Blanton exhibit reveals lesser-known art passion of writer James Michener
'Exquisite Visions of Japan' showcases several centuries of Japanese woodblock prints.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, July 06, 2008

Here in Austin, best-selling author James A. Michener is remembered by art aficionados for the singular collection of 20th-century American paintings that he donated to the Blanton Museum of Art. An early supporter of the University of Texas museum (he began giving artwork as early as 1968), Michener also donated $10 million toward a new museum building.

But before the Pulitzer Prize winner amassed his American paintings collection, he busied himself with a very different art passion: Japanese woodblock prints.

Now, an exhibit culled from the Michener Collection at the Honolulu Academy of Arts lands at the Blanton, giving Austin a chance to see the other side of the collector and philanthropist who helped shape the Blanton. More than 50 prints spanning three centuries are featured in "Exquisite Visions of Japan" on view through Aug. 24.

The Honolulu Academy's Michener Collection boasts 5,400 prints the author bequeathed upon his death in 1997.

When Michener began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the late 1940s, it was hardly a fashionable pursuit. His service with the U.S. Navy in World War II and in the years afterward took him around the South Pacific and Japan, an experience that led to his discovery of the art form. Michener found the colorful, delicately rendered prints "one of the most totally delightful art forms ever devised ... its allurement infinite."

True to his methodical nature, Michener's research on the art form led to his 1954 book on the growth and decline of the Japanese woodblock prints, "The Floating World," one of the first full-length English-language studies on the subject.

The art of ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world," emerged at the beginning of the 1600s in the bustling metropolitan culture of Edo (modern-day Tokyo). At the time, Japan was a country virtually isolated from the rest of the world. Yet while the ruling shoguns might have kept a tight rein on the political sphere, Edo's burgeoning middle class enjoyed a certain cultural freedom that allowed them to "float" free of too much official interference. Teahouses, geishas, sumo wrestling and Kabuki theaters flourished. And to celebrate these entertainments, artists produced woodblock prints depicting Edo's popular culture. Famous Kabuki actors and wrestlers or beautiful courtesans became the subjects of mass-produced prints that were sold to and casually collected by a moneyed middle class, much like baseball cards or movie posters are today. The prints were both affordable and ubiquitous. Particular prints went in and out of fashion as tastes — and popular culture icons — changed.

The number of prints in good condition that survive today is not vast by most measures. Michener's collection — the bulk of which he bought from a Chicago collector — is in particularly good shape.

By the time Japan began to open its borders in the mid-19th century, the heyday of ukiyo-e prints was waning. However, they were eagerly snapped up by a curious West suddenly hungry for all things Japanese. Indeed, "Japonisme," to use the term coined by one critic, was all the rage in 1870s Europe and the decades following. Creatives of all types were inspired by Japanese aesthetics, from painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who penned the opera "Madame Butterfly." Likewise, among their many popular comic operettas, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan wrote "The Mikado."

Interest in Japanese art and culture was at a low point in post-World War II America when Michener began acquiring woodblock prints. But his interest was unwavering, his passion for Japanese woodblock prints as much cultural advocacy as anything else. "I must stress that Japanese prints are a joy," he wrote in "The Floating World." "In the long history of man's persistent attempts to create beauty, these prints are one of the gratifying successes."

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This year's 'New American Talent' takes a very topical turn
Emerging artists consider the larger world issues, not just themselves.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, July 06, 2008

It's summer, and that means we have the next iteration of "New American Talent," the annual juried exhibit featuring the work of emerging artists from across the country. Arthouse has presented "New American Talent" for 23 years now, since long before the talent competition became the super-popular form of pop culture entertainment — not to mention reputation-maker — that it is.

"Project Artist," anyone?

No, "New American Talent" is much better than that. And this year's version is sharper than ever. The works are selected by Nato Thompson, a curator at Creative Time, the New York-based nonprofit that commissions innovative public art projects. Kudos to him for sorting through more than 1,000 entries to select 43 artists whom he identifies as "curious" and able to present "lush mysteries in a world that often seems altogether too transparent." (Sixteen of the artists are from Texas, with seven from Austin.)

And perhaps the most refreshing aspect of these artists' curiosity is their sense of timeliness and topicality. Call it the curse of graduate art school, but emerging artists can end up so addled by their own self-involvement that they can't produce anything that's not too, well, self-involved. But much of what's on exhibit in "New American Talent" percolates with contemporary issues: climate change, the war in Iraq and its far-reaching consequences, technology's intrusion into everyday life.

Something like Margot Herster's "Kuwaiti Detainees in Guantánamo Bay" is advocacy as much as it is art. Through her connection with attorneys representing the detainees at the Cuba naval base, Herster has collected more than 2,000 images the attorneys gathered from their clients' families. As a way to establish their clients' trust, the attorneys traveled to the Middle East and photographed detainees' family members and homes and carried personal messages back to Guantánamo. Among other photos that Herster has arrayed on the wall at Arthouse are images of a Muslim family joyfully playing with a new baby — a baby whose father is detained at Guantánamo and has presumably never seen his child. It's a considerably more thought-provoking view of the detainees than the one presented by U.S. officials.

Goran Maric approaches the same topic from a different tack. His expressively rendered quartet of etchings depicts horrifying scenes of prisoner torture. Less immediately direct, but no less loaded with conviction, are Chad Erpelding's elegant "Topography" black-and-white digital prints. With frenzied lines that resemble a map gone haywire, Erpelding creates an artistic representation of the powerful global networks that seem to govern our world: the World Trade Organization, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Not everything in "New American Talent" is quite so explicit with its message. A miniature moss-covered mountaintop crowned with a tiny solar panel, Alec Appl's "Mt. Solar" charms with its dollhouse scale. Yet with an ordinary desk lamp playing the role of the sun and feeding the solar panel, the irony to Appl's piece is loud and clear.

Going way beyond ironic and touching on the absurd is Emily Puthoff's "S.I.R.E.N. Surrender Modulis." Through a performance video and other documentation, Puthoff contemplates the strange coincidence that apparently has Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il all reportedly devoted fans of Whitney Houston, and in particular Houston's recording of "I Will Always Love You." "Could it be that this song is the axis upon which even the fiercest hearts will turn?" Puthoff writes on a diagram of her project.

Who knows? Perhaps the answer to world peace is Whitney Houston.

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'LeWitt x 2'
Austin Museum of Art - Downtown, through Aug. 17

By By Rachel Cook
Austin Chronicle
Friday, July 11, 2008

Sol LeWitt is typically identified as a key figure in minimalism, although his work is more connected to conceptual art, a movement where LeWitt was, and still is, seen as influential because of his texts "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967) and "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1969), both published in Artforum. LeWitt defined conceptual art as art in which "the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." What is intriguing about LeWitt's vast body of work is how much he was able to explore within art's most basic elements: lines, shapes, structures, and the cube. These became the axes for most of LeWitt's explorations through various structures, photographs, drawings on paper, and large-scale wall drawings. These wall drawings have a set of instructions, so anyone can carry out the piece, and in this way LeWitt acted more like an architect than an installation artist. LeWitt's titles refer to the way in which the works themselves are carried out, providing dry descriptions rather than revelations of hidden meaning, as with Horizontal and Vertical Bands of Color. However, LeWitt's work doesn't stop there; he was an avid collector of his peers' work, most of which he obtained through trades for his own works.

In this lies the premise of Austin Museum of Art's exhibition "LeWitt x 2": to reveal nuances in LeWitt's work by placing it alongside work from his collection and to provide context for those artists by showing their work with one another. Overall, the show is successful in regard to LeWitt's work, but less so with the other artists. The most successful combination is in the first room of the collection, where work by conceptual artist Dan Graham is presented alongside work by sculptor Siah Armajani, photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, among others. The relationships appear to have more of an architectural backbone and are more intimate.

The entry gallery presents works by LeWitt alongside works in the collection, but more significantly it introduces "the cube." LeWitt's cubes tend to be more open geometric structures, but his collection includes Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube, a small Plexiglas box that appears to be sweating. (The condensation is set in motion by the temperature of the gallery.) Haacke's cube sits nicely within LeWitt's work as a structure, but also has an element from the environment. The relationship of this minimal object to outdoor elements makes the viewer aware of LeWitt's interest in the environment and how it reacts or relates to these structures.

Another piece that fits nicely within LeWitt's work and the collection is Dan Graham's Row Houses, Bayonne, New Jersey, from the series Homes for America. Graham's color photograph is a rather banal image of a group of houses sitting side by side, shot so they vanish into the background from the right-hand side of the image to the left-hand side. They look like cookie-cutter Fifties homes in a rainbow of muted colors from navy blue to olive green. If you stripped away the idea of them as homes and looked at them as just geometric shapes, you would see a similarity to LeWitt's cubes. Through the photograph, LeWitt's large cube structures become more intimate and maybe more personal.

In the last gallery are LeWitt's later works, from the 1980s to 2005, which show an explosion of color and curves. The shapes here are more organic than the rigid lines of his earlier works, and Brushstrokes (2000) and Horizontal Lines (1997-2005) appear to be more in the vein of abstract expressionistic paintings. Ironically, when Lewitt came to New York City in the late Fifties he was making large paintings, which he was dissatisfied with, leading him to creating a set of rules for his structures. But it was through these restrictions and limitations that LeWitt was able to find a more emotional voice.

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'Line/Form' packages new work by five intriguing artists
Wry satire and haunting juxtapositions characterize precisely stylized work.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, July 17, 2008

Don't let the vague title fool you. "Summer Group Show: Line/Form" at D. Berman Gallery is a refreshing little jewel of an exhibition.

Really, take "Line/Form" as something of a starting point for this show. If there's one thing Alice Leora Briggs, Jeffrey Dell, Mary McCleary, Joseph Phillips and Shawn Smith have in common, it's that they are all art-makers deftly employing an exquisite sense of line and form.

And that sense of discipline and attention to basic craft and composition is always welcome, especially when an artist can also take the work conceptually and thematically to the next level like the quintet in "Line/Form" all do. There's plenty of unsettling yet intriguing dualities here.

Take Briggs' dark and subtly chaotic drawings. Using a centuries-old technique called sgraffito (from the Italian word for "scratched"), Briggs overlays white acrylic paint with black India ink. She then uses a variety of implements (from dental tools to X-acto knives) to painstakingly scratch out her uneasy scenarios of a contemporary world that's been historically reshuffled or one where the collisions between innocence and evil are front and center. Female figures from a Renaissance painting may be inserted into a modern laboratory where they fiddle with medical equipment. Vigilante Minutemen take a break from their marginally legal armed patrol of the United States-Mexico border to smile for the camera or sip coffee. Nothing is really black and white in Briggs' world rendered in black and white.

Likewise with Phillips. His delicate gouache scenes should be required viewing for every decision-maker concerned with our built environment. For a couple of years now Phillips, an Austin native, has created beautifully rendered drawings in soft hues that depict an uneasy take on the American dream of owning land. Phillips shows us pre-fabricated land units — chunks of beaches, mountains, even glaciers that are freakishly commodified and ready for purchase by the super-wealthy who want their nature private. Some come equipped with security gates or private helipads. One grassy outdoor concert venue comes with its already attached VIP backstage lawn. If you think our revved-up desire to possess and control the natural world doesn't threaten access, think again.

Smith has a slightly less dark view of the collision between nature and modern world. His assemblages made of hundreds of little wooden cubes built into natural objects or animals ask us to question how our image-laden and pixilated digital world tricks us into thinking we really know nature. In the exhibit Smith positions a couple of his pixilated-cubed woodpeckers onto a piece of wood that leans against the gallery wall. Look closer and you'll see these ersatz creatures have indeed done what Mother Nature hard-wired them to do: peck wood. But Smith's birds clearly have cubed, man-made beaks, and so they leave behind tiny squared indentations.

Nature never looked so precisely prefabricated.

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'Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit'
Transformed by art into art

By Barry Pineo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, August 1, 2008

If you live a full life, then your life is full of epiphanies. San Antonio artist Katie Pell, whose exhibition with the utterly charming title "Tiny Acts of Immeasurable Benefit" opens at Women & Their Work next week, had just such an epiphany a couple of years ago.

For most of her artistic life, Pell was a visual artist working in acrylic. In other words, she was a painter. "And then a few years ago," says Pell, "a friend asked me to be in a show, and the theme was chairs. And I thought, 'Well, that's kind of not for me, 'cause I'm not gonna make some crafty chair.' So I staged a Mexican chair fight. I drew a chalk circle, attached the chairs to fishing wire, operated them like marionettes from these ladders, and I photographed all the people gambling and betting on these fighting chairs. The neighborhood I live in has a lot places where Spanish is sort of written outside on the stores, and I took the photos there, and people at the show asked: 'Where did you photograph this? Where did you see this? Where in Mexico was this?' And I got such a kick out of that because, you know, chairs don't fight in Mexico.

"We're not really seeing what's there. We're using what's there as a visual cue to define other things through that image. And I became really interested in that idea. That really was transformative for me."

So transformative that Pell now considers herself as much storyteller as visual artist. "I try to do inspirational. The stories that interest me are stories that are inspirational and yet ambiguously beneficial. Like it's not really clear whether any progress has been made, whether something is good or bad. I try to express the complicated nature of life."

Such will be exactly the case in "Tiny Acts," which consists of 40 screen prints, typically simply drawn figures such as three mushrooms and a butterfly accompanied by text such as: "You deserve more love. Don't lie any more." Most interestingly, the exhibition contains five sculptures, three of which the audience can choose to interact with – or not. "I don't encourage anything," says Pell. "People just end up interacting with them. I don't forbid it, nor do I encourage it. I don't want to make it like some theme show. I'm not trying to get everybody to come and clown around or anything. Usually, somebody gets inspired."

Talking with Pell, you can understand why people might get inspired, if even the slightest smidgen of the positive energy and intense commitment she exhibits in her conversation finds its way into her art. "I want to celebrate us. I want us all to get a little positive feedback and feel good. I want to make work that, when you interact with it, you can have this transformative experience by being in it. You become the art, and you are also physically in a position of openness and exposure. You're making yourself vulnerable to all these strangers, and we're all in it together."

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