Emvergeoning

Back in the salad days of VHS, perhaps the only special, visual effects you could add were on a weird, radioactive-color-scheme-slider mechanism. If you grew up in San Antonio, this song was the soundtrack to your childhood. This video of Freddy Fender seems like the equivalent of a visual menudo-panacea for all your over indulgence last night at Bar America…

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Now that Inland Empire is making its way into theaters, I thought it might be a good time post this David Lynch clip that appeared on YouTube last year. Apparently it is not a scene from Inland Empire, but these characters are in the movie. I think this clip works well on its own; Lynch’s sense of atmosphere and timing keeps getting stronger all the time. I’ve never been much of a fan of his work from the Blue Velvet period, but his new projects consistently impress me.

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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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For those of you looking to have some fun without all the commercials and guacamole, the Emvergeoning-endorsed Superbowl alternative tomorrow night is Potter-Belmar Labs‘ video performance at . The performance is scheduled to run from 7-8 pm.

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Let me start off this post by saying I’m grateful for all the things Artpace does for San Antonio, from the potlucks to the rooftop parties, but someone has to call them out on this one. When I heard that Jesse Amado was showing at Fine Silver, I thought “That’s strange; isn’t he showing at the Hudson Showroom? Isn’t it a bit of a faux pas for San Antonio’s two most reputable galleries to show the same artist at the same time?” So I decided to do a little fact-checking, only to find that the repo men have come to collect Artpace’s web site:

The Google cache of the site turned up the information I was after: yes, Jesse Amado is opening a show at Artpace on February 8 and Fine Silver on February 9. And I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for that. But the real mystery of the weekend emerges: Who killed the Artpace website?

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Who’s up for a little surprise road trip? I know I always am… sometimes maybe just a little too much surprise and not enough road trip, but hey.. So I approached Ed Saavedra Saturday night with a plan.. I needed to go out to the area around Marfa and the big bend region to do some shooting for a piece in my upcoming solo show “invisible houses,” at i2i gallery in March. As it turns out he was up for the trip. We decided to leave on Monday and come back sometime on Weds… soo traverse yourself along down old I-10 for about 6 hours and you hit the beautiful hole in the ground called Balmorhea . heres a photo.

this place was amazing. check out the waters.

i mean.. wow. the springs keep the pool at 73 degrees year round. just cold enough to be cold in the summer and just warm enough to be inviting in the winter. poor us, we didnt have towels of any kind and the sun was setting, so drip drying was out of the question as the winds started kicking up. Saying goodbye to the inviting waters we traveled onward to the Davis Mtns where we would camp for the night.. (click link below for the rest of the story)

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This one’s a doozy, folks. The Creative Capital Foundation offers grants for visual artists and video / film artists, and on average awards $25,000 to each grantee. The most they have awarded a single applicant is $50,000. In addition to the financial support, however, they offer workshops and advice on how to advance your career:

The Creative Capital Professional Development Program (PDP) was launched in 2003 to offer the career-building component of Creative Capital’s Artist Services Program to a broader community of artists. The program is designed to help empower artists to better manage their professional paths by providing them with the training and tools they need to thrive in the marketplace.

To apply for this grant, you must submit an inquiry between February 5 and March 5. You must be at least 25 years old, a U.S. citizen (or permanent resident), and a working artist with at least 5 years professional experience.

Go get ‘em tiger!

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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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