. But at the same time he did this using an image that isn’t explicitly provocative.

LMC: Well there is that quote of his: “Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks, because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning.”

NS: But I believe in a kind of pluralism for those different activist approaches. I feel that it is very interesting to have Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio (1978) and ACT UP and Felix Gonzalez-Torres working at the same time. Because that communicates a kind of diversity that subverts the conservative idea that all homosexuals and artists and intellectuals are communist perverts. It gets away from that kind of universalizing so that you can say that there are lots of different kinds of “perverts!”

AC: And there were many that actively embraced that label of “pervert.” At least those in the kink communities were used to being labeled as perverts by broader gay and lesbian communities by the ‘90s. I think of Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait/Pervert (1994), where she’s got the word carved in gorgeous type across her chest. It’s cutting, sure, but from a kink perspective it’s downright erotic.

LMC: All this pluralism in sexual and activist expression gets away from this very contradictory idea of hegemonizing the other—if that’s even possible. So another thing that I was going to ask you about is the tone of his work. So many activist organizations have so much anger around them, and so much of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work is so quiet that it almost becomes meditative. There is an absence of anger in mourning, which is one of the processes of coping. Do you see any anger in his work?

NS: Along with the rest of Group Material, he would choose artists that were very angry—not that he was personally constructing angry images, but through the kind of discourse that he was involved in with Julie Ault, Doug Ashford, and everyone else that was involved, and through the discourse of the artists that they would invite to participate in the Group Material exhibitions. He would choose artists along with the rest of Group Material that were very angry, like in the AIDS Timeline in 1990 for instance. That same notion of pluralism that we were talking about before also has to do with one’s own reaction to a crisis. So while Group Material gave him the outlet for rowdy anger, I think that his work was able to be more meditative, slow and quiet—it provoked more questions than it necessarily gave the answers to.

AC: I agree with Noah, but I think that openness allows for anger. Even the elegiac stacks and spills hold some anger for me. I get angry looking at it, touching it and taking home, as much as I get sad. Nevermind that half the time I get angry because there’s an overt surveillance of the work—take one piece but no more!—that I think is a disgrace to the legacy and generosity of the work. But that’s a different reason to be angry!

Leslie Moody Castro is the visitor services manager at Arthouse at the Jones Center, and a former graduate intern at Artpace San Antonio. She graduated with her Master's Degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 2010 in Museum Education, and worked at the Blanton Museum of Art while earning her graduate degree. Moody Castro has also curated exhibitions at Women and Their Work, Mexic-Arte Museum, and is a co-founder of Co-Lab, Austin.

Noah Simblist is an Associate Professor of Art at SMU and a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent curatorial endeavor, the group exhibition Out of Place, is on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin through March 5.

Andy Campbell is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Texas in Austin. He is currently writing about gay and lesbian leather communities and visual cultures in the 1970s. He is co-curator of the group exhibition SUBstainability, which opens on January 20 at the Texas State University Gallery in San Marcos.

---

James Castle
Lawrence Markey Gallery, San Antonio
Through January 28

By Wendy Atwell

James Castle, BOOKS. Courtesy of Lawrence Markey, San Antonio.

A media-saturated commercial culture refines images to a polished transparency, whereas art’s opacity thwarts this seeming clarity, questioning what is taken for granted and what goes unseen and unexamined. The small, delicate books by James Castle on view at Lawrence Markey doubly perform this provocation. The sense of distance and removal that pervades Castle’s art exists not only because the work is exhibited in glass vitrines, but also because the books, made from combinations of letters, numbers, portraits and sketches, speak Castle’s personal language.

Castle, who was born deaf, remained mute and communicated via the art he created. A self-taught, prolific artist, Castle (1899-1977) produced undated handbound books, drawings, collages and constructions throughout his life. Castle chose stove soot mixed with saliva to draw on his books and used a hand-sharpened stick. The found and discarded objects he used to create books, collages and paper dolls were garnered from his parents who were postmasters in rural Idaho. The bricolage of material used by Castle includes soap labels, unfolded matchbooks, used envelopes, bills of sale, comics and other available detritus. This jumble of materials is also reflected in his lettering, a variety of very thoughtfully created fonts, as well as some cryptic lettering with Greek-looking origins.

The careworn edges of these aged, hand-stitched books reveal their handmade origin. Some books are tiny, the color worn off the covers, such as the cover of Untitled (Red Book), which attests to its usefulness to the artist, who was known to frequently carry his books around with him and page through them. The 96 pages in this book include collaged images, found text and portraits. Though rudimentary, the lines drawn for eyes, noses and mouths on Castle’s figures are nevertheless hauntingly charismatic. Some figures remain featureless and ghostly; everywhere Castle’s shading performs a daunting play of light and shadow.

The twenty small books on display are carefully propped open to a particular page or closed to show their covers, beckoning the viewer to do the impossible—turn the pages. A catalog accompanies the exhibition with an essay by Bob Nickas, which allows the viewer this indulgence from a distance once removed. This furthers the sense of detachment which is felt everywhere in Castle’s work, most poignantly because it seems to mirror the artist’s own aloofness.

Though Castle’s visual repertoire isn’t totally inaccessible, it doesn’t allow the viewer to construct a traditional narrative. Untitled (Calendar Castle Jim) is a calendar of six months with drawn numbers that, on some months, count up to 35 days. In Untitled (Three Figures), wavy lines flow horizontally across the pages, miming rows of text, as void of narrative meaning to the viewer as real text must have been to Castle.

Castle’s texts resist meaning. Instead, the way he repeats text, images and numbers produces a empty sensation, like looking into facing mirrors in which one’s image recedes off and way into infinity. Perhaps this is much like the sensation Castle himself must have had. Looking at language from the outside, he was forced instead to create his own. No one will ever fully know or understand the system of meaning that Castle fashioned for himself, but what is evident in his extensive oeuvre is the world it makes for itself, so self-referential and striking in its vision and extensiveness.

Wendy Atwell received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from The University of Texas at San Antonio.

---

Clifford Owens
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through April 3

By Chelsea Beck

Clifford Owens, Photographs with an Audience (New York) (detail), 2008-09, 18 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays, New York.

Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston kicked off with a riveting, socially sticky performance at the opening called Photographs with an Audience, an ongoing project by the artist that engages the audience in the live construction of a series of group portraits. The performance began with a loaded question: “Do you trust me?” Then Owens popped the Veuve Clicquot. An hour later members of the audience were naked, touching and posing. When the Veuve ran out we began to drink the cheap stuff. A sequence of increasingly intimate confessions, propositions and confrontations had brought Owens to tears. Together we had profiled ourselves: anxious, divorced, immigrants, fathers, friends and Mexicans, among other things.

As one attendee told Owens at the artist lecture the following night, “It was like we were giving years’ worth of therapy for free.” Free for Owens perhaps, because he paid no money to the participants, but there is certainly a psychic debt being paid by the artist in order to activate these scenarios. Owens fearlessly choreographs the slippages that occur between our real-time identity (his unfolding identity, with his art dealer and recent gut in tow, as an artist, male, black, father, increasingly tipsy, late for dinner…) and the rigid construction and consumption of a single moment suspended in time by the photographic medium. The friction between the live experience of an event and the mediation of it is exposed with varying degrees of success and sensitivity in the work on view at Owens’ first museum show.

Politics and Emotion (Gregg Bordowitz), 2006, begins with Bordowitz, the artist, activist, and Owens’ former professor, describing his own experience at one of Owens’ performances. With a screaming red background and a steady close-up on Bordowitz's concerned face, it's a video you want to look away from. The viewer listens to this critique while in a room full of work that may or may not suffer from the same pitfalls. Bordowitz explains that humans are born with hang-ups: the job of the artist is to uncover and play in those pre-conscious emotional and physical states we experienced in our infancy. He goes on to describe a past performance in which the artist seemed to vacillate between states of anger and vulnerability.

Perhaps he’s referring to one of the iterations of Performance with an Audience documented in the exhibition, but the photographs, arranged in esoteric configurations, do not show this wide range of emotions. In fact, they are quite dry, functioning more as formal arrangements of bodies and color. Mostly, Owens appears stone-faced, composed, unblinking, legs shoulder-width apart, ready to be documented in perpetuity. The participants take their cues from him and the camera.

Things get even messier and meatier when Owens collaborates with iconic performance artists in series such as Studio Visits, an ongoing project performed at the Studio Museum in 2005 and at Skowhegan in 2004. In the video featuring Carolee Schneemann, there is a three-way power struggle between the two artists and the camera that is belied by the servile action being performed. Schneemann rubs Owens down with lotion and avoids the camera, hiding in plain view, yet Owens’ reverence for his collaborator and his awareness of his place in the performance art constellation ekes out through his body language and poker face. Despite Schneemann’s subservient actions, it is she who dominates Owens. As in many works on display, Owens directs himself in a submissive role.

Furthering the performance art lineage, Owens re-performs work by influential African-American performance artists, such as Lick Piece by Benjamin Patterson (the original is on view in Patterson’s CAMH retrospective upstairs). Owens’ work participates in this history while simultaneously furthering a critical discourse of its documentation and reception. As the artist pointed out repeatedly during the opening weekend events, his dealer was present and works were available. Performance is a business after all––and business is performance. It’s a rare treat to have an artist publicly measure his own insecurities and bravado as well as those of his audience, while agilely slipping from irony to sincerity within a few simple gestures.

Chelsea Beck recently co-curated Weasel at Inman Gallery Annex. She lives and works in Houston, TX.

An Exchange with Sol LeWitt
Cabinet & MASS MoCA
Through March 5 & March 31

By Veronica Roberts

Austin News

Texas News

Austin News

Austin Openings

Austin on View

Austin Closings

San Antonio Openings

San Antonio on View

San Antonio Closings

San Marcos Openings

Houston Openings

Houston on View

Houston Closings

Dallas Openings

Dallas on View

Marfa on View

New York on View

Austin Events

San Antonio Events

Houston Events

Dallas Events

Events