Blanton nets national award

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, January 3, 2008

The Blanton Museum of Art has received the award for Best Thematic Show Nationally from the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics for “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.”

The exhibition was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, the Blanton’s curator of Latin American art. After its debut last spring at the Blanton, a smaller variant of the exhibit traveled to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery during the fall.

The award will be presented at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in March.

The U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics annually invites its 400 active members — of which yours truly is a member — to nominate and vote for outstanding exhibitions of the previous season. The group is the only organization to formally recognize excellence in this cultural arena. Members like to think that the annual awards are the art world equivalent to those given by the New York Film Critics Circle or the Drama Desk.

“Geometry” featured more than 125 works by 40 artists all drawn from the Cisneros collection, arguably the best private collection of mid-20th-century Latin American abstract art. Perez-Barreiro and his curatorial team organized the show around the cosmopolitan art capitals of South America where from the 1930s through the 1970s a dynamic, logic-inspired abstract visual language developed.

As part of the educational programming surrounding the exhibit, the Blanton developed an interesting online version of the exhibition.

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'Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97'
Austin Museum of Art - Downtown, through Feb. 3

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
January 11, 2008

Do you remember your first movie - your first encounter with characters both larger than life and yet somehow just like you? If you left the film inspired, admiring, more knowledgeable, or, in the case of horror, scared, you are probably in the majority. But how often have you left a film feeling mechanically coerced? More than likely coercion is not why you paid to sit before the big screen, but according to many contemporary philosophers and film theorists, the movie industry is a culture industry, a desiring machine that slowly but steadily teaches you how to desire, what to desire, and when to desire it. And we're not talking about adult films or films on power and relationships; we're talking about every movie from Psycho to Bambi. Apparently, it works by repeatedly packaging emotions, scenarios, personas, and combinations in ways that are both familiar and seemingly "natural." Then these tacit clichés map out every facet of our lives, from what to eat to how to love.

But historically, movies were not the only media to bring the culture industry to the general public. "Roy Lichtenstein Prints 1956-97" suggests the role that comic books and other pop-culture graphic arts played and still play in setting standards for our hopes and desires. Showing off more than 70 prints and a career's worth of work, this Washington State University traveling exhibition, currently at the Austin Museum of Art, demonstrates how Lichtenstein employed and advanced printing techniques to explore how cliché in pop culture, with aid from various mechanistic technological advancements, helped form these desires. In works such as his famous Crying Girl (1963) and others, Lichtenstein constructs "images of beauty" from the calculated use of techniques employed by comic-book illustrators: three primary colors, Benday dots, and carefully placed black lines. When asked about his own susceptibility to the beauties he created, Lichtenstein replied that to him they are "really made up of black lines and red dots. I see it that abstractly, that it's very hard to fall for one of these creatures, to me, because they're not really reality to me." Yet the enduring contemporary power of Lichtenstein's work matches back up with media studies and philosophy precisely at the point where we recognize that our everyday assumptions and constructions are often little more than a series of lines and dots that we learn to connect over time, over books, over film, over art, and even over comics.

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'Jorge Macchi: The Anatomy of Melancholy'
Blanton Museum of Art, through March 16

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
January 11, 2008

Blanton Museum of Art curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro surveys a little more than 15 years of Jorge Macchi's art with "The Anatomy of Melancholy," a spare exhibition that positions the artist as creating a "third space" between conceptual art and expressionist painting. More than 40 pieces in collage, sculpture, photography, and video provide the first comprehensive overview of Macchi's work presented in the United States. Originally organized for the sixth Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the show stops in Austin before heading to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

The formal simplicity of Macchi's work may draw comparisons with conceptual art, but it also brings to mind the poets Charles Baudelaire and André Breton, among other observers of the modern city's utter strangeness. Like the poets, Macchi explores the power of chance operations, the revelations of aimless walks, and - as the exhibition title suggests - the melancholy of everyday life.

Take Buenos Aires Tour, an artist book produced in collaboration with the writer María Negroni and the composer Edgardo Rudnitzky. Macchi allowed the lines of a broken glass to dictate the tour's itinerary through Buenos Aires, the artist's hometown. Texts, photographs, and sound illuminate points along each path, which draw eight jagged lines across the map. The virtual tour, explored largely via CD-ROM, eschews typical tourist sights in favor of banal spaces. In the spirit of Baudelaire's flaneur, it's a particular kind of stroll through the city: one not meant to reach a specific destination but taken simply for the sake of experience.

Other pieces evoke the city's alienation as much as they comment upon the human condition. A series of newspaper obituary notices, cut so that only a black frame topped with a cross remains, is collaged into a pile that resembles an apartment building in Monoblock (Tower Block) - an elegant memento mori. Vidas Paralelas (Parallel Lives) combines two panes of mirror glass broken in exactly the same places, with identical fragments removed. A manufactured coincidence, the broken mirrors nevertheless suggest loneliness and isolation, since two parallel lines (or lives) never meet.

Existential questions are balanced by a more playful mood elsewhere in the exhibition. The video Caja de Música (Music Box) features a stream of cars shot from above, with the camera positioned on a highway overpass. Macchi assigned a musical tone to each lane, which sounds every time a car passes through it. The result is an automotive tune that transforms traffic, a typically depressing feature of the urban landscape, into a delight.

"The Anatomy of Melancholy" has some rough spots: Two videos that draw on the conventions of film - La Flecha de Zenón (Xeno's Arrow) and Fim de Film (End of the Film) - complement each other but ultimately fall flat. And as one critic noted a few years ago, it is easy to overlook Macchi's work. His art is not spectacular. Macchi barely employs color. Often, his pieces are relatively small. Yet the artist has built a body of work rich in other ways. It may not grab you immediately, but such understated lyricism will linger.

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Catherine Lee
Moving fluidly through the landscape

By Rachel Cook
Austin Chronicle
January 18, 2008

Catherine Lee grew up in the Panhandle plains of Texas and spent the last 30 years in New York City. Recently, the acclaimed artist came back to Texas and decided, of all the places she could live, the Hill Country was where she felt most at home. Now, Lee has a pair of prominent projects showing locally: a two-person exhibition with Bodo Korsig at D Berman Gallery, opening this week, and the display of her work Raku Amends at the Blanton Museum of Art.

Lee's work is rooted in minimalism and postminimalism, but there's nothing minimal about the abstract language she creates using colors and forms. Lee moves between various sculptural mediums and processes: everything from raku ceramics and fiberglass to bronze, concrete, and steel - sometimes within the same piece. Looking at the work, her choice of colors and sense of texture took me back to high school art assignments, arranging various shapes of different colors into compositions, as well as finding pieces of American Indian pottery in Pot Creek, N.M. - a primitive language of utilitarian objects and symbolic shapes left behind.

The connection between Lee's sculptural work and a place is not apparent on first glance. But after spending a day visiting her studio in Wimberley, I was stunned by the way Lee moves fluidly through the landscape, walking her dogs by the Blanco River, noticing the shapes of the cypress tree trunk and roots, which relate to the shapes and language in her work. After the visit, she spoke to the Chronicle about her career, her process, and what she's learned.

Austin Chronicle: Can you talk about the two current projects in Austin and how they came about?

Catherine Lee: [Bodo Korsig] and I have known each other since the Nineties. We have been discussing ideas and art for years, hence the title of the show, "Exchange." Raku Amends just went on view at the Blanton Museum of Art. The piece is in their huge and glorious foyer, so it's the first thing you see when you enter the museum. I have kept my profile very low for the last 13 years in Texas, because this was my retreat from the art world, a place where I could just work. I can make things here that aren't allowed in Manhattan: welding, casting, kiln firings, etc. Everything I do seems to be fire-related, none of which was too popular with my neighbors in New York City. Now that I live in Texas full-time, it feels like the right time to share my work with this amazing community.

AC: How do you construct a title, and what do you like to get across with it?

CL: Titles are the fun part; all the rest is work. They almost always come after the piece is completed and not during the actual making of a work. Once the piece is finished, my relationship to it changes and a certain respectful distance develops. It may sound odd, but if the piece were not complete, then that sense of respect or worthiness wouldn't occur at all. I would have to keep working on it. Sometimes that is how I know when a thing is finished. Once complete, a title will reveal itself to me.

Most of my titles are a bit oblique. For example, the Hebrides sculptures: To me, it is relevant that these were spawned in the Outer Hebrides, [Scotland], where there are some amazing Stonehenge-like structures and massive menhirs [standing stones]. They are not meant to mimic any of these things, they are not representational, but they address that sense of awe I felt when I was there. In another series called the Clad Sentinels, I think they contain a sense of sentries standing guard, and the raku-fired ceramic facets that cover them are akin to armor, as if they are samurai or medieval warriors. To someone else, they might seem like ghosts, fence posts, or a dream they once had; you never know. We see what we need to see.

AC: After being an artist for more than 30 years, what keeps you inspired each day? And do you have any advice for the younger generation?

CL: Wow! OK, yes, advice. If you don't have to make art - and I mean really, really have to - then don't. You will spend years doing a thankless task, and maybe one day it'll be recognized, maybe not. It's only if you are compelled to make something that that kind of risk makes any sense at all, and even then it doesn't. Also, you can't do it part-time, though we all have to in the beginning, of course. But in the end, you have to give it everything you have, or else you'll end up making decorations and not art. There are other more important and noble things to be done anyway. My mother was an RN, and I have a sister who is an ER nurse, and I see every day how great a service they provide to this world. And yet I have to do this, so I do.

Staying inspired is never the problem; what I need are breaks. At 57, I realize there's no way I'll ever get it all done, never finish, never catch up, so I'm always at it. Sometimes I wish I could take a vacation, but my work just follows me around wherever I go. Artists don't really get weekends. And retirement? Forget it. What I do, making art, for me it's a good thing and a necessary thing.

"Exchange: Catherine Lee and Bodo Korsig" is on view Jan. 17-Feb. 23 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe. For more information, visit www.dbermangallery.com.

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'Donna Huanca: Secret Museum of Mankind'
Women & Their Work, through Feb. 16

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
January 18, 2008

Even before Lizzie Wetzel's performance, a smoke machine, incense, and drumbeats made the opening night of Donna Huanca's "Secret Museum of Mankind" at Women & Their Work feel more like an esoteric ritual than a reception for an art exhibition. The University of Houston alumna jam-packed the gallery with a series of installations that loosely reference pre-Columbian civilizations, 20th century Cuban rebels, psychedelic rock bands, and New Age spirituality. Each vignette fluctuates between a diorama and a stage, where viewers and performers alike activate the space.

The gallery is roughly divided into three parts that overlay past, present, and future. The video I'm Leaving and the felt diptych Cuban Rebels and Papauly represent events from the lives of Huanca's parents. The former echoes her mother's flight from Bolivia to the United States through satellite footage familiar from TV weather reports, while the latter focuses on the time the artist's father spent in the Bolivian army. In two mural-sized wall hangings, Huanca treats scraps of felt like paint, layering boldly colored swatches to depict two groups of figures based on photographs in her father's collection. On one side, men dressed in uniforms hover over a fallen solider. On the other, the rebels pose in front of a campfire. It's the right balance of artificiality and realism - combined with the dense hue of textiles - that makes these figures almost pop off the wall and also makes Cuban Rebels and Papauly one of the best pieces in the show.

Memories/Past includes two sets of near-life-size puppets situated on either side of a painted stepped pyramid. In this vignette, Huanca ruminates on events from her own life, with characters that include a plush version of her dog. The puppets prompt activation via imagination, turning this portion of "Secret Museum of Mankind" into something like a children's museum.

The gallery's central space has been given over to stage sets for ritual acts. A mound of dirt speared with sticks of incense and covered in spices sits in front of a large black circle painted on the wall. Nearby, white blocks form a pit that spews artificial smoke. A large installation on the back wall combines bones, crystals, colored powders, and found objects to evoke a glowing grotto where Wetzel, one of Huanca's collaborators, cavorted on opening night. This part of the show - which Huanca created with Wetzel and the artist Owl Eyes - functions well as a performance space, but compared with the high craft of the exhibition's other vignettes, it does not make for great visual art.

Much of what is here has been shown elsewhere, including the puppets and felt diptych. There is nothing wrong with resituating past projects to create something new; however, the combination of fully resolved art objects with temporary performance props is a little jarring and leaves viewers with a lot to process. "Secret Museum of Mankind" is not a tight show but certainly an ambitious one.

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'Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn': Activism disguised as art

By Barry Pineo
Austin Chronicle
January 25, 2008

Unless you're a moron, morally blind, or possibly a Republican, it's easy to see, in both the microcosm and the macrocosm, that as a nation and a people we are becoming more and more isolated from one another and from the world. While the party line focuses on diversity and acceptance, anyone who has ever hung around the halls of a high school can tell you that those who differ from the norm are ridiculed and shut out. We don't know our neighbors, and if we do, we probably don't like them. And despite the sniggling innuendos of conservative editorialists, anyone with half a brain and the ability to sense changes in the weather knew the world was getting a lot hotter 10 and even 15 years ago. We're in denial, folks. We have been for a long time, and no landscape is more barren than the landscape of denial.

Thank the powers that be, then, for individuals like Fritz Haeg. An architect/artist/teacher, Haeg began his attack on denial July 4, 2005, by launching his Edible Estates project, replacing a residential front lawn in Salina, Kan., the geographical center of the U.S., with a vegetable garden. Since then, Haeg has done the same in Los Angeles, New Jersey, and London, and this coming March, in conjunction with an exhibition at Arthouse opening this week, Haeg will plant his fifth such garden in front of a residence in the Austin area.

"Why are we attacking lawns?" asks Arthouse curator Elizabeth Dunbar. "Why not? They suck up lots of water, and there's chemical runoff. And there are a host of other issues associated with having a front lawn. For the most part, the lawn is nothing more than a decorative space with no real function other than just sitting there and sometimes being pretty. A lot of times it isn't even that.

"Edible gardens weren't really considered something to hide until fairly recently. Fritz is reversing that trend by putting them in the front yard, making them functional, making them aesthetic, and also making them sites of conversation and social interaction. At the same time, he's asking us to think about where our food comes from. Most of our produce is shipped something like 1,500 miles before it gets to us in stores. Fritz wants to inspire people to become more involved in thinking about where their food comes from and considering what kind of environmental and sociological impacts food production has on our world today.

"In a way, Fritz's project is social activism wrapped in the guise of art. I think he really expands the definition of what art can be. Fritz also fits in with many other artists who are working today in what is called relational aesthetics, whose artworks consist of working within communities and involving themselves in facilitating social interactions."

In addition to the Arthouse exhibition, which will feature photographic and video documentation from the Edible Estates project, a series of workshops titled How to Eat Austin will be held every Saturday, 3-5pm, in a large geodesic tent inside Arthouse's main gallery space. The workshops will focus on subjects such as composting, planting, and caring for a garden; cooking the food you grow; and possibilities for selling what you grow. Haeg will attend the workshop on Jan. 26, as well as return to Austin for another of the workshops and, of course, the planting of the garden itself.

"Friz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn" runs Jan. 26-March 16 at Arthouse, 700 Congress. For more information, call 453-5312 or visit www.arthousetexas.org.

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