POP goes the easel
Roy Lichtenstein's art helped people to accept mass media as 'high culture'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, December 06, 2007

Got Pop?

You do even if you don't realize it.

Sure, Pop Art was a shock when it popped in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The egalitarian convergence of "high culture" and "low culture," the enthusiastic embrace of mass media - that was all radically different from the artistic status quo that privileged certain kinds of creative production and certain kinds of artistic subjects over others.

And Pop hasn't stopped popping. In fact, the way in which Pop re-configured the common artistic consciousness more than half a century ago is alive and well in the first decade of the 21st century. Nowadays, we don't much question that the common stuff and trivia of everyday life can be the subject of fine art.

But in the early 1960s, after a decade of the intensely private, self-involved art of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, a new creative sensibility began to celebrate popular culture and mass culture as fodder for artistic inspiration. Instead of their own navel-gazing existential crisis, a new crop of artists preferred to embrace the very common world of consumer culture with a sense of humor and irony.

No wonder "Roy Lichtenstein Prints, 1956-97," now on view at the Austin Museum of Art, feels so familiar. With more than 70 works of art - lithographs, screenprints, woodcuts and collages - the exhibit arguably brings to Austin the best opportunity in recent memory to dive deep into the work of the Pop master.

That comic-inspired paintings featuring strong outlines, primary colors and Benday dot patterns (the kind used in commercial printing processes) are worthy of museum display wasn't always the case. In 1964 Life magazine published a story about Lichtenstein titled "Is He The Worst Artist in the U.S.?" Even though by then he had been successfully selling his work to forward-thinking collectors, not everyone knew what to make of the new art that Lichtenstein and his peers - among them Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist - were busy creating. Suddenly Campbell's soup cans and F-111 fighter-bombers were the subjects of paintings.

The stage was primed for such artists to merge the high and low.

A booming postwar economy gave new buying power to all strata of society: More people than ever had the means to buy a house, a car, appliances and newly invented consumer goods such as televisions. The growing economic prosperity led to a new appreciation of the people and the popular. Eating hamburgers and apple pie, reading comic books and idolizing movies stars and first ladies - all that got the green light. By 1962, nearly 90 percent of U.S. households had a TV, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising, and hordes of images from around the world were streamed right into people's personal private space. Formerly distant and exotic places, people and events, including space flights and presidential funerals, were no longer out of sight and out of reach.

That kind of ready accessibility to images and information began to send fissures into the bedrock that separated high culture and low culture. The world was starting to get flat. The elite, subjective, self-involved art of and for the few was challenged by the demand for a broader-based culture.

The social revolution of the 1960s only added more fuel to the breakdown between high culture and low. Traditional was no good any more. Challenging conventions, kicking prudery off its pedestal and scoffing at formality were the hallmarks of progress. All this in a society increasingly characterized by excess, affluence and the easy availability of things.

Artists such as Lichtenstein responded not so much with a blind celebration of common culture but with a new way of recognizing what was important about it; mainly that popular culture was important. Mass culture images became equal in value to natural images. A baked potato or a glass of Alka-Seltzer were no different - or less worthy as artistic subjects - than clouds in the sky.

We're still full of Pop sensibility of merging high culture and low today. Maybe even more so, even if we don't consciously realize it.

The Internet has exponentially broadened accessibility to images and information. Art is less remote than ever before: Virtually visiting a museum anywhere in the world can be done from a laptop in a coffee shop. For that matter, the museum-building boom of the past decade has meant bigger and higher profile arts venues popping up around the world that draw crowds to highly publicized blockbuster exhibits.

In Austin, 65,000 people headed to the Austin City Limits Music Festival this year; more than 77,000 made their way to the Austin Museum of Art. What were two of the final projects for this year's Arthouse Texas Prize, the glossy $30,000 award given by the Austin arts organization to an emerging Texas artist? A tractor made of clay and a giant Stealth fighter-bomber piñata. And among the 20 emerging Austin artists selected for the next "New Art From Austin," the Austin Museum of Art's triennial exhibit, is Buster Graybill who uses everything from automated deer corn feeders to inner-tubes to create his site-specific sculpture.

No wonder Lichtenstein seems right at home here.

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'WorkSpace: Paul Ramirez Jonas'
Blanton Museum of Art, through Feb. 3

By Rachel Cook
Austin Chronicle
December 7, 2007

Is patriotism something we believe in anymore?

With statements like "This land is your land," "I solemnly swear to tell the truth," and "My fellow Americans," Paul Ramirez Jonas confronts patriotism and our sense of Americana in his current installation in the Blanton Museum of Art's WorkSpace. Ramirez Jonas is fascinated with history and American-ness. In a somewhat cramped space, there are multiple sculptures referencing analog vs. digital technology in an interactive, performative installation.

Ramirez Jonas draws on famous Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges as a point of departure for the show: "Reading, obviously, is an activity which comes after that of writing; it is more modest, more unobtrusive, more intellectual." In each of the sculptures, the artist uses various pieces of patriotic texts as jumping-off points, from lyrics to a song to a courtroom oath to a prompt that begins many State of the Union addresses. While these texts carry a certain amount of weight - ironically, the texts themselves are on pieces of clay, like the Ten Commandments - Ramirez Jonas attempts to breathe new life into them by turning on the microphone in front of them with the hope that the viewer will utter the words in public. I admit to feeling a bit bizarre standing in the middle of a museum repeating into a microphone, "Do you solemnly swear that you will consider all the evidence in this case, follow the instructions given to you, deliberate fairly and impartially, and reach a fair verdict? So help you God?" or "Is this land made for you and me?"

Each object is filled with various electronic components alongside traditional sculptural components. One of the standouts is a copy machine that has made copies from clay tablets of a religious survey, where one of the questions is: "Which of the following items best describes your belief in God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit?" You are supposed to circle one of the options: believe in, not sure, don't believe in, or unsure. I felt like I was back in religion class at the Catholic school I went to, taking multiple-choice tests on my belief system. It all seems like something out of the Fifties. Another piece is a clay sculpture of a video-camera teleprompter placed on a modeling stand with text coming off the prompter stating, "My fellow Americans." It is an interesting juxtaposition of a traditional technique of clay modeling with the media-driven political machine that a teleprompter represents.

The pieces that fall flat, or rather, don't activate in the same manner are the video and piano pieces, Wh_r_ Hav_ All th_ Flow_rs Gon_. Maybe because I am not a musician, and I am not quite sure what the significance of the missing C-note is, but it feels like something is missing in the piece itself. A piano with the C-note missing from it sits on one side of the wall as you enter the space, and you, the viewer, are invited to play along to the video that is playing a song without the C-note.

Maybe it is all this election banter that is going on right now before the Iowa caucus, but the sculptural pieces that reference political or religious elements are the most resolved and frankly need more space surrounding them for the type of interaction to happen, especially in a museum setting like this one. Ramirez Jonas leaves us to question our own notions of patriotism and our sense of American-ness. How fitting for this time to pose such a thought.

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'Alice In Wonderland': Drawn down the rabbit hole again

By Barry Pineo
Austin Chronicle
December 14, 2007

At the base of a large tree, on a seemingly massive mushroom, sits a caterpillar, all hot-blue malevolence and thin, white horns. Body curving downward, he holds a smoking hookah away from him like an extension of his arms. Below him at the base of the mushroom, on a twig springing from the ground, stands a girl in a pale, soft, blue dress who seems to float in the air, her long full blond hair falling neatly at the base of her neck. One of close to 50 pieces that will appear in the Wally Workman Gallery's group show "Alice in Wonderland," Leslie Sealey's oil is most striking for what it does not reveal: Because she stands with her back to us, we cannot see the young girl's face.

Twice a year at her gallery on West Sixth, Wally Workman hosts group shows with the artists she represents. Last year, for the first time, Workman did a show for the holidays. It was titled "Red," and each artist did a painting with a little, a lot, or no red in it at all. At around the same time, Workman met local mixed-media artist Sheri Tornatore.

"I've been into literature for a long time," says Tornatore, "and thus my obsession with Lewis Carroll. People who are Lewis Carroll fans tend to be pretty hardcore. There's a pretty big cult. I'm not really qualified to be in the cult, because there's a big Lewis Carroll society in the world that I'm not a part of. But I think people who tend to be into Lewis Carroll tend to be very, very into him, if not over the top." Tornatore decided to do a series of sculptures based on Carroll's perennially popular characters. "I constructed them from thrifted items. I finished them about eight years ago but never showed them. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician, and time is a big issue for Alice. So I went around to thrift stores for a couple of years, gathering different teapots that I wanted to use and different clocks. They're built up, so some of them look like they might fall over. Sort of precariously balanced."

Workman saw Tornatore's sculptures and found the theme for her next Christmas show, asking each of her artists to participate. Most of them have, contributing Wonderland-inspired images in pastel, acrylic, watercolor, and collage, as well as oil and 3-D mixed media. "It's a great theme," says Tornatore. "It's incredibly universal. Have you ever met anyone who doesn't know the story or wasn't touched by it somehow? I've seen one piece that Wally's going to use - you just see a little girl's legs, like she's upside-down and falling, like maybe falling into the hole. That's my interpretation of it. That's a neat piece."

"Alice in Wonderland" is on view through Jan. 6, at Wally Workman Gallery, 1202 W. Sixth. For more information, visit www.wallyworkman.com.

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Arthouse becomes art itself
German artist fills a gallery with nothing and everything.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, December 20, 2007

Florian Slotawa is teaching us all a very important object lesson.

Principally, he is reminding us that art can, and should, be about so much more than objects: Ultimately, art is about experience.

In "One After the Other" -- the first exhibit project spearheaded by Arthouse's new curator, Elizabeth Dunbar -- the Berlin-based Slotawa has re-imagined the historic building that Arthouse, a contemporary art center, calls home.

The result is quietly provocative.

With walls made of simple 2-inch-by-4-inch studs and wallboard, Slotawa reconfigured the interior of the Congress Avenue structure that started out as the Queen Theater in the 1920s and became a Lerner's department store in the 1950s. Rather than step into Arthouse's expansive galleries, which are capped by street-front floor-to-ceiling windows, visitors now make a circuitous journey through a sequence of spaces. Down a narrow hallway that runs the length of the building, around through the back, up again toward the front of the building and through a trio of rooms, the enormous street-front windows blocked by Slotawa's white walls.

Empty rooms as art? Absolutely. Slotawa provides spaces that are pleasantly devoid of objects, whose blank white walls recede from attention and allow the subtle architectural details of the building to come into focus.

There are plenty of delightful details to notice. When the building was renovated and converted to its current use in 1998, Dallas architect Gary Cunningham didn't erase all its layers. And now Slotawa's current intervention sharpens our focus on those details. Like a palimpsest, the polished concrete floor reveals markings left from tilework. Painted ornate trompe l'oeil designs -- remnants from the Queen Theater days -- often unnoticed in a low-lit hallway to the restrooms, now pop under brighter lighting. Elsewhere a portion of the building's 19th-century limestone north wall, shared with the historic building next door, is revealed in all its glory, rough-cut blocks and all.

But perhaps Slotawa's most suggestive gesture is the plywood staircase that leads up through an opening to the second floor. Budget constraints of the first renovation didn't allow Arthouse to finish the massive high-ceilinged second floor for public use. Plans for a $3 million renovation call for the second floor to be converted into galleries. But in the meantime, Slotawa gives us a little perch to contemplate the glorious empty space, its walls still bearing the outlines of theater balcony steps.

Slotawa is deft in his consideration of objects. After all, this is the artist who made a thoughtful project of de-possessing himself of his possessions. For several years, he meticulously catalogued and photographed all of his modest belongings, carefully constructing temporary installations of them, some of which towered over large galleries. Then not long ago, an adventurous collector approached Slotawa about purchasing all of his belongings. Slotawa thus sold his clothes, his furniture, his kitchen appliances, his car and even his childhood mementos.

We could all take a lesson from Slotawa in jettisoning our attachment to objects. And given that the contemporary art market is of late flush with new money, grabbing headlines with record-setting prices and taking on more than a slight tinge of celebrity and high-priced commercialism, Slotawa's "anti-object" approach feels refreshing.

Just say no to more stuff.

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Reflections in a Blank Wall
Florian Slotawa's exhibition tells us more about Arthouse than the artist

By Rachel Cook
Austin Chronicle
December 21, 2007

Sometimes an artist imports his practice into a space to create what is typically referred to as a site-specific installation. He utilizes the actual walls of the exhibition space as elements within the installation, adding or subtracting elements, shifting walls, floors, or even ceilings to create a world filled with his colors, sounds, movements, and textures. Acting much more along the lines of a theatrical designer or art director in a film, the artist brings his installation to life in the exhibition space. Yet sometimes an artist comes into a space by infiltrating it from the inner structure out, not only rearranging objects but also confronting the edifice and logic put into place by the institution itself.

Berlin-based Florian Slotawa gets to the core of the organization Arthouse with his first U.S. solo exhibition, "One After the Other," currently on view in the organization's home at 700 Congress. What might at first seem like a blank show with no tangible work is, in fact, Slotawa's sleight of hand: the artist shifting the architecture of the galleries' walls, cutting an opening in the ceiling, blocking the traditional entrance of the exhibition space. He peels back the layers of the wall to expose the past and then creates a portal through the ceiling into the future - all of which forces the organization to look at itself both structurally and historically. The building where Arthouse is located has a long history on the 700 block of Congress. It has been there since 1851 - predating both the state Capitol, which was completed in 1888, and the University of Texas, on which construction began in 1882. First, the building was home to a drugstore, Tobin's; then, most notably, it housed one of the first movie theatres in Austin, L.L. Hegman's Queen Theater. Then, Lerner Shops, a women's department store, occupied the building for 40 years, until finally in 1995, the Texas Fine Arts Association (Arthouse's former name) purchased the building and turned it into a visual arts space.

From the moment you walk into Arthouse, Slotawa transforms your path, forcing you to travel to the back of the building to enter the exhibition. With this simple shift, he takes you back in time, past a mural on the wall from when Arthouse was the Queen. From there, he takes you through a maze of blank white walls in a bizarre configuration that has no exit except the way you entered; I found this slightly problematic because I wanted to be led out in a different direction. Eventually, you arrive in front of a wooden staircase leading to a small portal through which you may view the second floor of the building. The space is vacant now, but Arthouse is working with the design firm Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis to develop the building's upper levels into artists' studios, a 6,000-square-foot gallery, a multipurpose community room, and a rooftop terrace; it's where the future of Arthouse is going. Viewing the vast empty space while standing on the wooden staircase with half of your body in the space above and the other half still in the space below feels similar to entering a tree house that you can't climb all the way into. You are only allowed to imagine what it would feel like to explore and touch the walls filled with remnants of the past history of the building.

So in essence, Slotawa's site-specific installation extends beyond the walls of the exhibition area of Arthouse into the offices, the bathrooms, and rooftop, etc. Driving by, I find myself admiring the building as a whole and evaluating the plot of land that the building at 700 Congress occupies as one giant sculpture. One of Slotawa's most successful installations was in Germany at Bonner Kunstverein, an organization with very little in the way of resources but an enormous exhibition area. Slotawa told me that when he first visited the venue, he was struck by how congested the offices were and how much they had stacked and packed everywhere, so he decided to move the overcrowded administrative offices into the massive gallery space and put his exhibition in their moderate-sized office spaces. Slotawa seems to get himself into situations like this quite frequently; he'll be invited to do a show by an institution that perhaps has an idea or expectation of what he will create, and, almost to spite them, he'll take the equation and spin it on its head. With the exhibition described above, he not only made the organizers move their offices but also told them that while they were in this giant exhibition space, maybe they should throw out and organize some of their stuff. Maybe the artist becomes the best evaluator of the institution.

It is fitting for Arthouse to allow an artist to take over the entire building as a way to evaluate the organization as a whole. In choosing Slotawa for her debut as Arthouse's new curator, Elizabeth Dunbar has not only commissioned a bold new site-specific work; she has also helped create a clean slate in terms of Arthouse's curatorial focus. The organization that Arthouse grew out of was founded in 1911 to promote art activity throughout the state, so its focus then was supporting and promoting Texas art. As the state has changed over the decades, so has the organization's focus. In recent years, Arthouse has broadened its focus to contemporary art outside Texas as well as inside it, as seen through a programming mix of traveling shows, open juried exhibitions, annual fundraisers, and the biennial Arthouse Texas prize exhibition, with a relative handful of exhibitions curated in-house by key staff members, such as Regine Basha, who, during her four-year stint as adjunct curator, was responsible for such shows as "The Gospel of Lead: Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake" and "Daniel Bozhkov: Recent Works." While the blank walls and lack of intervention will most likely confuse viewers who walk through the space, this may be Dunbar's way of bringing the focus back to the organization itself and where it has been and where it is going. What does it mean "to promote the growth and appreciation of contemporary art" and "to deepen the public's understanding of contemporary art," as Arthouse's mission states? That's the question raised by this exhibition, and only time will tell how the organization will answer it.

"Florian Slotawa: One After the Other" is on view through Jan. 13 at Arthouse, 700 Congress. For more information, call 453-5312 or visit www.arthousetexas.org.

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'Double Vision: Chris Chappell and David Ohlerking'
Davis Gallery, through Jan. 5

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
December 28, 2007

In founding the Austin Figurative Project last year, artists Chris Chappell and David Ohlerking raised the profile of traditional painting in Austin. Their Eastside gallery mounts rapid-fire exhibitions of work by member artists, who paint quickly from live models. Two painters working from the same subject can end up with radically different canvases, a circumstance that highlights each artist's particular style. This is the premise behind "Double Vision," Chappell and Ohlerking's two-person show at Davis Gallery.

Take the two paintings of Third & Chicon, where Austin Figurative Gallery is located. Both artists paint in oil on Masonite, which gives their work a baseline similarity. But in addition to their common subject matter, the similarities end there.

As is evident throughout the show, green and brown hues - dappled generously with white highlights - dominate Chappell's palette. His dynamic brushwork flows toward a vanishing point located two-thirds up from the bottom of the support, where sky and street meet in a haze of parked cars, asphalt, and yellow-green grass. The effect is comparable to the blurs of time-lapse photography; longer brushstrokes appear similar to the streaks of light generated by traffic in motion.

A striped crosswalk and a line of telephone poles help us to map Chappell's painting onto Ohlerking's, but the perspective is slightly different. In Ohlerking's painting, we see one less telephone pole and a fire hydrant surrounded by a spit of grass. It's as if the two artists worked side-by-side, slightly altering their respective points of view.

Ohlerking uses heavy outlines that make obvious his influences, including Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. This technique gives his paintings a jewellike, cloisonné appearance. Brighter colors govern a more limited palette than Chappell's, with blocks of pink, red, and green paint making up most of his streetscape.

The differences between the two paintings of Third & Chicon reveal two divergent "visions" and prompt a series of questions fundamental to art and its history: Where does an artist's style come from? What factors condition his peculiar way of viewing the world? And what might make one painter's painting more appealing to a viewer than the other? Here, the last question probably amounts more to personal taste than anything else; this viewer leans toward Ohlerking, but you can decide for yourself.

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