Emvergeoning

Artpace and Finesilver crossed the proverbial streams by each opening a Jesse Amado exhibit last week, on the 8th and 9th respectively. The show at Artpace is a kind of mini-retrospective or survey of his work, while the Finesilver show is more like an upscale studio visit — from what I understand, it was not curated, and is a way of letting the artist show new work that Artpace doesn’t have the space for. The Finesilver show thus has the kind of loose, work-in-progress feel that Artpace residencies sometimes produce (empty cardboard boxes sitting in the corner, pieces hung with scotch tape).

The only common elements are recent compressed cellulose sponge pieces such as the one pictured here. Still using his signature Helvetica typeface (like design group Experimental Jet Set, Amado displays an unusual loyalty to Helvetica), Amado spells out the dots and dashes of a Morse-coded message. In other pieces, he uses the same medium to write out “death,” “desire,” and “beauty.” (Not coincidentally, I’m sure, the title of this Morse code piece is “Death is the Mother of Beauty” — a reference to a Wallace Stevens poem: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires.”)

At Artpace, the work spans a broad range of styles from Amado’s early felt cones (inspired by Joseph Beuys) to the stacked letters to the sponge pieces. Here we see him critique the exploitation of Joseph Beuys in a fashion magazine spread, while at Finesilver we see him echo Warhol’s secularization of The Last Supper. At one moment he references poetry about the ultimate meaning of death and sacrifice, at another he seems to use text as an almost arbitrary medium. Seeing these shows simultaneously (and hearing him talk about the work at Artpace) has brought to the forefront Amado’s schizophrenic ideas of art being just a “good picture” on the one hand and a philosophical statement on the other. It’s a schizophrenia he shares with much of the art world, trying to be decadent and austere, flippant and sincere.

I can’t tell if it’s a commentary on human nature or a defense mechanism.

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Stare at this drawing by Leon Ferrari for a few minutes. Just stare at it until your pupils become puddles of ink dipped, tiny tornadoes. Somehow this drawing punctures holes into every big problem I think I have these days. It’s complicated yet pellucid. Things get tangled up until you look back at your circuitous path and wonder, what have I been doing? How did I get here? Dude, where’s my carcass? Then a security guard tells you to stop loitering in the wonderful drawing room at the Blanton. Bummer. The Gego drawings in there are magnificent and this Ferrari piece offers insight into texts as they deteriorate into schizophrenic strings of indecipherable subtext. Yeah, you heard me the first time. And if you haven’t been to the Blanton yet, take a drive up 281 so you can see all the miniature ponies along the way!!

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I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear that the Artpace web site is up and running, just in time for the opening of the Jesse Amado show and Randy Wallace’s WindowWorks installation. I think I’ll celebrate by revisiting some Felix Gonzalez-Torres work. It was good to see a survey of Amado’s art, but I’m more taken with Randy Wallace’s Unsettlement, especially in light of his show at Sala Diaz not so long ago. Wallace’s work has a psychological impact that is somehow both crude and nuanced. More on that once I’ve had some time to reflect…

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I just finished hanging Marlys Dietricks new show at the fl!ght gallery a couple of minutes ago, and in true emvergeoning style, I thought it might be good to write a short response to a show in my own space.  (please excuse unnecessary or lacking punctuation) .

First I’ll start by saying that I’m extremely nervous, not for marlys but for myself.  This show is downright amazing.   Her frames look extremely well crafted and the way the pieces are hung within the glass is exquisite.  She throws in a casual latin title intelligently made using the creatures origins.  A sheet to break it all down is available at the entrance to the gallery.  The creatures themselves come from very interesting origins, she told me that in her quest to finish this work she would throw out a piece the second it started looking like something in our recognizable realm.  I’m torn to several of the smaller drawings.  They look suspiciously like an amalgamation of a dream I wanted to have when I was 14.   I’m quite excited about this show.  I know Marlys hasnt shown her work in over 12 years.  It totally wants to blow you away.  The giant drawings elucidate the hours of work that must have gone into each one..  ok, thats all i have time for now, back to speaking online french. désolé d’entendre parler de vous et de votre jeu emvergeoning de boule sur des roues.

heres an image from the show. 

The opening for this show is Second Saturday February Tenth.  This also coincides with the reopening of one9zero6 Gallery in the same building on South Flores(1906). one9zer06 will host Mollie Gates as they reopen this month.  

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Jed Perl is on a tear. His latest fulmination (subscription required) in The New Republic lashes out at John Currin (”what Currin doesn’t know about figure painting could fill volumes”), Kiki Smith (”whose dumb-beyond-belief Whitney show was full of the sort of neo-hippie baubles I wouldn’t buy at Target for $14.95″), Fernando Botero (whose recent paintings “have as much sense of form and structure as mushy brown gravy poured over marzipan”), and a host of others. What he’s so worked up about is what he calls “laissez-faire aesthetics” which he claims “violates the very principle of art.” And he has a point.

I don’t follow the art world closely enough to address his specific attacks on their merits, but I think the larger themes of the essay are worth grappling with. The crux of his argument is that high art is by its very nature exclusive and esoteric. The mingling of high art with pop culture is therefore an unholy union which threatens to turn museums into expensive shopping malls. But his take on this situation is more nuanced than the tired lamentations about pop art we’ve been hearing for decades. His point rests on the idea that what was once a dialectic between high art and pop culture has devolved into a raw pursuit of money through the time-tested marketing strategies of the taskmasters of pop. That is, while Andy Warhol may have been the “evil prophet of the profit motive” he was at least taking a risk, standing up for an idea, and engaging in a real conversation. Now, apparently, artists like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage are presenting works without meaning, without statements, that challenge nothing.

Should the art world try to maintain (or regain) its tendency towards the “daringly, rightfully, triumphantly intolerant”? Personally, I’m not sure yet — but I do think this is an important discussion to be having at a time when the art market is exploding and YouTube is helping to create and propagate some of the most inane pop culture this side of pet rocks.

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UTSA Satellite Space whips up a lively show with lots of emvergeoning artists in “Creating Context: Words at Work.” Featuring the work of Lisa Choinacky, Enrique Martinez, Kurt Mueller, Josh Rios and George Zupp, it’s a short lived show that closes Feb. 18th. It would behoove you to check out Josh Rios’ assemblage of quotes uttered by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Investigate the photographic evidence above. If that’s not compelling enough, then what about a madlib version of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl? Observing that today was William S. Burrough’s birthday, it’s a sweet tribute to the troublemakers of this American landscape.

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Austin seems to be hovering in some sort of world weariness these days. Between the severed, sashimi-like tongues at Okay Mountain’s “Dark Matter: New Work from Japan” and the mutant, calamitous sea of malice and mammoths at Art Palace, the state of art in Central Texas looks sadistically mirthful. Seth Alverson delivers a concentration of drawings and paintings entitled “Ghost Survivor of the Final Plague.”

A future of natural corruption and mutation provides fetid ground to rake and Alverson digs up some seriously disturbing creatures. Wizards become culpable for cuckold interludes amidst ruins and dismembered limbs. Tusks of woolly mammoths clone and choke themselves in a soft torsion disconnected from the animal itself. Each drawing portrays a mental geographic minefield where we are witnessing or nearly missing catastrophic events until all that’s left is a coagulating mess. Alverson’s propinquity for such malevolence resonates in all the complicated, repetitious and somewhat sociopathic lines he draws over and over until they become vibrant red seas and azuline, undulating surfaces. These uncharted waters smother teleology; consequently opening prehistoric possibilities and submerging any inkling of a heavenly dead end. Somehow the tenuous modern landscape shifts beneath us and the ground Alverson covers is absolutely treacherous, consuming and the curious manifestation of mal du siecle with a Quarternarian’s providence.

You can witness the darkness if you stop by Art Palace before the show ends Feb. 17th.

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Local artists are popping up on the international art radar. Zane Lewis bubbled to the European surface with a little bit of humor and ipecac. His recent, painterly rendition of a regurgitating Pope was part of the international, invitation-only Arte Fiera in Bologna, Italy. Looks incredibly delectable for holy bloviating and dribble. Somebody needs a bib…
Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

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These piggies all have something to say…but you have to go to the Mcnay this month to listen. This little piggy [Basquiat] went to marketing class, this little piggy [Warhol] stayed home, this little piggy [Wyeth] painted portraits and they all frolicked in a Manhattan play pen called The Factory.

Everything about “Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth & Basquiat” hovers around the alluring glow of the cult of personality. Given that caveat, Jamie Wyeth takes the blue ribbon for his portraits of subjects as disparate as John F. Kennedy, a smirking swine and a she-male in a ball gown. His oil paintings and pencil drawings exude a sense of classically trained talent with a mischievous twist. The show itself is a mixed fruit salad of taxidermied pets, toy train sets and painfully outdated haute couture. Continue Reading »

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Although I could write pages and pages about Bettie Ward’s incredibly precious and profane show at Southwest School of Art and Craft, I’m giving you 15 reasons to go see this show:
1. Embroidery can be subversive.
2. Where else will you see a peppermint striped dick?
3. Breasts become rosettes; become targets.
4. Our Lady of the Cupcakes
5. Picasso, Miro, sexual imagery full of flying genitalia
6. Look for the arbor of fluffy penises
7. A video of Patricia Pratchett singing Guantanamera
8. Smudgy drawings that are mimetic of Darger or miscreants
9. Heart shaped doilies sprouting cacti and fellatio
10. Tiny golden shoes
11. Birds flying out of a woman’s mouth
12. The titles: The Girl who had a relationship with the Spiney Tree of Life Cactus
13. The Marvelous Hysterical is better than porn
14. Imaginative scenes of apocryphal beings
15. Bettie Ward is a San Antonio gem.

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On the threshold of Sound Space in Laredo, the two large pod sculptures illuminated within diaphonous plastic are softly breathtaking. The couple in collaboration, Megan and Murray McMillan, staged a performance and installation in propinquity with a video made during their Spring 2006 residency at Can Serrat in Barcelona. [Coincidentally, I recently returned from a writer in residency at the same 17th Century stone farmhouse].

The repetitive sounds of synchronized tap dancing inside a revitalized wine cellar add a lovely note of harmony to the entire installation. In keeping with the theme of their titled intentions, the couple choreographed a group of actors to speak in contrapuntal intervals between alternating loops of the video.

The large, plastic cocoon sculptures left interstices for the actors to sit comfortably inside the strange structures while feigning to read the local news. During their intermittent vocal performances, they would speak simultaneously in repetitive Spanish sentences. The only desideratum was amplification of the voices to balance the acoustics. With all the background echo and chatter, it was difficult to discern what was being conveyed through these perfunctory vociferations. Still, the structures themselves seemed like shrink-wrapped biospheres from a future where poverty reinvents housing from discarded materials similar to Central Park during the Great Depression. In this futuristic Hooverville, blurred inhabitants live pell mell between sheets of cob-webbed plywood and disassembled car doors. These pods are anything but airtight, as we can see feet sticking out and hear newspapers rustling behind the thick plastic, soft shelled sculptures. The artists leave thoughtful details like peepholes in the plastic so that you can see inside but the characters are still obscured. The notion of lives lived in proximity yet parallel makes the entire show resonate with a slight tension reconciling solitude with loneliness.

Sound Space continuously brings talented, young artists to the cusp of Texas/Mexico border and this show reinforces their importance in the South Texas art scene. Eduardo Garcia’s curatorial insight is making Laredo a bright light on the artistic horizon.

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Walking around First Friday the other night before Erick Michaud’s performance at Unit B was.. fun? exciting? trying? hmm.. I’m not sure really. but I did see a lot of folks who I hadn’t run into lately, and I handed out a bunch of postcards for the Derek Allen Brown show coming up this next Saturday at FL!GHT .. I also really enjoyed Mary Hawthornes show in the little room of Joan Grona Gallery, and I found a keen photo opportunity in the Blue Star Gallery four. Upon closer examination however, I noticed something was amiss(i think) .. Someone seems to have added an empty obituary box of their own to the display on the wall with an arrow pointing to it with the words “Time magazines person of the year.” .. Upon first viewing it, I thought it was part of the piece..and then after reflecting on it earlier today, and reading the handout I had picked up in the gallery, I was almost sure it was not exactly part of it, but some First Friday reveler’s idea of a prank. Anybody know for sure? (in my original photo look to the guy on the left, at his right side)

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Subtlety and simplicity make art a welcome benediction. Cherubic Riley Robinson consistently reminds us that sculpture is his metier- second only of course to his alacrity for keeping Artpace on the forefront of the contemporary art scene in America. “A Short History of Television” offers habitues of Sala Diaz the thrill of a lunar landing or at least the re-enactment of an interstellar disembarkation.

Perhaps the virescent gem of this show dwells inside the carefully preserved torsion of a coveted pair of bib overalls. The patina on this article of clothing is a perfectly captured color of distress and creates a ghostly uninhabitable space. Robinson’s decision to place the work upright makes it seem like these jeans had been burnt to a crisp and blown against the gallery wall by some white hot, solar flare. The straightforward lemma of television pulls Mr. Green Jeans into the same lost channels of the 1960s that followed the lunar landing while alluding to the conspiracy theory of Hollywood mise en scene surrounding that “small step.” A signed, framed publicity photo of Mr. Green Jeans adds a tender touch to a remarkably delightful show.

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The Austin art scene takes a couple of punches at sincerity and sweethearts with a show at Volitant Gallery called “Take Me To Bed or Lose Me Forever.” Prima facie, everyone cries crocodile tears about the floor, the floor, the immaculate misconception of marble floors. Still, it was perfectly suited for one of Bunnyphonic’s anachronistic and Schadenfreudian environments. Keeping true to the constitution of Emvergeoning in the new year, I am writing a review of my own group show because this is, after all, “The Most Difficult Art Blog in America.” Continue Reading »

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Albert Camus wrote in his 1962 essay Creation and Revolution:

“Industrial society will only open the way to a new civilization by restoring to the worker the dignity of a creator; in other words, by making him apply his interest and his intelligence as much to the work itself as to what it produces…. Every act of creation denies, by its mere existence, the world of master and slave. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in which we survive will only find its death and transfiguration on the level of creation.”

This passage came back to me today as I visited the website of one of my favorite ceramic artists, Marek Cecula, which declares on the front page: “mass production is an inspiration for originality.” Ceramics, more than almost any other art form, is forced to confront this tension between the creative act and the means of production. Even among many sculptural ceramicists, we can see echoes of functionality in the work. This is fitting, since the world of ceramic art has been dominated until very recently by folk revivalists like Bernard Leach and Kawai Kanjiro, and before industrialization was a largely functional art form for thousands of years. (I know this is a simplification, but, after all, this is a blog). Cecula, who designs functional ceramics for mass production, is also a highly respected artist, and has confronted the tension between creativity and functionality head-on. In his most recent show at Garth Clark, he took traditional, industrially produced European tea sets and stacked them in various ways. He then re-fired them in a traditional Japanese wood-fired kiln, which melted the sets just enough to make them appear deformed, while coating them in dust and soot, and fusing the separate pieces together. The resulting sculptures are born of the clash between mass production and unique creation; but also between Western and Eastern (specifically Japanese) understandings of aesthetic value. Much of his other work explores this territory in other ways, and it is all worth checking in with – but I’d recommend starting with this PDF of the catalog for IN DUST REAL.

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Yesterday was a drive down to Laredo with PBL and Mimi, where we managed to catch a glimpse of el otro lado, and about six hours of film, some experimental, some not-so-experimental. The host, Sound art space, is in a warehouse (natch) and features a gallery, frame shop, furniture shop, and a brand new toilet. The organizers culled work by students, amateurs, and professionals, local and international, so the range in quality was quite wide. At the high end I was overcome by Murray and Megan McMillan’s brief allegorical animation (Grasping Hand and Walking Method, available here), Dan Monceaux’s fluid and poetic exploration of the lives of two blind women (A Shift in Perception, available here), and one of PBL’s signature semi-narrative video collages (Pandora’s Bike, more info here). Ann Wallace, Gil Rocha, and Bertozzi & Shell also contributed strong work.

The folks at Sound are bringing some solid contemporary art to Laredo, and their upcoming installation by Murray and Megan McMillan looks to be a killer show. Keep an eye on these guys.

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1. sit down on the stage. next to the scissors. we will cut away the stage, and cut away the cloth you hide behind. you don’t need all those layers. the stage only robs you of humanity. we can make you human again. you’re not healthy. but we can cut away the disease you hide behind. sit down and stay still.

2. how could you sit there, unmoving? how could you give us those scissors? the cloth is there for a reason, and so is the stage. you stole our humanity. you used the stage to make us destroy it. this is carnegie hall, not some peep show. and even a peep show has boundaries. you’re not an artist, you’re just afraid of being human.

3. i cut her bra. on the stage of carnegie hall, i cut her bra. no one else could. they are afraid of revealing desire. they are afraid of being human in front of an audience. she got scared. she didn’t know what she was asking for. i took the scissors and made her a woman. she didn’t know what she wanted. only i knew.

4. what could i do? i just sat and watched as they cut away the world. who could be human without anything to stand on? who could speak with scissors cutting right through the floor? this might take some time. cornball. where are they speaking from, now that everything is cut?

these are responses to the video above, a 1965 performance by yoko ono at carnegie hall.

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Oftentimes San Marcos resides in its own collegiate bubble. If you are going to see any shows in Austin soon, make a short stop off Exit 205 to visit the 7th floor of the Alkek Library. Inside the cozy campus hideaway you will find the most extensive and sometimes shocking collection of photographs by Mexican nonpareil Graciela Iturbide. After reading a recent biography of Diane Arbus, these brutally honest black and white documents perpetuate a dark undercurrent of death and mysticism. But don’t let me tell you that, go see for yourself. Make note of my favorite, “Bombay,” which features a weathered, neglected artificial limb longing for the ever elusive disembodied “other.” Welcome back, bunny.

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the world is formed in the image of spaztek. with each mask it dies and is born again. with new borders. every border is a figment of a mask. every machine is a reinvention of the world. but billie holiday is not a machine or a world or a mask or a tear. she lives in the invisible waves that connect us. her mask is the air shedding its leaves. her border is the flower clinging to its petals. if spaztek could return the leaves to the air, or dissect the petals, maybe he could find her. maybe he could build a world out of all the invisible waves, a voice out of masks. but all spaztek knows is he’s lost and not gonna give up. and devil girl’s gone.

written in response to a cruz ortiz exhibit at fl!ght gallery.

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