issue
# 67, April 14, 2006 Austin, TX
I. Austin:
Eric Gibbons:
Outer Limits at Art Palace & Fresh Ink:
Flatbed Editions at St. Stephen’s School's Nancy Wilson
Scanlan GalleryII. San Antonio : New Works: 06.1 at Artpace & Jeb Stuart's Page Turner at Sala Diaz
III. Elsewhere: Kara Walker: After the Deluge at The Met & Beck's Futures 2006 at the ICA London
IV. Excerpts: From a Coversation with Ursula Dávila Villa and Carla Herrera-Prats on testsite 06.1: The Burden of Decision
V. Announcements: Easter (Bunnyphonic Style)
I. Austin:
Eric
Gibbons: Outer Limits at Art Palace & Fresh Ink: Flatbed
Editions at St. Stephen’s School's Nancy Wilson Scanlan Gallery
Eric Gibbons: Outer Limits at Art Palace
Closed April 12, 2006
Erin Smith
In Outer Limits, a series of solemn portraits inspired by George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy, Eric Gibbons takes gallery visitors to a place not so far, far away as it once was. This place is more introspective than intergalactic, more sorrowful than stellar, more historic than hi-tech. And, at times, this place is really, really spooky.
In choosing to title the show Outer Limits, Gibbons draws attention to how public iconography—in this case, the stuff of our early ‘80s, lightsaber hallucinatory dreams—evinces a visible, “outer” demise. Given that the ineffable heroic qualities of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo erode with each passing year of mediocre prequels, our interior, psychic homes for these figures erode in tandem. More acutely, for individuals of a certain age, the mental outposts for star-warriors have suffered the years-long assaults of time, adulthood and, judging by Gibbons’ work, a heady disillusionment.
While Gibbons attempts to lighten up the exhibition with pop-artsy titles, like Dutch (all images 2006), a National Geographic-like head-shot of Leia rendered with disquietingly ape-like features, or Bass Solo (see above image), a stylistically similar portrait of Han Solo—this effort seems hollow. Nevertheless, it is perfectly apt for an era that prefers the safety of irony over the exposure of sincerity. The exhibition’s subject matter is a movie series that featured a society of small adorable bears after all—you’d be scoffed at if you took that to heart.
Yet, many of us, during our younger years, took it to heart. Gibbons paintings, mutely troubling, harness the language of Star Wars to tell a much darker tale of personal loss. His portraits reference the solemnity and presence of Byzantine icons, most notable in his re-imaging of the wise and esteemed Obi-Wan Kenobi in Real Guinness, as a nod to the epic importance of these once-closely-held heroes. In the case of Leia (the dominant subject in the exhibition), this adoration seems rooted in unfaltering adolescent lust. Despite the widely variant iterations of her image, she is yearned for in each rendition.
Dang, arguably the loveliest piece in the show, portrays Leia as her ideal. Dang 2 sees her stripped of color and magnetism. This reverence gives way (in images like Dutch, Bass Solo and Super Sweet Sixteen) to Francis Bacon-vintage horror as the characters stare out blindly with vacant eyes and bared teeth, paint drips staining the dark canvas. Many of the works feature a distorted and warped face with aspects of both youth and age, anger and placidity. A number of the subjects bear the mark of a single tear running down their cheek, a motif which accents the artist's self-portrait, as well. Most notably, the markedly spooky and melancholic renderings protect the images from tumbling into the realm of innocuous movie mementos.
Despite the levity of the subject matter and the risk of tying one’s work so closely to a cast of cultural icons, Gibbons effectively integrates the well-known imagery into a challenging exposé of a generation’s struggle with disillusionment. Using a common nostalgic reference point, Outer Limits articulates the universal tragedy of the lost and aging inner child resigned to face the world with irony in lieu of innocence and a cell-phone in her tote bag instead of a lightsaber in her hand.
Erin Smith is trouble. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
Fresh Ink: Flatbed Editions at The Nancy Wilson Scanlan Art Gallery
On view through April 14, 2006
Tobin Levy
A blonde, string bean of a girl, no older than thirteen or fourteen, practices a cheerleading routine in the upper parking lot of St. Stephen’s School. With tireless limbs and tranquil gaze, she is the very picture of blithe youth. How will she respond, I wonder, to sculptor Luis Jimenez’s macabre self-portrait, which is currently on display at St. Stephen’s Nancy Wilson Scanlan Gallery? Jimenez’s Self-Portrait (1996), a color soft-ground etching and aquatint, is a startling depiction of the cruel effects of a lifetime spent in motion. Frenetic lines ravage the artist’s face, leaving a skeleton that offers only hints—a furrowed brow, a wispy, receding hairline, one, seemingly functional eye—that it is somewhere other than in the grave.
Jimenez’s work is not simply a stark reminder of time’s deteriorating effects. As part of Fresh Ink, an eclectic exhibition of prints from Austin’s Flatbed Press, Jimenez's Self-Portrait is also a prime example of the power and versatility of printmaking. Although envisioned for students, the information and images presented defy a demographic. Though the featured works are as disparate in content as they are in technique, quite possibly, only the most philosophical of Fresh Ink’s young viewers will appreciate the exhibitions graver themes.
Dan Rizzie’s spirited Bird on a Limb (2003), a chine colle aquatint and line etching, depicts, just that, a bird on a limb. The bird solid on its perch, appears precarious in its existence due to the same inky black that is essential to the bird’s contour and definition. Minute details such as the bird’s eye are set against a sea of black and, at first glance, those details seem to be in peril of drowning. Their survival is the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artist and a master printer whose control of the medium—the amount of ink applied to the plate, the pressure applied when pulling the image from the engraving—allows for a particularly rich surface infused with subtle greens and yellows. The artist’s reliance on the printer to fully realize his vision is clear, as is the potential for disaster with this type of collaboration. Finding the ideal person to apprehend and execute an artist’s intent has been the hallmark of Flatbed Press, which has paired artists (many of whom had little or no prior experience in a printmaking studio) and master printers for the past fifteen years.
Fresh Ink is supplemented with absorbing literature, provided by Flatbed, on the collaborative process and various printmaking techniques. In the case of Jimenez’s Self-Portrait, the original plate from which the edition was made hangs alongside the print, allowing viewers to study the complex, seemingly counterintuitive art form in which original prints are copies, images are created from indentations, and, in order to realize his or her vision, the artist must work in reverse.
Visitors will also find works by Austin painter Julie Speed and University of Texas at Austin professor Michael Ray Charles. Speed’s menacing and multifarious Women’s Studies (2005), a gouache on chine colle polymer gravure etching, is a choice example of the acute realism for which she is renowned. The two editions of Charles’ provocative (Forever Free) The Fall of a Proper Nigga...Guilty? (2000) feature replicas of the Time Magazine cover that sported OJ Simpson after he was charged with murdering his wife. Mark Smith, Flatbed’s founding co-director explains, “As in all of Michael Ray's works, he’s exploring in these prints, each of which has a different overall color scheme, the theme of racism in America. They were inspired by the Time cover that artificially darkened OJ's skin. He wanted to provide one image each for guilty and not guilty.” Smith also has a piece in the show. On a sidewall, hangs a monotype from the artist's poignant Last Words Suite (2005), in which Smith revisits some of the last words spoken by his late father. In this case, the words “It’s About Quittin’ Time,” which, appear vertically in the middle of the print, signify something much more profound than the end of yet another day’s work.
If you’re familiar at all with Flatbed, you might be inclined, as I initially was, to think Fresh Ink is anything but fresh. The title of the show has been used for two previous Flatbed exhibitions—one at the Austin Museum of Art in the mid ‘90s, and another currated by Jim Edwards last year at the Salt Lake Art Center in Utah. Moreover, many of the works on display have been exhibited and written about countless times. Is it possible to view these prints too many times? In this case, no, not as long as you bring with you fresh eyes and a willingness to explore the processes behind what you see.
Tobin Levy is a writer living and working in Austin.
Eric Gibbons: Outer Limits at Art Palace
Closed April 12, 2006
Erin Smith
In Outer Limits, a series of solemn portraits inspired by George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy, Eric Gibbons takes gallery visitors to a place not so far, far away as it once was. This place is more introspective than intergalactic, more sorrowful than stellar, more historic than hi-tech. And, at times, this place is really, really spooky.
In choosing to title the show Outer Limits, Gibbons draws attention to how public iconography—in this case, the stuff of our early ‘80s, lightsaber hallucinatory dreams—evinces a visible, “outer” demise. Given that the ineffable heroic qualities of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo erode with each passing year of mediocre prequels, our interior, psychic homes for these figures erode in tandem. More acutely, for individuals of a certain age, the mental outposts for star-warriors have suffered the years-long assaults of time, adulthood and, judging by Gibbons’ work, a heady disillusionment.
While Gibbons attempts to lighten up the exhibition with pop-artsy titles, like Dutch (all images 2006), a National Geographic-like head-shot of Leia rendered with disquietingly ape-like features, or Bass Solo (see above image), a stylistically similar portrait of Han Solo—this effort seems hollow. Nevertheless, it is perfectly apt for an era that prefers the safety of irony over the exposure of sincerity. The exhibition’s subject matter is a movie series that featured a society of small adorable bears after all—you’d be scoffed at if you took that to heart.
Yet, many of us, during our younger years, took it to heart. Gibbons paintings, mutely troubling, harness the language of Star Wars to tell a much darker tale of personal loss. His portraits reference the solemnity and presence of Byzantine icons, most notable in his re-imaging of the wise and esteemed Obi-Wan Kenobi in Real Guinness, as a nod to the epic importance of these once-closely-held heroes. In the case of Leia (the dominant subject in the exhibition), this adoration seems rooted in unfaltering adolescent lust. Despite the widely variant iterations of her image, she is yearned for in each rendition.
Dang, arguably the loveliest piece in the show, portrays Leia as her ideal. Dang 2 sees her stripped of color and magnetism. This reverence gives way (in images like Dutch, Bass Solo and Super Sweet Sixteen) to Francis Bacon-vintage horror as the characters stare out blindly with vacant eyes and bared teeth, paint drips staining the dark canvas. Many of the works feature a distorted and warped face with aspects of both youth and age, anger and placidity. A number of the subjects bear the mark of a single tear running down their cheek, a motif which accents the artist's self-portrait, as well. Most notably, the markedly spooky and melancholic renderings protect the images from tumbling into the realm of innocuous movie mementos.
Despite the levity of the subject matter and the risk of tying one’s work so closely to a cast of cultural icons, Gibbons effectively integrates the well-known imagery into a challenging exposé of a generation’s struggle with disillusionment. Using a common nostalgic reference point, Outer Limits articulates the universal tragedy of the lost and aging inner child resigned to face the world with irony in lieu of innocence and a cell-phone in her tote bag instead of a lightsaber in her hand.
Erin Smith is trouble. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
Fresh Ink: Flatbed Editions at The Nancy Wilson Scanlan Art Gallery
On view through April 14, 2006
Tobin Levy
A blonde, string bean of a girl, no older than thirteen or fourteen, practices a cheerleading routine in the upper parking lot of St. Stephen’s School. With tireless limbs and tranquil gaze, she is the very picture of blithe youth. How will she respond, I wonder, to sculptor Luis Jimenez’s macabre self-portrait, which is currently on display at St. Stephen’s Nancy Wilson Scanlan Gallery? Jimenez’s Self-Portrait (1996), a color soft-ground etching and aquatint, is a startling depiction of the cruel effects of a lifetime spent in motion. Frenetic lines ravage the artist’s face, leaving a skeleton that offers only hints—a furrowed brow, a wispy, receding hairline, one, seemingly functional eye—that it is somewhere other than in the grave.
Jimenez’s work is not simply a stark reminder of time’s deteriorating effects. As part of Fresh Ink, an eclectic exhibition of prints from Austin’s Flatbed Press, Jimenez's Self-Portrait is also a prime example of the power and versatility of printmaking. Although envisioned for students, the information and images presented defy a demographic. Though the featured works are as disparate in content as they are in technique, quite possibly, only the most philosophical of Fresh Ink’s young viewers will appreciate the exhibitions graver themes.
Dan Rizzie’s spirited Bird on a Limb (2003), a chine colle aquatint and line etching, depicts, just that, a bird on a limb. The bird solid on its perch, appears precarious in its existence due to the same inky black that is essential to the bird’s contour and definition. Minute details such as the bird’s eye are set against a sea of black and, at first glance, those details seem to be in peril of drowning. Their survival is the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artist and a master printer whose control of the medium—the amount of ink applied to the plate, the pressure applied when pulling the image from the engraving—allows for a particularly rich surface infused with subtle greens and yellows. The artist’s reliance on the printer to fully realize his vision is clear, as is the potential for disaster with this type of collaboration. Finding the ideal person to apprehend and execute an artist’s intent has been the hallmark of Flatbed Press, which has paired artists (many of whom had little or no prior experience in a printmaking studio) and master printers for the past fifteen years.
Fresh Ink is supplemented with absorbing literature, provided by Flatbed, on the collaborative process and various printmaking techniques. In the case of Jimenez’s Self-Portrait, the original plate from which the edition was made hangs alongside the print, allowing viewers to study the complex, seemingly counterintuitive art form in which original prints are copies, images are created from indentations, and, in order to realize his or her vision, the artist must work in reverse.
Visitors will also find works by Austin painter Julie Speed and University of Texas at Austin professor Michael Ray Charles. Speed’s menacing and multifarious Women’s Studies (2005), a gouache on chine colle polymer gravure etching, is a choice example of the acute realism for which she is renowned. The two editions of Charles’ provocative (Forever Free) The Fall of a Proper Nigga...Guilty? (2000) feature replicas of the Time Magazine cover that sported OJ Simpson after he was charged with murdering his wife. Mark Smith, Flatbed’s founding co-director explains, “As in all of Michael Ray's works, he’s exploring in these prints, each of which has a different overall color scheme, the theme of racism in America. They were inspired by the Time cover that artificially darkened OJ's skin. He wanted to provide one image each for guilty and not guilty.” Smith also has a piece in the show. On a sidewall, hangs a monotype from the artist's poignant Last Words Suite (2005), in which Smith revisits some of the last words spoken by his late father. In this case, the words “It’s About Quittin’ Time,” which, appear vertically in the middle of the print, signify something much more profound than the end of yet another day’s work.
If you’re familiar at all with Flatbed, you might be inclined, as I initially was, to think Fresh Ink is anything but fresh. The title of the show has been used for two previous Flatbed exhibitions—one at the Austin Museum of Art in the mid ‘90s, and another currated by Jim Edwards last year at the Salt Lake Art Center in Utah. Moreover, many of the works on display have been exhibited and written about countless times. Is it possible to view these prints too many times? In this case, no, not as long as you bring with you fresh eyes and a willingness to explore the processes behind what you see.
Tobin Levy is a writer living and working in Austin.
|
Art Palace 2109 Cesar Chavez Austin, Texas 512.496.0687 www.artpalacegallery.com Nancy Wilson Scanlan Art Gallery Helm Fine Arts Center St. Stephen’s Episcopal School 2900 Bunny Run Austin, Texas 512-327-1213 ext. 6161 Nancy Wilson Scanlan Art Gallery Flatbed Press 2830 East MLK Jr. Blvd Austin, Texas 512.477.9328 www.flatbedpress.com |
II.San
Antonio: New
Works: 06.1 at Artpace & Jeb Stuart's Page Turner at
Sala Diaz
New Works: 06.1 at Artpace
On view through May 7, 2006
Ben Judson
Edgar Arceneaux’s new installation at Artpace, Alchemy of Comedy… Stupid, attempts to string together narratives that span thousands of years. Arceneaux begins with Moses and follows through with the show's centerpiece: videos of David Alan Grier's comedy routines. Medieval alchemy forms an expansive bridge between these two unlikely characters and the transformative role of the comedian, which Arceneaux presents as analogous to the role of the alchemist, becomes the crux of the work.
A print hanging opposite a multi-channel video projection recounts the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. Author of Egyptian Hermetic texts that medieval alchemists studied, Moses’ symbolic role as father of the alchemists becomes more apparent. In the gallery, Moses' original declaration “Here I am," has been crossed out and replaced with “Who me?”
Like the transposition of “Here I am” and “Who me?” the comedian’s sense of identity is easily subverted through his changing surroundings. The videos of Grier were filmed in three different cities which the artist selected and then modified through lighting, audience placement and video angles. Arceneaux uses environmental variables to destabilize the comedian's identity, offering a new set of constraints that the performer must leverage to transform a skeptical audience. Similarly, the comedic routines deal with painful and uncomfortable subjects, which Grier attempts to recreate into a joyful absurdity. The comedian—like the artist and the alchemist—holds the key to overwhelming the environment, the audience and his subject matter with the sheer force of his personality.
A stark contrast to the haphazard nature of Alchemy of Comedy... Stupid, Augusto di Stefano’s contribution to New Works 06.1 displays precision and austerity. The work's contents suggests a dialectic taking place within them and perhaps even a narrative progression from one piece to the next. Several groups of graphite drawings, composed with differing yet related vocabularies, are separated by three larger-scale paintings. All of the drawings utilize two basic elements: structural forms and faint marks that define boundaries. However, to say that the marks “define boundaries” is an oversimplification. Marks sometimes contradict, anticipate or augment the works’ physical, structural limits.
The structures themselves are formed by small units of tiny bricks and sometimes stones with intermittent, thick dark lines. It would be a mistake to talk of these structures in an architectural sense since they have a stronger relationship to the internal human psyche than to the spaces we inhabit. It's unclear (and perhaps irrelevant) whether the psychological dialogue within the drawings is a product of an internal struggle or a relationship between two individuals. The paintings are more unified and less structural than the drawings and they seem to signify revelatory moments in which the dialogue reaches a breaking point, giving way to spiritual transformation.
Finally, Ranjani Shettar’s installation, I’m no one to tell you, what not to do, deals with the meeting and adaptation of two communities of inherently dissimilar sculptures or "species." One group of sculptures is carved, smoothed and polished Mesquite. These works form several rounded bodies with subtle indentions and protrusions. As a whole, this group has an amorphous feel—as if any member could grow into any particular shape to suit the environment and its placement within the community. The second group consists of entities made of translucent, blue-green silicone rubber, stretched into long, spindly organisms with rhizome-like nodes. This society of sea plants floats through the gallery as it approaches the wooden blobs congregating on the far wall. Simultaneously, the Mesquite carvings move into the air to meet the approaching silicone beings. One of these silicone forms plants itself onto the wall, its placement resembling a manifestation of lichen. Shettar's work suggests mutual adaptation with implications of symbiosis and the profound transformation of two societies learning to share contrasting environments. The walls and open space constitute ecosystems in which each society struggles with a balance between its own nature, the nature of others and the shifting boundaries of an abode.
Ben Judson is a freelance writer living in San Antonio, where he organizes exhibitions and events for Salon Mijangos
Jeb Stuart's Page Turner at Sala Diaz
On view through May 2006
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez
"I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life." ~Luis Buñuel
Jeb Stuart's new works at Sala Diaz invite readers and viewers to peruse a series of paintings through the form of a book. Arising from Stuart’s insipid palette and rudimentary presentation of paintings as books, the paintings in Page Turner evoke thoughts of loss and memory. A dozen corduroy, cloth-bound books with pages of paint neatly bound between their covers contain viscid, rough-edged pastel renderings, but no text. Each book nests in its own small, horizontal, wall-mounted wooden casing. Some of the books were still tied with red string, awaiting tactile engagement from their audience. Ridged textures and appealing fabrics line the covers with warm colors of crimson, coffee, vanilla, grape and lavender.
In Page Turner, Stuart scaled down his work to make everything inviting. These works are meant to be handheld and Stuart excels at creating a cozy space to contemplate each volume. Two soft cushions, custom built by the artists, encourage visitors to lounge and the presentation of the books challenges one’s initial tendency in an art gallery to look but not touch. As such, the gallery transforms into something akin to a kindergarten play room. A mural in washed out, Easter-décor pastels spreads from the northeast corner of the front room in the shape of an open book, making the walls at 517 Stieren appear the color of smoke-stained incisors.
Some of the books feature pale purple and mandarin orange samples of soft, seemingly seismograph-drawn lines, magnified and then pressed into blurred, viscous two-dimensional backgrounds. Stuart loves lines. These thready, malleable elements can be found in the upholstery, like the silent furrows of a beloved record. Winding lines and wordless pages evoke metaphors of memories and linear time frames where episodes of existence become distorted, forgotten or embellished.
Looking at books of one painting after another, a viewer senses that perhaps the story has been either smothered or erased with amnesiac alacrity. By excluding words, Stuart sets the stage for viewers to feel what it's like to be temporarily illiterate. At times viewers might feel the frustration of being unable to read their poetry, or follow their plot.
Perhaps the works are examples of Korsakov's syndrome, an alcohol-induced avenue to amnesia. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, clinical neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes about "individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts." One of his patients is a man who exists physically in the present but mentally incurs a memory cunctation, idling in the glorious year of 1945. Trauma, neurons and misplaced files are culprits in the patients own blank book of a brain. Turning the pages back to Stuart's efforts, all that is missing is what is most imperative. Books infer plots and villains, tragedies and histories. Stuart's painted books offer open terrain. In these imagined constructions, a void emerges much like the "final amnesia" that Buñuel so fervently anticipated.
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is a performance artist and the San Antonio Contributing Editor of ...might be good.
New Works: 06.1 at Artpace
On view through May 7, 2006
Ben Judson
Edgar Arceneaux’s new installation at Artpace, Alchemy of Comedy… Stupid, attempts to string together narratives that span thousands of years. Arceneaux begins with Moses and follows through with the show's centerpiece: videos of David Alan Grier's comedy routines. Medieval alchemy forms an expansive bridge between these two unlikely characters and the transformative role of the comedian, which Arceneaux presents as analogous to the role of the alchemist, becomes the crux of the work.
A print hanging opposite a multi-channel video projection recounts the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. Author of Egyptian Hermetic texts that medieval alchemists studied, Moses’ symbolic role as father of the alchemists becomes more apparent. In the gallery, Moses' original declaration “Here I am," has been crossed out and replaced with “Who me?”
Like the transposition of “Here I am” and “Who me?” the comedian’s sense of identity is easily subverted through his changing surroundings. The videos of Grier were filmed in three different cities which the artist selected and then modified through lighting, audience placement and video angles. Arceneaux uses environmental variables to destabilize the comedian's identity, offering a new set of constraints that the performer must leverage to transform a skeptical audience. Similarly, the comedic routines deal with painful and uncomfortable subjects, which Grier attempts to recreate into a joyful absurdity. The comedian—like the artist and the alchemist—holds the key to overwhelming the environment, the audience and his subject matter with the sheer force of his personality.
A stark contrast to the haphazard nature of Alchemy of Comedy... Stupid, Augusto di Stefano’s contribution to New Works 06.1 displays precision and austerity. The work's contents suggests a dialectic taking place within them and perhaps even a narrative progression from one piece to the next. Several groups of graphite drawings, composed with differing yet related vocabularies, are separated by three larger-scale paintings. All of the drawings utilize two basic elements: structural forms and faint marks that define boundaries. However, to say that the marks “define boundaries” is an oversimplification. Marks sometimes contradict, anticipate or augment the works’ physical, structural limits.
The structures themselves are formed by small units of tiny bricks and sometimes stones with intermittent, thick dark lines. It would be a mistake to talk of these structures in an architectural sense since they have a stronger relationship to the internal human psyche than to the spaces we inhabit. It's unclear (and perhaps irrelevant) whether the psychological dialogue within the drawings is a product of an internal struggle or a relationship between two individuals. The paintings are more unified and less structural than the drawings and they seem to signify revelatory moments in which the dialogue reaches a breaking point, giving way to spiritual transformation.
Finally, Ranjani Shettar’s installation, I’m no one to tell you, what not to do, deals with the meeting and adaptation of two communities of inherently dissimilar sculptures or "species." One group of sculptures is carved, smoothed and polished Mesquite. These works form several rounded bodies with subtle indentions and protrusions. As a whole, this group has an amorphous feel—as if any member could grow into any particular shape to suit the environment and its placement within the community. The second group consists of entities made of translucent, blue-green silicone rubber, stretched into long, spindly organisms with rhizome-like nodes. This society of sea plants floats through the gallery as it approaches the wooden blobs congregating on the far wall. Simultaneously, the Mesquite carvings move into the air to meet the approaching silicone beings. One of these silicone forms plants itself onto the wall, its placement resembling a manifestation of lichen. Shettar's work suggests mutual adaptation with implications of symbiosis and the profound transformation of two societies learning to share contrasting environments. The walls and open space constitute ecosystems in which each society struggles with a balance between its own nature, the nature of others and the shifting boundaries of an abode.
Ben Judson is a freelance writer living in San Antonio, where he organizes exhibitions and events for Salon Mijangos
Jeb Stuart's Page Turner at Sala Diaz
On view through May 2006
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez
"I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life." ~Luis Buñuel
Jeb Stuart's new works at Sala Diaz invite readers and viewers to peruse a series of paintings through the form of a book. Arising from Stuart’s insipid palette and rudimentary presentation of paintings as books, the paintings in Page Turner evoke thoughts of loss and memory. A dozen corduroy, cloth-bound books with pages of paint neatly bound between their covers contain viscid, rough-edged pastel renderings, but no text. Each book nests in its own small, horizontal, wall-mounted wooden casing. Some of the books were still tied with red string, awaiting tactile engagement from their audience. Ridged textures and appealing fabrics line the covers with warm colors of crimson, coffee, vanilla, grape and lavender.
In Page Turner, Stuart scaled down his work to make everything inviting. These works are meant to be handheld and Stuart excels at creating a cozy space to contemplate each volume. Two soft cushions, custom built by the artists, encourage visitors to lounge and the presentation of the books challenges one’s initial tendency in an art gallery to look but not touch. As such, the gallery transforms into something akin to a kindergarten play room. A mural in washed out, Easter-décor pastels spreads from the northeast corner of the front room in the shape of an open book, making the walls at 517 Stieren appear the color of smoke-stained incisors.
Some of the books feature pale purple and mandarin orange samples of soft, seemingly seismograph-drawn lines, magnified and then pressed into blurred, viscous two-dimensional backgrounds. Stuart loves lines. These thready, malleable elements can be found in the upholstery, like the silent furrows of a beloved record. Winding lines and wordless pages evoke metaphors of memories and linear time frames where episodes of existence become distorted, forgotten or embellished.
Looking at books of one painting after another, a viewer senses that perhaps the story has been either smothered or erased with amnesiac alacrity. By excluding words, Stuart sets the stage for viewers to feel what it's like to be temporarily illiterate. At times viewers might feel the frustration of being unable to read their poetry, or follow their plot.
Perhaps the works are examples of Korsakov's syndrome, an alcohol-induced avenue to amnesia. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, clinical neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes about "individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts." One of his patients is a man who exists physically in the present but mentally incurs a memory cunctation, idling in the glorious year of 1945. Trauma, neurons and misplaced files are culprits in the patients own blank book of a brain. Turning the pages back to Stuart's efforts, all that is missing is what is most imperative. Books infer plots and villains, tragedies and histories. Stuart's painted books offer open terrain. In these imagined constructions, a void emerges much like the "final amnesia" that Buñuel so fervently anticipated.
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is a performance artist and the San Antonio Contributing Editor of ...might be good.
|
Artpace
445 North Main Avenue San Antonio, Texas 210.212.4900 www.artpace.org Sala Diaz 517 Stieren San Antonio, Texas 210.455.7034 |
III.
Elsewhere: Kara
Walker: After
the Deluge at
the Met & Beck's Futures
2006 at the ICA London
Kara Walker: After the Deluge at the Met
On view through July 30, 2006
Lyra Kilston
Currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a small exhibition of works both created and selected by Kara Walker titled After the Deluge. Walker was granted free license to draw from the museum’s archives, choosing to present historical works depicting black figures, as well as works that reference the sea. It is still unusual for a museum to allow their archives to be mined in such a manner, but Walker did so with wry and clever skill, including several eighteenth-century silhouettes and epic paintings that depict floods or the Atlantic slave trade.
In a deliberate referral to Hurricane Katrina and the toxic disaster that New Orleans indefinitely remains, Walker has interspersed the historical selections with her own recent works, which continue to present the nightmare of America’s antebellum past in clean black silhouettes. Best known for her use of this elegant Victorian technique, Walker’s brutal vignettes present scenes of carnage, dominance and desire, accentuating racial and sexual stereotypes.
One suite of Walker’s works, Testimony (2005), consists of five lush photogravures of film stills. Shadow puppetry, like the silhouette, is reminiscent of a time of lengthy candlelit parlor games and extreme social repression. Walker chose the photogravure process to enhance the deep, velvety texture of the shadow silhouettes and succeeds in making the imagery look as though it has been unearthed from another era. The usual clarity of her cut paper is now blurred and the depth of the miniature stage sets creates a collection of remarkable images. The suite was drawn from a 2004 commission to produce her first video work for SITE Sante Fe. Fully titled, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress, Burdened by Good Fortune, the story follows the chaos of a white slave revolt against their black overseers. The grainy black-and-white stop-animation depicts a dim world of paper cut-outs being manipulated by the artist’s hands reaching down into the shadowed scene. Walker’s trademark mastery of desire and discomfort may take on a new form in this work, but not surprisingly, all ends disastrously in the violent rebellion.
Hung salon-style, After the Deluge makes for a haunting experience that links the egregious aftermath of Katrina with centuries of racism, re-framing Walker’s work as undeniably contemporary and vital, despite its historical roots.
Lyra Kilston is a writer living in Brooklyn. She studied art criticism at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies. Beck’s Futures 2006 at The Institute of Contemporary Art, London
On view through May 14 2006
Lillian Davies
Since 2000, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London has given its exhibition spaces up to a major German beer company for the annual Beck’s Futures exhibition. In their sixth appearance at ICA, Beck’s boldly wields the powers of selection and promotion, continuing to confuse creative marketing with cultural sponsorship. Founded in 1947 as an alternative space for contemporary art, music, film, lectures and new media, ICA typically seems to take pride in its off-beat program of club nights and exhibitions, art-house cinema and hipster pub. For Beck’s Futures 2006, a research team of eight young writers and curators put together a long list of “the most talented contemporary artists”—all of them UK-based, under the age of 35, and without a major solo exhibition at a UK public venue. This list was pared down to 13 in January by a group of six established artists, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Martin Creed, Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and Gillian Wearing—all of them previous contenders for Tate’s Turner Prize. These six plus a new online public vote will determine the winner in this year’s contest and £20,000 prize.
Despite this elaborate (and very corporate) system of research and selection, the resulting exhibition is delivered without conviction and lacks depth. The exhibition is disappointingly lazy as the works are only asked to match a trendy, marketable image rather than to investigate any serious aesthetic or ethical issues. The show has been installed with superficial attention to fast and literal connections. For example, Pablo Bronstein and Stefan Brüggemann are paired because both have observed that exhibition design affects how we perceive an artist's work. Bronstein’s baroque inspired doorways Display Walls in the Style of an Earlier ICA Refurb (2006), leads in and away from Brüggemann’s Show Titles (2000-ongoing), which consists of 728 proposed exhibition titles presented as vinyl wall text.
Challenging the attempt to create an exhibition based on a contest, some of the most interesting works in Beck's Futures resist comparison and can only be installed on their own in a separate space. For example, Flávia Müller Medeiros’s Inaugurate (2005) stubbornly takes over a black walled space in the first floor galleries. The piece is bitingly simple video and sound collage—George Bush’s inaugural address rapidly delivered by the voice of a used-car dealer on pop radio overwhelms a somber scene from Easy Rider with the president’s devastatingly naive message. The film's soundtrack is silenced, but Jack Nicholson’s line is invoked, "This used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
Reactionary and self-indulgent intoxication permeates the exhibition. A painting by the allegedly telepathic team of Jo Robertson and Lucy Stein (known together as Blood ‘n’ Feathers), The Morning After (2006) is a graphic picture of the sloppy, stripped aftermath of a night of excess. Simon Popper’s more restrained installation, Borromean (2006) stacks 1000 copies of his reprinted version (all of the words in alphabetical order) of that intoxicated day in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Seb Patane invokes hedonism, the occult and nineteenth-century English drug culture in his installation, Absolute Körperkontrolle (2006) loosely based around Aleister Crowley. Sue Tompkins’s text based works, Untitled (2006), are a drunken mimick of Carl Andre poems—cliched, juvenile phrases crookedly typed and haphazardly repeated on carelessly folded gray paper. Even the initially staid work of Richard Hughes becomes hallucinatory, as a concrete pole turns into a network of tiny wild-eyed faces. Each pebble stuck into the once wet ready-mix has been carefully painted with a mischievous expression in Hughes' Long Hard Stare (2006).
Olivia Plender, one of the only artists that seems to recognize the conflict of interest posed by an art prize exhibition sponsored by a major beer company and held in a purportedly independent, alternative arts and events space, references the temperance movement in her latest edition of The Masterpiece, (Vol. 5), a 1950s style comic that she has been working on since 2002. Cleverly mobilizing the aesthetic and ethical tendencies of Oyvind Fahlstrom, Plender has blown up figures and props from her comic for the installation The Road to Ruin (for Oyvind Fahlstrom) (2006). She has also created a small model of a scene from an archive photograph of a nineteenth-century performance promoting the virtues of temperance. Offering the closest thing to a disclaimer for this exhibition, Plender has introduced "Buck’s" (a beverage company with suspicious interests in contemporary art) into her ongoing comic saga and the Fahlstrom-inspired installation, very clearly identifying her villain.
Austin native Lillian Davies studied art history at Columbia University and curating contemporary art at The Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and works in the U.K.
Kara Walker: After the Deluge at the Met
On view through July 30, 2006
Lyra Kilston
Currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a small exhibition of works both created and selected by Kara Walker titled After the Deluge. Walker was granted free license to draw from the museum’s archives, choosing to present historical works depicting black figures, as well as works that reference the sea. It is still unusual for a museum to allow their archives to be mined in such a manner, but Walker did so with wry and clever skill, including several eighteenth-century silhouettes and epic paintings that depict floods or the Atlantic slave trade.
In a deliberate referral to Hurricane Katrina and the toxic disaster that New Orleans indefinitely remains, Walker has interspersed the historical selections with her own recent works, which continue to present the nightmare of America’s antebellum past in clean black silhouettes. Best known for her use of this elegant Victorian technique, Walker’s brutal vignettes present scenes of carnage, dominance and desire, accentuating racial and sexual stereotypes.
One suite of Walker’s works, Testimony (2005), consists of five lush photogravures of film stills. Shadow puppetry, like the silhouette, is reminiscent of a time of lengthy candlelit parlor games and extreme social repression. Walker chose the photogravure process to enhance the deep, velvety texture of the shadow silhouettes and succeeds in making the imagery look as though it has been unearthed from another era. The usual clarity of her cut paper is now blurred and the depth of the miniature stage sets creates a collection of remarkable images. The suite was drawn from a 2004 commission to produce her first video work for SITE Sante Fe. Fully titled, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress, Burdened by Good Fortune, the story follows the chaos of a white slave revolt against their black overseers. The grainy black-and-white stop-animation depicts a dim world of paper cut-outs being manipulated by the artist’s hands reaching down into the shadowed scene. Walker’s trademark mastery of desire and discomfort may take on a new form in this work, but not surprisingly, all ends disastrously in the violent rebellion.
Hung salon-style, After the Deluge makes for a haunting experience that links the egregious aftermath of Katrina with centuries of racism, re-framing Walker’s work as undeniably contemporary and vital, despite its historical roots.
Lyra Kilston is a writer living in Brooklyn. She studied art criticism at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies. Beck’s Futures 2006 at The Institute of Contemporary Art, London
On view through May 14 2006
Lillian Davies
Since 2000, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London has given its exhibition spaces up to a major German beer company for the annual Beck’s Futures exhibition. In their sixth appearance at ICA, Beck’s boldly wields the powers of selection and promotion, continuing to confuse creative marketing with cultural sponsorship. Founded in 1947 as an alternative space for contemporary art, music, film, lectures and new media, ICA typically seems to take pride in its off-beat program of club nights and exhibitions, art-house cinema and hipster pub. For Beck’s Futures 2006, a research team of eight young writers and curators put together a long list of “the most talented contemporary artists”—all of them UK-based, under the age of 35, and without a major solo exhibition at a UK public venue. This list was pared down to 13 in January by a group of six established artists, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Martin Creed, Cornelia Parker, Yinka Shonibare and Gillian Wearing—all of them previous contenders for Tate’s Turner Prize. These six plus a new online public vote will determine the winner in this year’s contest and £20,000 prize.
Despite this elaborate (and very corporate) system of research and selection, the resulting exhibition is delivered without conviction and lacks depth. The exhibition is disappointingly lazy as the works are only asked to match a trendy, marketable image rather than to investigate any serious aesthetic or ethical issues. The show has been installed with superficial attention to fast and literal connections. For example, Pablo Bronstein and Stefan Brüggemann are paired because both have observed that exhibition design affects how we perceive an artist's work. Bronstein’s baroque inspired doorways Display Walls in the Style of an Earlier ICA Refurb (2006), leads in and away from Brüggemann’s Show Titles (2000-ongoing), which consists of 728 proposed exhibition titles presented as vinyl wall text.
Challenging the attempt to create an exhibition based on a contest, some of the most interesting works in Beck's Futures resist comparison and can only be installed on their own in a separate space. For example, Flávia Müller Medeiros’s Inaugurate (2005) stubbornly takes over a black walled space in the first floor galleries. The piece is bitingly simple video and sound collage—George Bush’s inaugural address rapidly delivered by the voice of a used-car dealer on pop radio overwhelms a somber scene from Easy Rider with the president’s devastatingly naive message. The film's soundtrack is silenced, but Jack Nicholson’s line is invoked, "This used to be a helluva good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it."
Reactionary and self-indulgent intoxication permeates the exhibition. A painting by the allegedly telepathic team of Jo Robertson and Lucy Stein (known together as Blood ‘n’ Feathers), The Morning After (2006) is a graphic picture of the sloppy, stripped aftermath of a night of excess. Simon Popper’s more restrained installation, Borromean (2006) stacks 1000 copies of his reprinted version (all of the words in alphabetical order) of that intoxicated day in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Seb Patane invokes hedonism, the occult and nineteenth-century English drug culture in his installation, Absolute Körperkontrolle (2006) loosely based around Aleister Crowley. Sue Tompkins’s text based works, Untitled (2006), are a drunken mimick of Carl Andre poems—cliched, juvenile phrases crookedly typed and haphazardly repeated on carelessly folded gray paper. Even the initially staid work of Richard Hughes becomes hallucinatory, as a concrete pole turns into a network of tiny wild-eyed faces. Each pebble stuck into the once wet ready-mix has been carefully painted with a mischievous expression in Hughes' Long Hard Stare (2006).
Olivia Plender, one of the only artists that seems to recognize the conflict of interest posed by an art prize exhibition sponsored by a major beer company and held in a purportedly independent, alternative arts and events space, references the temperance movement in her latest edition of The Masterpiece, (Vol. 5), a 1950s style comic that she has been working on since 2002. Cleverly mobilizing the aesthetic and ethical tendencies of Oyvind Fahlstrom, Plender has blown up figures and props from her comic for the installation The Road to Ruin (for Oyvind Fahlstrom) (2006). She has also created a small model of a scene from an archive photograph of a nineteenth-century performance promoting the virtues of temperance. Offering the closest thing to a disclaimer for this exhibition, Plender has introduced "Buck’s" (a beverage company with suspicious interests in contemporary art) into her ongoing comic saga and the Fahlstrom-inspired installation, very clearly identifying her villain.
Austin native Lillian Davies studied art history at Columbia University and curating contemporary art at The Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and works in the U.K.
|
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 212.535.7710 www.metmuseum.org Institute of Contemporary Arts The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH. 020.7930.3647 www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm |
IV.
Excerpts:
From
a Coversation with Ursula Dávila Villa and Carla Herrera-Prats
on testsite 06.1: The Burden of Decision
Last Sunday, April 9, testsite 06.1: The Burden of Decision opened at Fluent~Collaborative. From 1 to 5 p.m., viewers were invited to attend the exhibition, which consists of two exercises on collaboration, one presented in testsite's exhibition space, the other collected in a printed document. Directly following, testsite collaborators Ursula Dávila Villa and Carla Herrera-Prats sat down for a public conversation moderated by Caitlin Haskell. Below, we have excerpted portions of that conversation.
testsite’s mission, which Carla and Ursula discuss as a fundamental component of their collaborative project, is as follows: “testsite, a project of Fluent~Collaborative, explores new ideas and works-in-progress in contemporary art. In a domestic setting, testsite situates itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home. Collaborators, usually a writer and a visual artist, are invited to creates parallel experimental projects that are germinating, or at a stage of fruitful exploration and healthy doubt." The Burden of Decision will remain on view through May 7, 2006.
Caitlin Haskell: So, you were invited here to do a collaboration and decided early on that you were going to do a collaboration about collaboration—a very self-reflective project. I guess this might be an appropriate time, then, to introduce the quote driving your methodology. It comes from Alexander Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, and there’s a quote by Lawrence Weiner embedded within this quote: "As Weiner stated later, 'The person who was receiving the painting would say what size they wanted, what color they wanted, how big a removal they wanted.' The Propeller paintings thus undermined their own authority by inviting and then incorporating that of the viewer or, as the case may be, the patron. In this exchange among artist, art object, and viewer, the sense of a single authority or signatory dissolves altogether, placing the burden of decision-making on the collector.” That quote brings out a lot of different themes that you’re working with: decision-making, collaboration, collecting, working with a collection…
Carla Herrera-Prats: Yes, but I think, in fact, the idea of working on collaboration started much more with the mission statement of testsite. That’s another quote that we include in the document, that is somehow at the root of the game. To participate in testsite, to sort of bring together an artist and a curator in order to collaborate, those are the concerns that our exercises contain. So the fact of working on collaboration and having a methodology about collaboration I think answered the mission statement of testsite. And then the quote by Alberro is something that somehow fit into what we were invited to investigate here. (To Ursula) But do you want to talk more about that?
Ursula Dávila Villa: I want to make a point about the mission statement of testsite. As a curator, when you are offered a testsite and you have to explain to someone, to an artist, what testsite is, there’s not an easy answer, I have say. It’s a bit tricky. Because not every artists can work in testsite's space. It has to be a specific kind of artist that can come here and feel comfortable working with this space. Carla asked me “So, how have others been collaborating?” and we did some research. The way that collaboration was interpreted was completely different in every exercise. There are some similarities and we can group them—if you go into the archive that’s online (www.fluentcollab.org/testsite) you will see that there are some very interesting ways of understanding what collaboration is. So, based on that, we decided “why don’t we forget about who’s the artists and who’s the curator” and we participated at every single level of the process of conceptualizing the piece, writing the text, and producing it. This was the first time for me (a curator) and the first time for Carla (an artist) to act as the other. It was challenging.
On the Alberro quote, it happened that Carla and I were reading that book at the same time. So before coming to testsite, we were discussing the way Lawrence Weiner was collaborating with the recipient. This quote refers to a very specific historical moment in Weiner’s career when he was doing the Propeller paintings. And he’s discussing the patron as the other element within a collaboration. But later on in his career, that patron turns into a receiver. The idea of having a patron as collector somehow is not important in this case, it is important, that he was receiving the work as a two-way site, and that’s where Carla and I focused our attention.
CH: Talking to Carla and Ursula earlier this week, it was interesting for me to learn that they felt that this methodology, this quote, was the most important part of their project, but that they could have substituted any body of work from Laurence Miller's library for their study in Exercise 1. It didn't have to be the Lawrence Weiner books that we’re looking at the acknowledgements from, it could have been…
CHP: ...the flowers of Texas. The fact that we included Lawrence Weiner was somehow an answer to what this archive contains. This type of material, books and artwork, is the second largest collection [in the library we were working with at Fluent]. It was kind of logical to use that big chunk of the archive for our work because it just happened that we were studying this kind of collaborative methodology and Lawrence Weiner was a very important element at Fluent. It was tempting… it was tempting not to work with Weiner because it was really confusing. Weiner's work is still something that I don’t think that I can do justice to as a historian because I’m not one. An appropriation was not something we wanted to do either because the piece is not about Lawrence Weiner’s work, it’s about collaboration. ...
UDV: Also, I felt that the conversations we had with the contributors to testsite and Fluent Collaborative influenced us to take this position. It was based on talking to Rebecca (Fluent Collaborative’s librarian, Rebecca Roberts) who is here and who I actually want to acknowledge. Rebecca helped us through the library. And Risa (testsite’s coordinator, Risa Puleo) who also helped us a lot and Laurence Miller, these three people gave us information that led us to decide to work with Lawrence Weiner. Their influence is part of the text that is included in the document in Exercise Two.
CH: In your minds, is there an overlap between Exercise One, the documents that are collected on display and Exercise Two, your printed document? How do you see them overlapping?
CHP: I think there are two different approaches to collaboration here. In the acknowledgments (Exercise One) we decided to work with books on or by Laurence Weiner, so we collected all the books with acknowledgements out of the library at Fluent Collaborative. There are 20 books. And we were really lucky because we could fit them all in the room. (laughs) So Exercise One is all the books that contain an acknowledgment and in Exercise Two we wanted to … make an artists book or a research book of our own about Laurence Weiner. It’s an effort that includes more than one person.
In writing a book, there is a huge amount of people implicated in the work. But usually authorship ends up being assigned to one single person. And, we wanted to see how the efforts of these other people are indicated, besides the credits which are institutional—like you acknowledge the photographer. But, how do you choose the people that you think enough of to thank and to include in the endeavor of the work? In Exercise Two what we tried to do was to invite the people that work in teststite to make a piece together, which is this document.
I think, in a little way, it shows the dynamics of how testsite works. It’s a very familiar space, a very intimate space and the interests of the people that run this space are very close to Laurence Weiner. Risa presented a curatorial proposal about him even before inviting us. Laurence Miller did the first show of Laurence Weiner’s work in Spanish. Rebecca classified all the materials by Laurence Weiner in the library. Conversations with these three really helped us shape our thinking process. Exercise Two was a way to bring that together.
UDV: But, also, I would say that there’s another layer in there. The primary aim of Exercise One was not to just read all the acknowledgements. There’s a trace of how Lawrence Weiner was constructed. You can see that Alice Zimmerman (Weiner’s partner) becomes Alice Weiner. You can see Benjamin Buchloh’s relationship to Weiner, you can see the figures who have worked around Weiner. The acknowledgements don’t tell you if they are friends or not friends, but there are specific lines that detail relationships. For me, that tells a lot about the human element. It has nothing to do with art history, it has to do with humans and with feelings and with care. And I feel that Exercise Two has a lot to do with that as well. It brings out the human element that sometimes disappears in institutions.
Last Sunday, April 9, testsite 06.1: The Burden of Decision opened at Fluent~Collaborative. From 1 to 5 p.m., viewers were invited to attend the exhibition, which consists of two exercises on collaboration, one presented in testsite's exhibition space, the other collected in a printed document. Directly following, testsite collaborators Ursula Dávila Villa and Carla Herrera-Prats sat down for a public conversation moderated by Caitlin Haskell. Below, we have excerpted portions of that conversation.
testsite’s mission, which Carla and Ursula discuss as a fundamental component of their collaborative project, is as follows: “testsite, a project of Fluent~Collaborative, explores new ideas and works-in-progress in contemporary art. In a domestic setting, testsite situates itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home. Collaborators, usually a writer and a visual artist, are invited to creates parallel experimental projects that are germinating, or at a stage of fruitful exploration and healthy doubt." The Burden of Decision will remain on view through May 7, 2006.
Caitlin Haskell: So, you were invited here to do a collaboration and decided early on that you were going to do a collaboration about collaboration—a very self-reflective project. I guess this might be an appropriate time, then, to introduce the quote driving your methodology. It comes from Alexander Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, and there’s a quote by Lawrence Weiner embedded within this quote: "As Weiner stated later, 'The person who was receiving the painting would say what size they wanted, what color they wanted, how big a removal they wanted.' The Propeller paintings thus undermined their own authority by inviting and then incorporating that of the viewer or, as the case may be, the patron. In this exchange among artist, art object, and viewer, the sense of a single authority or signatory dissolves altogether, placing the burden of decision-making on the collector.” That quote brings out a lot of different themes that you’re working with: decision-making, collaboration, collecting, working with a collection…
Carla Herrera-Prats: Yes, but I think, in fact, the idea of working on collaboration started much more with the mission statement of testsite. That’s another quote that we include in the document, that is somehow at the root of the game. To participate in testsite, to sort of bring together an artist and a curator in order to collaborate, those are the concerns that our exercises contain. So the fact of working on collaboration and having a methodology about collaboration I think answered the mission statement of testsite. And then the quote by Alberro is something that somehow fit into what we were invited to investigate here. (To Ursula) But do you want to talk more about that?
Ursula Dávila Villa: I want to make a point about the mission statement of testsite. As a curator, when you are offered a testsite and you have to explain to someone, to an artist, what testsite is, there’s not an easy answer, I have say. It’s a bit tricky. Because not every artists can work in testsite's space. It has to be a specific kind of artist that can come here and feel comfortable working with this space. Carla asked me “So, how have others been collaborating?” and we did some research. The way that collaboration was interpreted was completely different in every exercise. There are some similarities and we can group them—if you go into the archive that’s online (www.fluentcollab.org/testsite) you will see that there are some very interesting ways of understanding what collaboration is. So, based on that, we decided “why don’t we forget about who’s the artists and who’s the curator” and we participated at every single level of the process of conceptualizing the piece, writing the text, and producing it. This was the first time for me (a curator) and the first time for Carla (an artist) to act as the other. It was challenging.
On the Alberro quote, it happened that Carla and I were reading that book at the same time. So before coming to testsite, we were discussing the way Lawrence Weiner was collaborating with the recipient. This quote refers to a very specific historical moment in Weiner’s career when he was doing the Propeller paintings. And he’s discussing the patron as the other element within a collaboration. But later on in his career, that patron turns into a receiver. The idea of having a patron as collector somehow is not important in this case, it is important, that he was receiving the work as a two-way site, and that’s where Carla and I focused our attention.
CH: Talking to Carla and Ursula earlier this week, it was interesting for me to learn that they felt that this methodology, this quote, was the most important part of their project, but that they could have substituted any body of work from Laurence Miller's library for their study in Exercise 1. It didn't have to be the Lawrence Weiner books that we’re looking at the acknowledgements from, it could have been…
CHP: ...the flowers of Texas. The fact that we included Lawrence Weiner was somehow an answer to what this archive contains. This type of material, books and artwork, is the second largest collection [in the library we were working with at Fluent]. It was kind of logical to use that big chunk of the archive for our work because it just happened that we were studying this kind of collaborative methodology and Lawrence Weiner was a very important element at Fluent. It was tempting… it was tempting not to work with Weiner because it was really confusing. Weiner's work is still something that I don’t think that I can do justice to as a historian because I’m not one. An appropriation was not something we wanted to do either because the piece is not about Lawrence Weiner’s work, it’s about collaboration. ...
UDV: Also, I felt that the conversations we had with the contributors to testsite and Fluent Collaborative influenced us to take this position. It was based on talking to Rebecca (Fluent Collaborative’s librarian, Rebecca Roberts) who is here and who I actually want to acknowledge. Rebecca helped us through the library. And Risa (testsite’s coordinator, Risa Puleo) who also helped us a lot and Laurence Miller, these three people gave us information that led us to decide to work with Lawrence Weiner. Their influence is part of the text that is included in the document in Exercise Two.
CH: In your minds, is there an overlap between Exercise One, the documents that are collected on display and Exercise Two, your printed document? How do you see them overlapping?
CHP: I think there are two different approaches to collaboration here. In the acknowledgments (Exercise One) we decided to work with books on or by Laurence Weiner, so we collected all the books with acknowledgements out of the library at Fluent Collaborative. There are 20 books. And we were really lucky because we could fit them all in the room. (laughs) So Exercise One is all the books that contain an acknowledgment and in Exercise Two we wanted to … make an artists book or a research book of our own about Laurence Weiner. It’s an effort that includes more than one person.
In writing a book, there is a huge amount of people implicated in the work. But usually authorship ends up being assigned to one single person. And, we wanted to see how the efforts of these other people are indicated, besides the credits which are institutional—like you acknowledge the photographer. But, how do you choose the people that you think enough of to thank and to include in the endeavor of the work? In Exercise Two what we tried to do was to invite the people that work in teststite to make a piece together, which is this document.
I think, in a little way, it shows the dynamics of how testsite works. It’s a very familiar space, a very intimate space and the interests of the people that run this space are very close to Laurence Weiner. Risa presented a curatorial proposal about him even before inviting us. Laurence Miller did the first show of Laurence Weiner’s work in Spanish. Rebecca classified all the materials by Laurence Weiner in the library. Conversations with these three really helped us shape our thinking process. Exercise Two was a way to bring that together.
UDV: But, also, I would say that there’s another layer in there. The primary aim of Exercise One was not to just read all the acknowledgements. There’s a trace of how Lawrence Weiner was constructed. You can see that Alice Zimmerman (Weiner’s partner) becomes Alice Weiner. You can see Benjamin Buchloh’s relationship to Weiner, you can see the figures who have worked around Weiner. The acknowledgements don’t tell you if they are friends or not friends, but there are specific lines that detail relationships. For me, that tells a lot about the human element. It has nothing to do with art history, it has to do with humans and with feelings and with care. And I feel that Exercise Two has a lot to do with that as well. It brings out the human element that sometimes disappears in institutions.
|
testsite
is a Project of Fluent~Collaborative
502 W. 33rd Street Austin, Texas 512.453.3199 www.fluentcollab.org/testsite |
V.
Announcements:
Easter (Bunnyphonic Style)
Greetings from the Art Bunny. I have packed a sugary basket of riveting events, curious invitations and tempting topics to keep buck-toothed talking long after Easter morning.
If you're hopping around San Antonio tonight, April 14, Finesilver Gallery offers a peek into the slippery world of Sincerity. Glasstire Editor, Rachel Cook, curated the show to answer the gnawing question: "Can a trite moment possess authenticity?" The answer awaits at the opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Artists sure to pack a heartfelt punch include Berlin-based Borjan Sarcevic, Houston's Katrina Moorehead and recent Artpace resident, Harrell Fletcher. Sincerity saturates Finesilver Gallery until June 26.
Also this evening, for eager bunnies, the Southwest School of Art & Craft opens its All School Exhibition from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibition will feature ceramics, printmaking, jewelry, book arts and chocolate eggs – ah, just kidding about the chocolate. Tomorrow, Saturday, from 7 to 11 p.m., 180 Grams record store in San Antonio (2120 San Pedro – down the street from Banana's Billiards) will host a graffiti art opening. Artists Wendy Kimura & Matthew Rodriguez coat the cozy walls of San Antonio's uber-hipster record store with new delinquent creations.
While you're looking for interesting treats in the River City, mark your calendars for the next Artpace Brown Bag Lunch with the artists in residence: Ranjani Shettar, Augusto Di Stefano and Edgar Arceneaux.
For $6.50 you can tour the New Works exhibit and then nibble on some almond biscotti from Sip! Or carrots from Linda Pace's Garden! Is this not America?! Call Artpace for a menu or to make reservations for Wednesday, April 19 at noon. Finally, Unit B will close Reconstructing the Mundane on May 5th (see ...mbg issue 66). Unit B's new show will emerge like a tender jonquil May 19th with work from artist/prankster Gary Sweeney, Chicagoan Jonathan Russell and fellow Illinois artist Chris Wildrick.
Still searching for more treats to fill your bottomless art basket? Richie Budd brings sculpted surprises with his solo show at Tortilleria La Popular, a new contemporary art haven in Southtown. What's Going on behind What's Going on features sculptures, live performance and photographs on April 21st from 7 to 9 p.m. Look for the cactus signage at 1415 South Presa in San Antonio. Flight Gallery hits the pavement, ahem, the bunny trail, this week to look for a new place to call home. Owner and Curator Justin Parr asks for your suggestions on cheap, unconventional spaces in South Texas to put on shows, drink beer and make vinyl sticker love. He also wants to organize a short bus to Marfa as a rockin' and rollin' art show on steel belted radials. Um, you're like, totally stoked, so send us an email at info@fluentcollab.org if you're interested and we'll egg him on.
Back to Easter in East Austin, Risa Puleo's brand new space The Donkey Show opens with Christening Friday, April 21, from 6 to 9 p.m. Ali Fitzgerald and Cruz Ortiz are sure to transgress some bounderies with their donkey show-inspired works. Later that weekend, you're invited to witness The Moment That Changed My Life Forever. Hmm, was it the first time I laid an egg? No! But perhaps artist and former co-director of the Fresh Up Club Peat Duggins can help us find that moment. The show opens April 22 at 8 p.m. at Art Palace and promises an installation full of "doomed history and politics." Mmmmm, sounds toothsome. The show closes May 31.
Run Bunny Run! Club Arthouse lets the kids take center stage at the Nancy Scanlan Gallery at St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Synesthesia opens Friday, April 28 from 6 to 8 p.m. Fourteen high school students offer their visual versions of songs and sounds. Art awaits you at 2900 Bunny Run and don't piddle around 'cause it closes Sunday! For bigger bunnies, check out Luminosity, the culmination of a semester long project by Dr. Samantha Krukowski of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at UT. Luminosity showcases experiments in architecture and video on Saturday, April 29 beginning at sunset. Students will insert site-specific, video installations onto the backdrop of the three main buildings in the Jesse H. Jones Communications Complex. Should be ideal for enjoying the fresh spring evenings, but watch out for the skeeters.
Women & Their Work keeps the grass greener with two days of theatrical performances by Natasha Tsakos. UpWake Part III at the Boyd Vance Theater at The Carver Museum and Cultural Center, 1165 Angelina Street in Austin. Tickets sell for $15 at the door or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org to purchase online. The show starts 8 p.m. on Friday, April 21 and Saturday, April 22. Tsakos’ work includes a fusion of clowning, movement, detailed soundtracks and 3-D animation custom made for the stage.
As the semester winds down, you can check out the latest crop of MFA students at yet another opening reception tomorrow night, April 15th, from 6-9pm. Nathan Spondike, Jared Steffenson, Brant Watson, Eric Benson and Thuy-Van Vu display their thesis works in part 2 of the MFA shows at Creative Research Laboratory.
On to peeps and lectures. The Blanton Museum of Art offers a free symposium on “Latin American art in a Global Context” as part of the Grand Re-opening Gala April 27 to 29. For information and registration, email latinam@blantonmuseum.org. Sin Título 2006 invites curators, moderators and directors from the Tate Gallery to the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Topics include integration and separation in the Latin art world.
In Houston, stop by the Lawndale Arts Center on April 22 at 2pm for panel discussion covering the “future of alternative art spaces and the importance of artist-driven curatorial practice.” Panelists include Fluent~Collaborative Co-Founder Regine Basha, Michelle Grabner, the ever-popular Harrel Fletcher, Michael Peranteau, Robert Pruitt and Jeff Ward.
Finally, Joseph Havel gives a free artist’s lecture at MFAH April 20 at 6 p.m. at the Caroline Wiess Law Building (Brown Auditorium: 1001 Bissonnet). If you’ve ever wondered about topiary sculptures and what goes on in the First Ladies’ Garden at the White House, then this is your basket.
Happy trails, until we meet again…
Greetings from the Art Bunny. I have packed a sugary basket of riveting events, curious invitations and tempting topics to keep buck-toothed talking long after Easter morning.
If you're hopping around San Antonio tonight, April 14, Finesilver Gallery offers a peek into the slippery world of Sincerity. Glasstire Editor, Rachel Cook, curated the show to answer the gnawing question: "Can a trite moment possess authenticity?" The answer awaits at the opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Artists sure to pack a heartfelt punch include Berlin-based Borjan Sarcevic, Houston's Katrina Moorehead and recent Artpace resident, Harrell Fletcher. Sincerity saturates Finesilver Gallery until June 26.
Also this evening, for eager bunnies, the Southwest School of Art & Craft opens its All School Exhibition from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibition will feature ceramics, printmaking, jewelry, book arts and chocolate eggs – ah, just kidding about the chocolate. Tomorrow, Saturday, from 7 to 11 p.m., 180 Grams record store in San Antonio (2120 San Pedro – down the street from Banana's Billiards) will host a graffiti art opening. Artists Wendy Kimura & Matthew Rodriguez coat the cozy walls of San Antonio's uber-hipster record store with new delinquent creations.
While you're looking for interesting treats in the River City, mark your calendars for the next Artpace Brown Bag Lunch with the artists in residence: Ranjani Shettar, Augusto Di Stefano and Edgar Arceneaux.
For $6.50 you can tour the New Works exhibit and then nibble on some almond biscotti from Sip! Or carrots from Linda Pace's Garden! Is this not America?! Call Artpace for a menu or to make reservations for Wednesday, April 19 at noon. Finally, Unit B will close Reconstructing the Mundane on May 5th (see ...mbg issue 66). Unit B's new show will emerge like a tender jonquil May 19th with work from artist/prankster Gary Sweeney, Chicagoan Jonathan Russell and fellow Illinois artist Chris Wildrick.
Still searching for more treats to fill your bottomless art basket? Richie Budd brings sculpted surprises with his solo show at Tortilleria La Popular, a new contemporary art haven in Southtown. What's Going on behind What's Going on features sculptures, live performance and photographs on April 21st from 7 to 9 p.m. Look for the cactus signage at 1415 South Presa in San Antonio. Flight Gallery hits the pavement, ahem, the bunny trail, this week to look for a new place to call home. Owner and Curator Justin Parr asks for your suggestions on cheap, unconventional spaces in South Texas to put on shows, drink beer and make vinyl sticker love. He also wants to organize a short bus to Marfa as a rockin' and rollin' art show on steel belted radials. Um, you're like, totally stoked, so send us an email at info@fluentcollab.org if you're interested and we'll egg him on.
Back to Easter in East Austin, Risa Puleo's brand new space The Donkey Show opens with Christening Friday, April 21, from 6 to 9 p.m. Ali Fitzgerald and Cruz Ortiz are sure to transgress some bounderies with their donkey show-inspired works. Later that weekend, you're invited to witness The Moment That Changed My Life Forever. Hmm, was it the first time I laid an egg? No! But perhaps artist and former co-director of the Fresh Up Club Peat Duggins can help us find that moment. The show opens April 22 at 8 p.m. at Art Palace and promises an installation full of "doomed history and politics." Mmmmm, sounds toothsome. The show closes May 31.
Run Bunny Run! Club Arthouse lets the kids take center stage at the Nancy Scanlan Gallery at St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Synesthesia opens Friday, April 28 from 6 to 8 p.m. Fourteen high school students offer their visual versions of songs and sounds. Art awaits you at 2900 Bunny Run and don't piddle around 'cause it closes Sunday! For bigger bunnies, check out Luminosity, the culmination of a semester long project by Dr. Samantha Krukowski of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at UT. Luminosity showcases experiments in architecture and video on Saturday, April 29 beginning at sunset. Students will insert site-specific, video installations onto the backdrop of the three main buildings in the Jesse H. Jones Communications Complex. Should be ideal for enjoying the fresh spring evenings, but watch out for the skeeters.
Women & Their Work keeps the grass greener with two days of theatrical performances by Natasha Tsakos. UpWake Part III at the Boyd Vance Theater at The Carver Museum and Cultural Center, 1165 Angelina Street in Austin. Tickets sell for $15 at the door or visit www.womenandtheirwork.org to purchase online. The show starts 8 p.m. on Friday, April 21 and Saturday, April 22. Tsakos’ work includes a fusion of clowning, movement, detailed soundtracks and 3-D animation custom made for the stage.
As the semester winds down, you can check out the latest crop of MFA students at yet another opening reception tomorrow night, April 15th, from 6-9pm. Nathan Spondike, Jared Steffenson, Brant Watson, Eric Benson and Thuy-Van Vu display their thesis works in part 2 of the MFA shows at Creative Research Laboratory.
On to peeps and lectures. The Blanton Museum of Art offers a free symposium on “Latin American art in a Global Context” as part of the Grand Re-opening Gala April 27 to 29. For information and registration, email latinam@blantonmuseum.org. Sin Título 2006 invites curators, moderators and directors from the Tate Gallery to the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. Topics include integration and separation in the Latin art world.
In Houston, stop by the Lawndale Arts Center on April 22 at 2pm for panel discussion covering the “future of alternative art spaces and the importance of artist-driven curatorial practice.” Panelists include Fluent~Collaborative Co-Founder Regine Basha, Michelle Grabner, the ever-popular Harrel Fletcher, Michael Peranteau, Robert Pruitt and Jeff Ward.
Finally, Joseph Havel gives a free artist’s lecture at MFAH April 20 at 6 p.m. at the Caroline Wiess Law Building (Brown Auditorium: 1001 Bissonnet). If you’ve ever wondered about topiary sculptures and what goes on in the First Ladies’ Garden at the White House, then this is your basket.
Happy trails, until we meet again…
|
Finesilver
Gallery
www.finesilver.com Southwest School of Art and Craft www.swschool.org 180 Grams ctxgrooves.com/180gram.html Artpace www.artpace.org Unit B (Gallery) www.unitbgallery.com Tortilleria La Popular 1415 South Presa Flight Gallery flight-gallery.com The Donkey Show www.thedonkeyshow.org Art Palace www.artpalacegallery.com Arthouse www.arthousetexas.org Luminosity http://archinect.com/events Women and Their Work www.womenandtheirwork.org George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center www.ci.austin.tx.us/carver Creative Research Laboratory uts.cc.utexas.edu/~crlab The Blanton Museum www.blantonmuseum.org Lawndale Art Center www.lawndaleartcenter.org The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston www.mfah.org |
Image
courtesy of the artist and Art Palace.
Detail of Eric Gibbons, Bass Solo, 2006.
Acrylic on Canvas.
.
Detail of Eric Gibbons, Bass Solo, 2006.
Acrylic on Canvas.
.
Fluent~Collaborative
is a speculative non-profit initiative established to increase
awareness of new developments in the contemporary visual arts and the
ideas and issues that inform contemporary culture. We are a place where
a critical and creative mix of visual, media and performance artists join
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outside of the arts to enable a new awareness and sophisticated discernment
of changing thought and culture around the world.
...might be good is a contemporary art biweekly produced by Fluent~Collaborative that reaches over 4,000 international subscribers via email and at our website: www.fluentcollab.org/mbg. An independent voice based out of Austin and San Antonio, with a team of writers covering exhibitions from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, …might be good encourages close looking, smart writing and brave thinking about art.
Situating
itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency
program and a private home,testsite
explores new ideas in contemporary art through the initiation of collaborations.
An artist and a writer are invited to create an experimental project that
develops out of conversation, fruitful exploration and healthy doubt.
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