Mexico City in Black and White

By Erin Keever
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, March 06, 2006

With a new show at F8 Gallery comes a new book by Faustinus Deraet. Both satisfy black-and-white photo files, although in different formats. The show is part of an exhibition of three artists called "Pulse." The book, Mientras Vagaba por El DF, is a limited edition of 500 copies signed and numbered by the artist and published and printed in Mexico City.

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Deraet grew up in Mexico City. After a nearly five-year absence, he returned to the city to capture what he describes as "its infinite spirit, rich history, untiring chaos, unmatched heroes, craziness and sophisticated beauty."

He shot all of his photos with a Holga, an inexpensive plastic camera that uses medium-format film. While the Holga has a reputation for being flimsy and toylike, in this case the quality of images produced is surprisingly refined.

Particularly appealing is the Holga's characteristic vignetting, which not only blurs the edges, but makes us more conscious of the photographer's gaze and lends Mexican storefronts, signage and people going about their daily lives a nostalgic and mysterious mood.

Deraet's silver gelatin prints range in size, yet a subtle continuity of style is present. His images are quiet. One can imagine him strolling through the city stopping to document a bridal boutique façade or a couple of maguey plants, while searching for that decisive moment.

The book, only about 7 inches by 5 inches, offers a compact and intimate presentation of Deraet's work. It also allows the photographer the opportunity to jot down his memories and interpretations of Mexico City. He includes a phrase or insight with each photo, usually on the opposite page. These added captions are sometimes humorous and sometimes more enigmatic, providing insight into Deraet's (humorous and enigmatic) personality.

"Pulse" continues 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, through March 25, F8 Fine Art Gallery, 1137 W. Sixth St., free, 480-0242.

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Bob Schneider Gets Etchy for Art

By V. Marc Fort
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, March 13, 2006

During the past two decades, Bob Schneider has transformed himself from brooding, sex-obsessed, funky band frontman into an accomplished singer-songwriter. Schneider's newest artistic incarnation -- copperplate etcher for his "The Bob Schneider Show" at Flatbed Press -- proves that Schneider's artistic bent is no fluke. The show is all at once a retrospective of the copperplate etchings that Schneider has created throughout the past 15 years, a debut of his seven latest copperplate creations and the first gallery installation of his hand-drawn video animations.

"It takes about 40 to 50 hours to complete one of the etchings," Schneider shyly revealed at the opening reception last Thursday. The party was packed with his female, male and even more of his female fans.

Schneider's art was most effective when he spread his artistic wings upon the largest of his copperplates. Those that were 48 inches wide and larger allowed him enough space to create intricate details within the plate's frame, slightly reminiscent of the minutiae within an Hieronymus Bosch or a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting.

In "Woman," Schneider fills the interior of the curvaceous figure of his favorite muse with a lute, a squid, his heart, barbed wire, a snake and multiple phalluses. Displaying his knowledge of the tradition he inherits, ruler-drawn lines akin to those used by Leonardo da Vinci for scale bisect and intersect Schneider's "Woman."

Within one of the most striking of the seven new works, "May Your Wish Come True," black clothing dominates a four-armed man, yielding the entirety of his river of darkness. A second head interjects itself into the right side of the frame vomiting unintelligible words.

During "The Blue of Heaven," a brash black crow puts his dukes up, ready to throw down and rumble with anyone who comes along. Schneider makes tree branches appear to come to life; he etches tree limbs so sardonically that they appear as animated as the limbs of a human.

Flatbed Press printer Tracy Mayrello said that while many artists like a clean copperplate to start with, Schneider chooses plates that have previous existing imperfections and scratches to create surface "noise" within his work.

"Bob is so good that he can draw right on to the copperplate. Most people have to draw something out by hand first and then trace and copy that on to the plate," said Mayrello.

Considering the number of hours that went into creating this show, it's a wonder Schneider has time to sleep, let alone simultaneously play in three different bands.

("The Bob Schneider Show" continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and by appointment through April 15. 2830 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Free. 477-9328, www.flatbedpress.com.)

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The Bob Schneider Show
On the cutting etch

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
Friday, March 17, 2006

A tableau of human figures twisted into horrifying shapes, their limbs and digits contorted like maverick putty and often multiplied in numbers far beyond the normal. This is not, though it could be, a scene from some planet called Shayol; this is the graphic work of Bob Schneider, better known for his music but currently represented by what he's rendered in intaglio etchings on copperplate. All of which can be seen in stunning profusion on the walls of Flatbed Press' gallery in his new solo show.

Once you've scanned the images in all their monochrome starkness, the delicate lines limning anatomical horrors and textual embeddings, it's hard to scrape them from the walls of your mind. Of course, working in intaglio, it's not the easiest thing for the artist to scrape the images from the walls of his mind in the first place, to scratch them into flat and polished planes of copper and witness them, finally, in limited editions of oversized prints pulled, 15th-century style, on enormous hand-cranked presses. Wouldn't a fine-point Sharpie and simple offset have been a lot easier?

"I got into etching in college," offers Schneider, woken from an exhaustion-capping, here-comes-SXSW-and-a-solo-show-at-Flatbed nap and yawning groggily into the phone. "I took a class with this great printmaking teacher, Kurt Kemp, at UT-El Paso, and he was really inspiring. We're still in touch these days, and he's, I guess he's my biggest influence. People look at his work -- I have some prints he gave me -- and they think I did it."

As if he'd have the time to do more than he already does. You look in the live music pages of the Chronicle, say, and you see the number of gigs the man plays; you search further and you find a discography comprising several bands and more recordings than the fingers on any of the hands of Schneider's extra-digited figures. You do that, and you may wonder where he finds the time at all.

"The etchings aren't a constant thing," he allows. "My printmaking tends to come in little bursts. Like maybe I'll do three or four a month for a few months; then I won't do anything for years. Because the visual stuff, yeah, it's a real small part of what I do."

It's also the visual stuff, chinked into whatever holes his schedule allows.

"Sometimes I'll take a plate into the studio," says Schneider, "and scratch away during the downtimes."

And does this -- or sheer intent -- cause any bleed-through between the membranes of the two media?

The artist yawns again, and there's a sound on the phone like a man scratching wearily at the stubble along his jaw. "Well," he says, "I put a lot of text into some of the prints. And sometimes I use lyrics in there, too, so it can get mixed up like that. And the cover for the first Lonelyland album was a print of mine. But when Universal issued it, they changed it, because they thought it was ... too weird or something."

Too weird or something. For the suits at a corporate media enclave? This should be a hint to you, O More-Than-Aesthetically-Stultified Reader, that what Bob Schneider is displaying in his second solo show -- his first in over a decade -- is possibly just weird enough. That the familiar verticals of Flatbed Press are currently holding some of the most complex and evocative prints they've ever held. That whether your ears think Schneider's music is God's gift to the audio spectrum or Satan's promise of what sounds you'll endure in hell, your eyes will widen in appreciation as they see what the man's done with metal on metal and ink on paper in the past few years.

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Gentle Disturbances
Creating ripples in public space with large-scale art

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, March 24, 2006

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you go strolling up the Avenue one fine day and find the Texas State Capitol completely covered in yellow fabric. I mean, completely covered, from the cornerstone up to the Goddess of Liberty's star, every square inch of pink granite -- House chamber, Senate chamber, dome, all of it -- obscured by a million square feet of polypropylene fabric the shade of a yellow rose (and tied down with 50,000 feet of cobalt blue rope). Three weeks our capitol looks like this, and then it doesn't. The statehouse-sized Christmas present is unwrapped, the wrapping taken away, and the building looks like it has every time the Lege has come to town since the thing was built.

What, you might be asking yourself, was the point of that? Why wrap a building in the first place? And if you're going to go to all that trouble of covering it up, expend all those resources, why uncover it after less than a month? Why go so far out of your way to create something so monumental and yet so ephemeral? Is there a point?

Valid questions all, and there may be no better time to find some answers in our town than now. More attention is being paid here to large-scale, temporary public art -- and let's get it out of the way straight off, this kind of work is art -- than any time in the last 25 years. From upstart nonprofits, such as Austin Green Art, to academic programs like Land Arts of the American West in UT's Department of Art & Art History, from under-the-radar shows by younger artists, such as Heather Johnson's "Cracks in the Pavement," to major exhibitions at the Austin Museum of Art, the city is full of artists thinking about, talking about, and making art that's big, that's transforming our public spaces, and that's here today, gone tomorrow. In fact, this week, AMOA is bringing to town Christo and Jeanne-Claude, if not the grandpére and grandmére of monumental, ephemeral public art, then surely its most recognized and vocal proponents in the world today. They should be pleased to know that the work they've been engaged in for 45 years running is active here, creating "gentle disturbances," to borrow Christo's phrase, across the face of our community.

Common Ground

That word "community" is key to getting a grasp on the kind of art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have pioneered and which is generating so much activity today. It's not about the wall of the gallery or museum, about some enclosed, private corner of a city visited by the merest fraction of the populace. It's designed precisely for the territory traversed by you and me and the other citizens around us, the terrain where we meet and interact and do business with one another and relax from such business. It's where we commune, our common ground, and as such is some place an artist's work not only may be seen by a greater number and variety of people than in a museum but may tap whatever civic identity we have invested in that spot. Think Barton Springs Pool. Think the Congress Avenue Bridge. Think Mount Bonnell.

Such sites are fertile ground for art. The meaning they have for us, cultivated by history and the consensus of a citizenry that for whatever reasons they matter, seem to make almost any creative expression at them all the richer and more resonant. In Dee McCandless' swimmers' ballet Waterworks, Sally Jacques' meditative performance Body Count, and Glenna Goodacre's statue of Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb, the power of the art was heightened expressly by its being at Barton Springs. All these pieces drew on the power of the place in our public life and wouldn't have worked on us in quite the way they have in a more traditional artistic setting.

Of course, precisely because so much of our communal identity is bound up in such spaces, we tend to be very protective of them. As Christo has noted, they are "full of regulations, ownerships, jurisdictions, meanings" and tend to be carefully overseen by politicians and urban planners. We may be willing to have a work of art added permanently to a public site, but we don't want it to mess with what we find important about that place. Most of the time, that means a prolonged review process with ample time for scrutiny of the proposed artwork and input from citizens. And that, opines Austin artist Hunter Cross, "can easily lead to conservative thinking because of the number of checkboxes that must be filled. Works may never gain approval because of their complexity, their reliance on the artist's personal history, or their aesthetic uniqueness. Indeed, familiarity is funding's best friend.

"For example, the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on Austin's Hike and Bike Trail is an obvious choice for permanence and institutional approval because it memorializes a regional celebrity, markets the city as musician-friendly, and is made of a traditional art material. But what new cultural discussions did our funding of this sculpture inspire? None."

Here Today ...

So what's an artist who wants to tap that power of the public space but not be creatively hogtied by bureaucracy to do? One of the most obvious and simplest ways to escape the straitjacket that is the approval process for new permanent public art is just make it not permanent. Treat the site like an exhibition space that's available only for a limited time frame. The work goes up on this day and comes down on that one. It not only skirts some of the bureaucratic requirements, it lessens the public anxiety that a beloved locale will be ruined. "Basically, we are borrowing that space and use it intricately for a short time." Christo says of his projects.

It certainly opens up the possibilities for what an artist can do. You aren't bound to the bronze or stone that will endure wind and weather or the recognizable likeness of the human figure, limitations imposed by an indefinite installation. "By specifically choosing to create temporary public works, an artist is able to consider different materials, concepts, and spaces that may be off-limits for the more traditional domain of permanent public art," notes Cross, who explored some of these ideas in the recent Open Doors Collective exhibition "In Between." "The requirements change from 'last forever' to 'simply exist.'"

That's not to say that public art with a short shelf life is without certain dangers. Cross believes that "temporary work is historically problematic because it makes itself and its ideas easily replaceable. The public is asked to consider an art experience of little consequence."

But others argue that the ephemeral quality of this kind of work is part of what gives it such strength, such beauty. Eva Buttacavoli, AMOA's director of exhibitions and education, speaks of the impermanence in art creating "a fragility, an urgency in the object/project." Certainly, that message came through in the museum's exhibit of work by Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy a year ago. His creations of leaves and twigs and snowballs and spiderwebs, which now exist only in the photographs he took of them, were poignant in their delicacy, quietly speaking to the transience of all things.

Christo, whose works with Jeanne-Claude take years, even decades, to realize but rarely last more than a few weeks, has spoken of a similar quality that informs their efforts: "the quality of love and tenderness that we human beings have for what does not last." For instance, he said in one interview, "we have love and tenderness for childhood because we know it will not last. We have love and tenderness for our own life because we know it will not last. That quality of love and tenderness, we wish to donate it, endow our work with it as an additional aesthetic quality. The fact that the work does not remain creates an urgency to see it. For instance, if someone were to tell you, 'Oh, look on the right, there is a rainbow,' you will never answer, 'I will look at it tomorrow.'"

Size Matters

That sense of urgency Christo speaks of can be intensified when the scale of a work is too big to ignore: 11 islands surrounded by pink fabric, 7,500 gates along the walkways of a park, a government building completely covered in fabric. Buttacavoli notes that "large-scale assumes a quality of the magnificent -- in both nature and the built environment -- and can invoke awe in its realization (the Grand Canyon, the Great Pyramids, Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial) and disappointment, fear, and sometimes a secret glee in its aberrations or failures (tsunamis, the collapse of the World Trade Center, the eyesore of the Intel building)."

In the world we inhabit, however, we've grown unaccustomed to creative work on a large scale beyond a few socially sanctioned rituals. That kind of manufactured magnificence is pretty much reserved for Olympic ceremonies and Super Bowl halftimes, and even their epic appeal is diluted by their clockwork appearances. We see them coming months in advance, their preparation is trumpeted for all to hear. "We are bombarded by trivial and repetitious things. Every time the same thing again," says Christo, which makes something grand that we've never seen before and never will again, that appears and vanishes in weeks -- 3,100 umbrellas opened simultaneously in two countries separated by an ocean, a white nylon fence extending some 25 miles along the Pacific coast -- "a demonstration of absolute freedom and total irrationality." The artist has no illusions about such works' importance in the great scheme of things. "The world can live without Umbrellas, without Valley Curtain or Running Fence," he has said. "They have no other reason to be there except poetical creativity, total creativity." And yet that's what draws us to them, because they are, in his words, "sublime unique things."

And the greater the size, the more magnificent the gesture, the more the work generates a kind of gravity, drawing people to it, people across the social spectrum, the cultural wavelength: young and old, rich and poor, knowledgeable about art and not.

First-Person

Austin artist Randy Jewart, who has been immersed in the creation of large-scale public works through his organization Austin Green Art (see sidebar), recalls the effect that The Gates had on New York City: "The vibe in the city was just amazing. We were down in TriBeCa having breakfast at some little diner, and you could hear people: 'Yeah, let's go up to Central Park and see that thing.' And it was not the art crowd. It was just pervasive throughout the town. When we got up there, it became clear to me that the project was about inviting the city of New York to take a stroll. It was that simple and that elegant and that powerful. And people did it, and when people were there, you had this vibe, with thousands and thousands of the most sophisticated people in the world just walking around like kids, happy and checking it out. It was amazing."

Jeanne-Claude has witnessed this effect with her and Christo's projects time and again, a transformation in people generated by their exposure to something singular. "You can see the people change," she has said. "They start smiling at each other, they start talking to each other; they are in a completely different state of mind. [It] is very rewarding for us because they feel that freedom and they feel that they are witnessing something that happens once in a lifetime."

"The key is to experience it," says Jewart of monumental, ephemeral public art like The Gates. "When you see a picture of it, it looks kind of weird, and you're like, 'Why would you put all that stuff in Central Park?' But when you're there, it explains itself."

Once you get beyond the rationality of such work, beyond our distinctly American preoccupation with the cost of things, beyond the concern for waste (did I mention that all of the materials in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects -- and Austin Green Art's, for that matter -- are recycled after the work is done?), it's about the moment you saw something beautiful and brief and happened to share it with someone else. You might as well call it the Rainbow Connection (if the Muppets don't mind).

Ultimately, large-scale temporary public art "becomes more about experience than the materials," agrees Buttacavoli, and she thinks that may help explain the current surge of interest in it locally. "One thing I figured out about Austin the first year I moved here is that Austinites are experiential! Listen to an Austinite talk about his or her favorite subject -- Austin -- and it is all about experiences: It is hot summer afternoons at Barton Springs, it is Zilker Park's Trail of Lights, it is Eeyore's Birthday, it is SXSW, it is ACL Festival, a UT game, the Fine Arts Festival, La Dolce Vita, the First Night Parade. It is a rainbow of celebration of things temporary, collaborative, outdoors, and transformative.

"So the question I ask myself, and the question I feel the (Christo and Jeanne-Claude) exhibition and the artists' current work provokes is: How do we transplant our values of appreciation of art (traditionally found in a museum setting) into an experience found in a public setting/or happened upon in the environment? And I would answer that with another question: So how wide is your definition of art?"

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New gallery courts art from Vietnam

By V. Marc Fort
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, March 23, 2006

Entering the enormous wooden doors at the Congress Avenue gallery, a set of Buddha masks looms into view. The masks -- easily the most overwhelming pieces in the exhibit at the still-new Fielding-Lecht Gallery -- were created by Hanoi artist Dinh Cong Dat.

Dat playfully created positive and negative space molds out of plaster. Later, he painted a few of the positive-space masks as Buddha faces with gold-leaf, and conversely covered the majority of the negative-space Buddha faces with Western popular-culture material, cut from magazines and various media, the pated onto the masks.

Thanks to Bill and Pam Fielding -- and their longtime friend, Suzanne Lecht, owner of Hanoi's Art Vietnam Gallery -- our metropolis is now home to a spacious shop that specializes in Vietnamese fine art rarely found oustide New York, Paris, Los Angeles or that country still inextricably entangled with ours, Vietnam.

The gallery occupies the two-floor space at 708 Congress Ave. in the Edwards Tipps building. Its ambitious exhibit, "The Ten Courts of the Kings of Hell," transports the viewer directly to Hanoi, where the majority of the contributing artists reside. It includes folk art originating thousands of years ago and modern-day pop art from some of Vietnam's most important young artists.

Lecht, who led President Clinton on a 2001 gallery tour in Hanoi, is considered a pioneer and a leading authority on contemporary art in Vietnam.

"I arrived here with the solitary dream of working and living among the artists in Vietnam," Lecht explained in an e-mail from Hanoi. "It has been a journey of discovery, at times intensely personal, but always deeply rewarding."

"Ten Courts" was curated by Lecht, Pam Fielding and an Englishman living in Hanoi, Simon Redington. His folio of 10 aquatint etchings housed in lacquer boxes is a monolith of an installation and acts as the centerpiece of the exhibit.

"I didn't originate these drawings," Redington explained during the exhibit's opening reception. "I kept seeing them over and over in pagodas and temples as I was traveling through Vietnam. The mystical drawings originated with Buddhism in India and made their way along the Silk Road to China and Vietnam."

Redington's addition and singular artistic stamp to the long cultural history of drawing these solemn kings as they sit in judgment over recently deceased mortals was creating them as etchings instead of drawings. Likewise, Redington cleverly coupled his etchings in exquisite glass and wood casings with verses from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." His combination of Western prose and Eastern art yielded an uncanny synchronicity and an even deeper meditation on the earthly laws of causality.

"My favorite artist in the exhibit is Nguyen Nhu Y," Redington said.

Y painstakingly carved approximately 20 wood totems for the exhibit. The totems all bear a striking resemblance to Y's wife because he is consumed with carving her image over and over again as a tribute to her. Sadly, Y's life partner suffered from schizophrenia, as does Y, and she recently disappeared without a trace in the jungles of North Vietnam.

With the exhibit -- and with the opening of the Fielding Lecht Gallery -- lifelong art lovers Lecht and the Fieldings hope to continue to share the art of Vietnam with collectors around the world. The Vietnamese government's new policy of openness only provides more opportunity.

"The Vietnamese artists are striving to maintain their own cultural identity and yet they want to express a more universal art with universal concerns," Lecht said. "There will always be artists that remain deeply rooted in their own traditions and others who will seek new modes and manners of expression.

"It is my hope that the Vietnamese artists will have more opportunity to travel and interact with people of all nations," Lecht continued. "Vietnam has been a closed country for nearly 25 years. I would like to see the Vietnamese have their rightful place in the development of fine art around the world and to be collected by museums worldwide."

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After 50 years, festival still raising fun for the arts

By Michael Barnes
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Just over 50 years ago, Peggy Frary dropped by the late Clara Driscoll's former home, Laguna Gloria, to pick up one of her husband Michael's paintings. The decaying villa was being used as a place to exhibit art.

"I was new to Austin," says the London native, recalling the Lake Austin estate, now part of the Austin Museum of Art. "There was only one person there, Mrs. Webb, a fragile little thing, barely 80 pounds.

"I said, 'You have a gorgeous place here. Why don't you fix it up?'

" 'We have absolutely no money and no support from anywhere. We're going to have to close the place down,' she said.

"I said, 'My God, this is terrible.' "

Frary responded by organizing a few wives of University of Texas art and architecture professors who had traveled and collected art in Mexico to create a Mexican-themed Fiesta, a sale to benefit Laguna Gloria. They scissored paper flowers, daubed a few temporary booths, borrowed a mobile canteen from Camp Mabry and hoped people would show up.

The first Fiesta, in 1956, netted $1,500 -- and saved the building.

Later, Fiesta matured into one of Austin's most cherished traditions, outgrew the shady confines of Laguna Gloria, moved downtown to Republic Square and was redubbed the Austin Fine Arts Festival. A few hundred showed up in 1956; tens of thousands are expected Saturday and Sunday.

The two-day event now benefits the Austin Museum of Art (successor to Laguna Gloria Art Museum) and UT's Blanton Museum of Art. And this year, organizers have added Art After Dark, which combines samples of fine food, performing arts and access to the art by 220 exhibiting artists for an evening extension of the daytime festivities.

Back in 1956, the number of participating artists arrayed on the villa's grounds could be counted on two hands, but included the biggest names -- Charles Umlauf, Ralph White, Michael Frary, etc. -- in Austin's much smaller art world.

"At first it was just an art sale," says Ruby White, widow of Austin Arts Hall of Famer Ralph White and first president of the Women's Art Guild. (An earlier event, the Texas Arts and Crafts Fair, was launched at the City Coliseum in 1951.)

"But then Peggy changed it to Fiesta to bring in families and children -- and so we could sell beer."

Beer was a popular, almost transformative addition, as was "outdoor plumbing," meaning portable toilets, in the 1960s.

"That was a great advance," laughs Lael Seagert, first director of Laguna Gloria when it incorporated officially as a museum in 1962. "There just wasn't a lot of money. The poor little place was in terrible trouble. We all used to park on the street to make (attendance) look big."

The early organizers agreed that another breakthrough was persuading the Junior League to adopt the estate's gatekeeper house as its headquarters. That brought new energy -- and business savvy -- to the event.

"It was lot of hard work, believe me," White says. "One year it rained so hard, we were sloshing around with mud in our boots. The husbands helped by laying palm fronds for the tops of the booths."

Back in the mid-1950s, women like White and Frary propped up the museum building however they could.

When the ancient boiler at Laguna Gloria sputtered out, Frary responded by hauling firewood and newspaper every day to the site from her Balcones-area home in order to heat the building. To keep younger attendants occupied at Fiesta, she brought her children's toys, cordoned off an area with chicken wire and put her maid in charge of the improvised play area.

All of those personal contributions -- enshrined now in scrapbooks and stories retold to younger generations -- were overshadowed in the intervening years by the millions of dollars that poured into the museum from the event.

"It allowed us to do what we could do," says former Laguna Gloria director Laurence Miller. "Fiesta was always absolutely crucial to the success of the museum."

Austin Fine Arts Festival

• When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday,
  11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday
• Where: Republic Square
• Cost: $5-$8, children age 12 and under free

Art After Dark

• When: 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday
• Where: Republic Square Park
• Cost: $55
• Information for both events: 458-6073,
  www.austinfineartsfestival.org

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Lance Letscher: Index
D Berman Gallery, through April 15

By Benné Rockett
Austin Chronicle
Friday, March 31, 2006

For the last year, I have approached writing reviews with trepidation. I am a visual artist accustomed to long periods of silence and strain to compose statements about my own work. It seems almost arrogant to write about others. Even though the preparation, research, viewing, and conversing is all part of a similar process, to be a scribe is excruciating for me. I want every word to count. I want my words to launch or further careers and to help viewers feel more at home with their own opinions. It is an impossible task.

I first saw Lance Letscher's work at James Gallery in Houston in 1996. Through a mutual collector I found out that Letscher lived in Austin and had no gallery representation. I can't express to you how nervous I was to ask him to exhibit in the humble gallery I was directing. The depth of stillness that must take place to create works of such beauty was beyond my grasp. I sensed it, but I had only two years of daily experience with the creative process under my belt. Each time I viewed his work, I was forced to re-examine my own. And as in times of childhood, I incorporated elements of his works into my own, wanting to understand where I must stand within myself to create on a level akin to his.

The current works are at once sublime, profound, mesmerizing, gorgeous, subversive, and encompassing. Each piece speaks to the other; there is continuity in concepts and iconography, but the progressive nature of ideas inspires no endpoint. For the creative process, a spiritual dimension within the artist must be carved out. As Mark Tobey, an American modernist painter, said, "This inner space is much closer to the infinite than the other, and it is the privilege of the balanced mind -- and the search for an equilibrium is essential -- to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space."

During his process, Letscher keeps his options open, avoiding envisioning the final piece. He courts all the fragility and doubt that accompanies daily life. After the tedium of cutting thousands of scraps of vintage papers has ceased, a sense of excruciating chaos takes hold. It is at this point he asks to enter the creative process and puts down the bones of the work. He is completely blind and knows that he will see from within as he surrenders intellectual control, allowing the work to have its own voice. In that moment he becomes an Olympian listener. Finally, exhausted and exhilarated, closure is attained. He can move onto the next work and, again, be reborn.

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