At the turn of the '80s, life in New York was truly an art

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, December 7, 2006

Here's the thing about "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," now on view at the Austin Museum of Art. The exhibit is more a visually noisy tribute to an era than your typical orderly display of artwork.

Sure, you can see samplings from art world heavy-hitters: Jean-Michael Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Barbara Kruger. But curator Carlos McCormick -- who is not a real-life curator, but rather a longtime New York cultural critic and currently senior editor at Paper Magazine -- doesn't proffer the typical chronological arrangement of most era-based exhibits.

No, McCormick gives us stuff -- lots and lots of glorious stuff that speaks of a relatively short period (10 years) in a relatively small place (a roughly 20-square-block area of Lower Manhattan) that nevertheless produced an enormous cultural impact. After all, this was the cultural petri dish that helped incubate punk rock and post-modernism.

True to that antiestablishment, do-it-yourself, there's-no-difference-between-high-culture-and-low-culture mindset, "The Downtown Show" crowds more than 300 objects -- indie magazines, concert posters, photographs, handmade clothing and accessories, films and, yes, a few paintings and sculpture -- on the museum's walls and into multiple glass cases.

It's a bit of an overload. It demands a lot of attention to put it all in some kind of context even though McCormick has arranged things in eight thematic sections. And some of what's on view seems more like nostalgic souvenirs for downtown scenesters.

What a scene it was.

New York City was bereft by the mid-1970s. White, middle-class business owners had fled to the suburbs, leaving behind a broke metropolis. "Ford to City: Drop Dead" read a 1975 headline in the New York Post after President Gerald Ford shrugged when the Big Apple declared bankruptcy.

But artists, musicians and writers found the empty industrial lofts and cold-water tenements of the Lower East Side and Soho the ideal cheap environment for a hand-to-mouth creative lifestyle. They were an antic, angry, idealistic, rebellious bunch tired of the hyperintellectualism -- and hypercommercialism -- of the art world.

So they created their own world. They wheat pasted the city with signs bearing their cryptic witticisms (Jenny Holzer) and symbolic images (Keith Haring). They opened their own clubs and performance spaces (Mudd Club, 8BC, Franklin Furnace). They formed their own raw, frenzied bands (Television, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, the Ramones). They made art objects out of inglorious junk like scrap metal and spray paint (David Wojnarowicz). In the end, the New York artists of the 1970s and 1980s were committed to making anything go with however little they had.

Of course, that made them, in essence, pretty much like previous generations of bohemian artists.

And now -- thanks to the "The Downtown Show" -- bits and pieces of all that downtown New York antiestablishment energy fill an established art institution.

Punks and postmodernists -- welcome to the museum academy.

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A blockbuster of video art, and it's all free to rent

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, December 14, 2006

How to make an artistic comment about the overload of information that characterizes our information age?

Try this: Throw more information at us to show how much we really don't know -- or more precisely, how much we really don't have access to.

That's the gist of E-Flux Video Rental, a project by New York-based artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda at Arthouse.

E-Flux Video Rental is a traveling archive of art films and videos by more than 250 artists that are available to the public for free home viewing. (There's also a monitor and tape deck in the Arthouse gallery for on-the-spot watching, along with a large screen on which films play nonstop.)

For all of our Internet internationalism and cyber-access, the films and videos of E-Flux -- all lined up on shelves along the gallery walls, looking nearly identical in generic-style black-and-white VHS boxes -- stand like sentinel reminders of how much information, or artistic creation, is beyond our reach.

Indeed, E-Flux Video Rental's decidedly low-tech approach is the polar opposite of a convenience-oriented media distribution system like Netflix.

Forget digital formats. Everything in E-Flux is VHS. Why? Because VHS doesn't really allow for high-quality copying; thus it protects artists' copyrights. And forget online registration and home delivery. You'll need to go to Arthouse and show identification before a staff member will type out your membership card on a plain index card.

Forget software-generated lists of recommended titles, too. Vidokle and Aranda have published a catalog, but it's organized by the date a video was added to the ever-growing selection. And the selection of videos expands as the project travels.

Since its launch in New York in 2004, the video rental enterprise has traveled to Amsterdam, Berlin, Miami, Frankfurt, Seoul, Antwerp and Budapest. (Simultaneous with its Austin opening, other versions started in Istanbul and the Canary Islands.) In each new venue, local curators are invited to recommend videos, particularly from local artists. So, though the exhibit catalog lists only 400 entries, the Austin incarnation features more than 650 videos.

How to find a specific title? It's harder than you think. At Arthouse, the videos are arranged alphabetically by artist. There are also copies of the catalog, and printouts show the Austin offerings organized by title and curator's name.

Confused? You should be. But then, E-Flux Video Rental's confounding organization is part of its charm -- and its intellectual point. After all, isn't any grouping of information really a very particular end-product of a very particular agenda?

Surrender to the confusion and the organic assemblage. Then you'll find things such as "Forget Baghdad," a 2002 documentary about Arabic-speaking Baghdadi Jews who were forced to emigrate to Israel in the 1950s and the tragic irony of the second-class status they were assigned in their new homeland. Or you might discover Rogelio A. González's "Mexico 2000," a 1960s Mexican sci-fi satire (sorry, no English subtitles). It's possible, too, you'll go for "Saber Vercencias," a 13-minute montage by Austin artists Regina Vater and Bill Lundberg -- and wonder at the irony of how it takes a traveling, New York-based project to bring to your attention the work of a pair of internationally recognized local artists.

Vidokle -- whose work is in the Blanton Museum of Art's permanent collection -- has been toying artistically with information and its distribution systems for years. The video rental project is just one of several ventures he has launched under his E-Flux banner (www.e-flux.com). E-Flux sends a visual arts e-mail newsletter on exhibits worldwide to 33,000 subscribers. Vidokle has also co-opted the 7,000-volume library of artist Martha Rosler for a temporary lending library.

And last summer, during a residency at San Antonio's Artpace, Vidokle covered an abandoned Lacks furniture store building with a mural composed of 100 corporate logos from defunct Eastern European and Latin American companies.

Just don't expect to find any of Vidokle's own videos for the borrowing at Arthouse; you'll have to suss out those on your own. Happy info-hunting

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'Take Me To Bed Or Lose Me Forever'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, December 14, 2006

In a way "Take Me To Bed Or Lose Me Forever," the group exhibit curated by artist Leona Scull-Hons now at Volitant Gallery, looks like it could be one of Scull-Hons' own spirited creations. Off-beat, colorful, revealing of some painful truths, the 14-person exhibit bears all the hallmarks of Scull-Hons' own odd art. After all, for her 2004 graduate exhibit at the University of Texas, she covered fancy vintage plates with sugared glaze and hung them on the gallery wall with the invitation to all to lick and taste.

Now, she gives a quirky but delightful grouping of her artistic peers who share her odd and lively weirdness.

Reed Posey knows how to make everybody on the art scene uncomfortable. He's taken more than 30 painfully truthful short notes he's dashed off to curators, fellow artists, gallery owners and even the management of trendy boutique Factory People and written each out on notebook paper and pinned it to the gallery wall. Forget privacy. Forget anonymity. Posey shines a harsh light on the ego- and emotion-laden business of creativity.

Heyd Fontenot hides very little too in his pencil-and-ink portraits of friends and Austin art world acquaintances. With graceful lines, he replicates each visage, then places it on a smaller-scale nude figure. It's a slightly cartoonish effect but also, given how recognizable many of his subjects are, rather a demure way to represent them in the nude.

One of the busiest artists in town, Candace Briceño gives us the quietly stunning "Nothing," a grid of meticulously crafted white felt flowers neatly arrayed on the white gallery wall.

For all the coyness that trickles through the exhibit, Leah Markov-Lindsay injects some harsh reality yet renders it beautifully. She's taken actual police file descriptions of the personal effects of female homicide victims in Texas and elegantly stitched the words onto crisp white linen, each handkerchief-sized square neatly hung on a wooden coat hanger. Markov-Lindsay displays 12 in the current exhibit, though she is working on hundreds more. "Blue jeans; long-sleeved black sweater; sneaker; tarnished ring" reads one, an anonymous yet poignant memorial of horrible crime.

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Beverly Penn: Weeds
D. Berman Gallery, through Dec. 23

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, December 15, 2006

"But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people's idea, not nature's." -- Author unknown

Situating her primary area of interest at the junction between nature and civilization, Beverly Penn frequently uses phrases like "the sacrifice that accompanies the advances of industrial and post-industrial times" to describe the issues in question in her artwork. Yet while Penn's wax-cast sculptures of weeds in bronze, brass, steel, and nickel may be stunning examples of the tension between our increasingly technologized world and the global resources we're draining and replacing in that advance, there's something in Penn's study of weeds, rather than flowers or plants, that essentially recasts these past explanations of her projects. We tend to think of weeds as nature unhinged, as wilderness amid civilization, as sin in the soil. Quotes like Robert M. Pyle's "But make no mistake: The weeds will win; nature bats last," illustrate the inside vs. outside, cultivated vs. natural dyads we use to even think about weeds. Yet as noted above, weeds are our ideas, not nature's. So with no real distinction between weeds and any other plant you might think of other than the ones we invent, weeds are as culturally constructed as the bar codes and measuring devices Penn uses to illustrate their differences. Thus, Penn's beautifully crafted weeds may look as if they allude to something wild that has been tamed, measured in time, and gilded into the confines of an unnatural technology, as in Twelve Months Time (2005), but in fact, this sculptural graph of a Pittisporum plant in bloom and recession is all construct. It is entirely man-made, from the idea of weed to the technology that holds the recast plants themselves.

None of this redescription or redefinition takes away from the tiny sublimity of Penn's work. As each thorn, each opening bud, each plant going to seed, is replicated in fine metal sculptures, the artist's intricate metalsmithing skills are abundantly clear. Even so, the tensions change. Penn's work no longer illustrates the difference between technology and nature but rather how both are tools from the same toolbox: constructs we use and invent to order the world according to our preferences and our tendencies. As work like Beverly Penn's helps to, at least, resituate and, at most, redefine the nature vs. technology dichotomy, it is interesting to think how simple redefinitions might help us rethink other basic dyads, like man vs. woman, foreigner vs. native, even legal warfare vs. terrorism. If "weeds are people's idea," then what else might we be oversimplifying?

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"Take Me to Bed or Lose Me Forever"
Volitant Gallery, through Dec. 30

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, December 22, 2006

It is the one line from Top Gun that almost everyone remembers: When Goose's wife says, "Take me to bed or lose me forever," he follows with "Show me the way home, honey." And if you don't remember what comes next, Volitant's current group show will help jog your memory. Each work shows the way through blissful beds, bedders, and the unhappily bedded alike, employing and questioning many of love's clichés. Under the curatorial direction of Leona Scull-Hons, "Take Me to Bed …" reminds us that between life and death there is at least love, in its many variations. In Bunnyphonic's coy pairing of apple and inchworm on two separated 78rpm records, we see the unending song of love at play: the desire to absorb, to possess, to even eat the object of your desires and make it part of you. In Candace Briceño's exuberant tented love shack, oozing, scalloped red, pink, and purple carpets map out the space of utopic union, while balloons and ribbons lilt above this house of bliss.

All in this exhibition is not candy and roses, however: In Sarah Voglewede's Come Play With Me, which might best be described as an oversized valentine's box of the type we made in class in the third grade, the invitation to love and to play is given form and matter. Stepping into the box, complete with a pink heart-shaped door, the viewer is presented with an endearing little piano, marked with stickers faded and curled by what were once, hopefully, loving hands. The scene and the experience pulls you in, until the moment you acquiesce, breaking all of your own gallery hands-off inhibitions, and finally put your own hands to the little piano keys only to find there is no sound. The piano is broken, and the invitation rings surprisingly hollow.

On the subject of hollowness, Jeff Hauger's work examines the economies of love in a series of very clever documents filled sometimes with formal jargon and other times with the confessions of the lovestruck, signing away one's very soul to an unseen lover in return. In Hauger's description of the materials used to make the piece he calls Emily Marquadet's Soul, "pins" and "star dust" file in alongside "one soul" and "shadow box with lock and key." As Emily writes out the promising of her soul -- an object, as she notes, the existence of which is as yet unconfirmed by science -- the use of blue pen on notebook paper throws us back to our own endless middle-school notes, written in undying love to the latest crush. The price of her soul, however, has a number attached to it, reminding us of the trade, the gift with many strings attached that love often makes of us and itself.

Overall, "Take Me to Bed or Lose Me Forever," like so many of our experiences of love, is a penetrating reflection on our highest heights and our lowest absurdities. It is a smile and a good laugh, and it might end before you realize it was ever here to begin with.

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EVR: e-flux video rental
Arthouse at the Jones Center, through Jan. 7

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, December 22, 2006

At a time when we all might have thought that video rental was becoming passé, taken over by online video streaming and Netflix, the self-described "New York-based information bureau" e-flux presents a joint opening of three such rental locations in Austin, Istanbul, and the Canary Islands. An interesting assortment of apparently unrelated choices, to be sure … which is something that might initially be said of the e-flux video rental (EVR) project itself, since its video holdings snowball from city to city as area curators add their favorite and often obscure pieces of video art to the EVR mix. But while it may seem random to have Austin curators such as Risa Puleo and Annette Carlozzi contribute any films they choose to the project as part of its two-month stay at Arthouse, it does in fact serve a real purpose: EVR was conceived by e-flux as a collaborative enterprise, and contributions from every site where it's stationed broaden the number of participants in the project, just as the movement of sites and librarylike policy of "renting" the videos -- in short, it's free -- ensures an ever-expanding audience of viewers. This ongoing expansion creates a dynamic map of contributors and participants that mirrors our own culture of increasingly inter-netted lives. With a simple sign-up process and a notecard membership, all of us sign our names into e-flux's own reconfiguration of the networks we embody on a daily basis.

But EVR is much more than that as well: For interested viewers who aren't ready to commit to the two-day return policy, EVR offers on-site TV/VCR combos that bring back all the best trappings of video rental culture. In fact, just after choosing between the cushy couch or the beanbags, I was quickly reminded why those "please rewind" stickers were used by so many video stores. The films are arranged in alphabetical order by artist, and a numbered guide to the collection lets you pick out films based upon who recommended them. After grabbing Carlozzi's pick of "Saberverv&etilde;encias," I sat down to screen "Hello, Ms. Schnitt." With Austin's EVR located just inside the glass front of Arthouse, watching this terrific five-minute flick by Corinna Schnitt was a double experience of both viewing and being viewed. Friendly and curious smiles of passersby reminded me that Arthouse's window serves as a screen itself. As more and more lunch-goers passed the building and glanced inside, one stopped to ask, "What is this place?" While the gallery attendant had a helpful answer, I wondered how she could honestly begin to explain that this art gallery, currently Austin's EVR, was a chance not only to see some very interesting, hard-to-find pieces of film and video art in what was once an emerging technology but also to participate in a study of our own patterns of communication -- of information flow and networking by immersion. It is a chance to check out of the world around you, and into it, all in the very act of renting or viewing a film.

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"The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984"
Austin Museum of Art, through Jan. 28

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, December 29, 2006

"The Downtown Show" formally begins in 1974 with the passing of the Loft Law, which enabled artists to lawfully live in the city lofts of SoHo, and ends in 1984 with the re-election of President Reagan. Within these bookends arose a culture of difference -- of radical challenge, performance, found art, identity politics -- whose experimentation still surprises, shocks, and stimulates. In this exhibition, what the Austin Museum of Art, in partnership with the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, presents is not only a rich and wild retrospective on the time that put New York art on the map; it also serves a young city like Austin as a bit of a how-to guide for raising the stakes and standards on our own artistic creativity.

Not that what happened in New York then could ever be reproduced: Compared to the raw, first-run rebellion of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, and Gordon Matta-Clark, attempts at imitation would only look like failed sequels. As "The Downtown Show" curatorial setup illustrates with section titles like Interventions, Salon de Refuse, the Mock Shop, and Body Politics, myriad factors in place at the time helped create and grow New York's crowning artistic movements. Reaching from the photography of Tseng Kwong Chi to the artist publication Top Stories to public-access television and the possibilities opened up by its arrival, this show homes in on the ways in which the artists of the burgeoning downtown scene continually sought to appropriate and mix up perceived splits between established artistic genres. Anything and everything was up for new scrutiny, from the formerly private categorization of gender roles to the increasingly public New World. Therefore, while early feminist pieces by Hannah Wilke, including performance pieces and photography, began to set the stage for post-feminist art, performance art by Matt Mullican, represented here by photos from Under Hypnosis taken during a performance at New York's Kitchen, illustrated the nation's search for experiences of the sublime, no doubt inspired by the nuclear threat of the Cold War.

As the work of these artists conveys part of the "what" that the downtown scene artists were expressing, and the entire exhibit sets the scene and establishes a sense of "where," so the more intimate and at times bizarre portraits and photos within the Portrait Gallery section remind us candidly of the "who" -- the personalities that still come to mind as some of New York's most edgy artists and art supporters. For American art enthusiasts and collectors, being in this room is like looking through a lost photo album from your childhood and finding that your favorite figures and characters were there all along.

In a way that elicits both nostalgia and awe, the overall effect of the show is almost patriotic: It is a look at what was startling about America in the 1970s and early Eighties, as it was created by artists from around the world who flocked to the blooming magnet of the Big Apple. It is an appreciation of the radical thought and freedom of action that made the U.S. the young revolutionary that it was to so many people in that time -- in all its rebellion, in its critiques, in its amazing creative production, and in its clever talents for bringing something new and radical to debates of all kinds, which reached into all places.

" Abstract Expressionism, 1940s-1960s"
Austin Museum of Art, through Jan. 28

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, December 29, 2006

Oil on canvas: a combination that has been used to honor kings and tyrants, to glorify empires, and has even been described as a tool to reveal truth itself. With this history, these two material elements of paint and support couldn't have been more firmly established, more installed in the hierarchy. When imitation was still the sincerest form of flattery, oil and canvas were never far behind. Yet sometime around the early part of the 20th century, with the rise of Freud and the establishment of psychology as a field of inquiry, the process of painterly representation began to move from outside events and landscapes to the inner scapes of the artist's mind. This shift meant that the "real" subject of painterly compositions was no longer seen as an outside object to be reproduced and admired in a work of art. The "real" took very different interpretations: It was in the territory of the mind, and it was in the material substance of the oil as pigment and the canvas as flat plane.

In the opening description of the Austin Museum of Art's current "Radical NY!" show, James Housefield eloquently quotes the mood that made artwork like that of Jackson Pollock and the de Koonings possible: "We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." Or as Harold Rosenberg stated, "What was to go on canvas was not a picture but an event." This event, this combination of action and materials, culminated in the drip paintings of Pollock, which were preceded by the drawings on exhibition in the half of "Radical NY!" titled "Abstract Expressionism, 1940s-1960s." These fine drawings, musings, and wanderings are something between doodles and intentional pen marks. They keenly illustrate the shift that was taking place in Pollock's work and in the New York art scene of his contemporaries. Another illustration of art as event arrives in the form of a group of works by Norman Bluhm and Frank O'Hara that grew out of an afternoon shared between this painter and the poet, who illustrate one another as they illustrate the events of living in word pictures and movement in paint.

The paintings by Willem and Elaine Fried de Kooning also mark the rising shift between representation and abstraction: In his Woman paintings, Willem de Kooning was betraying both camps -- making reference to the female form yet flattening that form into the work of paint on a plane, in sensuous colors and brush strokes. Elaine's striking painting included here is a vibrant flare of abstract colors and movement, underlaying a black line painting of a bull. In the pairing of this husband's and wife's work, gender representations which would later mark major movements of New York's downtown scene are just beginning to emerge. In this way, the exhibition is at once a stand-alone illustration of a pivotal and defining time in American art, with New York as its epicenter, and a prelude to the continued explosions of radical artistic energy that marked New York throughout the 20th century.

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