'The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art'
Blanton exhibit reveals work of a little-known modernist master
An exhibit in the form of art criticism
Secrets of suburbia exposed in artist's love 'Quadrangle'
Carol Marine: New Paintings' / 'Suzanne Lewis: Dune Shack Summer'
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 C-Scape Dune Shack Morning, Provincelands, Mass., by Suzanne Lewis |
'Dune Shack Summer' By Robert Faires Summer gets many Texans thinking of the beach, but for at least one Texan, the beach in mind is more than a thousand miles from her home state. Last year, Suzanne Lewis was one of the few individuals selected for an annual residence program that allows artists to spend three weeks living and making works in one of the 17 historic dune shacks scattered across three miles of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The shacks were built in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, often with lumber that had washed ashore, and the living conditions in them now are as bare-bones as when they were cobbled together: no electricity, no running water, the closest paved road 30 minutes by foot over soft sand. Still, for Lewis, the dune shack was "heaven," a getaway in which she was splendidly productive as both a photographer and a painter of abstracts. The work she generated there has resulted in the exhibition "Dune Shack Summer," opening July 2 in Wally Workman Gallery's upstairs space, and a book by the same title, available at the gallery and at BookPeople. The Chronicle asked Lewis what made this beach and her time there so special. Austin Chronicle: What draws someone born and reared in Austin to old Cape Cod? Suzanne Lewis: I am a fifth-generation Texan. However, I must've been misplaced, because I adore and hope to live on Cape Cod someday. It's the ocean, the New Englanders, and the weather. Need I say more in this 100-plus degree heat? Bring on the bitter cold, snow, fog, and gray days. AC: On the one hand, you're capturing the landscape in realistic photographic images, and on the other, drawing on it as inspiration for largely nonrepresentational paintings, which would strike some folks as moving in opposite directions simultaneously. What appeals to you about taking such different approaches at the same time? SL: I like it that way. I work very spontaneously and intuitively. The camera allows for this, as does the nonrep painting. I get bored easily and am constantly having to entertain my creative muse. I would shoot like a madwoman early in the morning and paint by music from NPR in the afternoon on my battery-operated weather radio. I produced about 30 paintings and more photo images than I've ever shot in one place. The most inspiring thing about the shack was knowing the history of those who had gone before me. Over the years, notable artists and writers have called these shacks home for weeks, months, even years. Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Mary Oliver, e.e. cummings, Eugene O'Neill, Jack Kerouac, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer – all spent time out there creating in the dune shacks. The light, the colors in this environment were magnificent. The weather was so inspiring – storms rumbled, the shack shook. Every morning after I photographed, I'd walk the 100 or so yards to the ocean with my coffee, journal, and binoculars to watch the finback whales. The solitude was very regenerative for me. Even when I was not working, I was gathering the quiet to use when I got back to my studio. I discovered it's not only about creating; it's about preparing to create. I realized I could survive without so much stuff. I was captured emotionally as if put under a spell. Being tuned in to things like the wind's direction is really about staying alive in the moment. It's easy for me to be unconscious of how much water I use at home. But at the shack, I maybe used a gallon a day. I was so much more cognizant of it. I was mindful of every sound. And just being more aware of the impact of my actions is an important balance for me to have. When we forget that, we're disconnected from ourselves and disconnected from one another. It was a sacred experience. "Suzanne Lewis: Dune Shack Summer" runs July 2-Aug. 5 in the upstairs gallery of Wally Workman Gallery, 1202 W. Sixth. For more information, call 472-7428 or visit www.wallyworkmangallery.com. |
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'The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art' By Robert Faires The way I remember it, I'm 3 years old, standing in the den of our house in Longview, watching my brother Ken, who's three years my elder, go out the back door to catch the school bus. And I'm thinking: "Why does he get to go to school? He's only one year older than me." A silly memory, but I've long thought of it as my earliest one, and I hold onto it, even though it isn't something I can confirm as having actually happened. No one else in my family remembers the event – and why should they? I'm not even sure why I remember it – so there's no way for me to confirm: Was I really 3? Was I in Dr. Dentons, as I recall it sometimes, or pajamas, as I picture it at others? Was my brother Ray, who would have been 9, leaving for school with Ken or not? The sensation of the moment is vivid, but the details blur and shift. In trying to pin down this memory, I might as well be trying to hold a stream of water. My personal experience of memory as fluid may be why the works that drew me the most deeply into "The Lining of Forgetting: Internal and External Memory in Art" were the ones that play off memory's elusive, ever-fluctuating nature. David Rokeby's Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent) presents side-by-side screens that run footage captured by a pair of surveillance cameras in downtown Montreal over a year's time. Only Rokeby has edited the video so that, as the cameras languidly pan past rooftops and trees, the images subtly shift across time, through different times of day and seasons of the year. Shadows melt then reappear; leafy trees magically shed their foliage and grow it back, and not in the caffeinated jitter of time-lapse photography but in a smooth, instantaneous shifting like the double image of a lenticular cover. It's as if you're looking at a place and have become lost in recalling its appearance at other times, the memories flowing in a steady, ceaseless, dreamlike stream. Was it early morning or twilight, late autumn or midsummer? "It all blurs together," we'll say when struggling to recall a moment from the past, and here it truly does. The images by Dinh Q. Lê from his From Vietnam to Hollywood series do something similar, though what's being blurred in them isn't just personal recollections but fact and fiction. He's taken large-scale photographs of both the Vietnam War and cinematic representations of it and literally has woven them together, employing the techniques for weaving grass mats in his homeland of Vietnam. The results pixelate and fragment history, rendered here in black and white, and fuse it with film's lush romantic drama, saturated in fiery oranges and reds. You can get some of the impact from reproductions such as the one running with this review, but it pales in comparison to what you feel standing before the real thing, 3 feet tall and 6 feet long, where the intricacy of the work and painstaking craftsmanship are inescapable. Being conscious of every strip and the constant overlapping on this outsized scale makes the work at once epic and deeply personal, a sense of an individual's past being swallowed in a mass culture fantasy of history. Not surprisingly, being a drama geek, I was mightily amused by Emma Kay's Shakespeare From Memory, in which she attempted to pen synopses of the Bard's plays without resorting to any reference works or prompts. The results, typed out formally on 26 separate sheets of bone-white paper, range from pagelong, detailed accounts (Romeo and Juliet) to vague, single-sentence summations (Coriolanus), with a few plays that she apparently couldn't remember anything about; below the titles, the pages are blank. Of course, Kay's memory trips her up in quite a few places, leading her to mash up characters and put lines in the wrong plays, which can be fun for those in the know. But whether or not you're a Bardophile, it's one more example that this thought-provoking exhibition from the Weatherspoon Art Museum provides of memory's shape-shifting nature, its ability to morph and change what we think we know into something else. "Remember me!" the ghost of Hamlet's father urged his son. Based on this show, Dad, that's easier said than done. |
 Arthouse At The Jones Center |
Got art? Need a review? By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Consider the economy of the art world. What defines an artist's value? Many things, not the least of which is a review (presumably a positive one) by a critic of record. Good reviews can legitimize artists, bolster sales of their work, leverage their careers. But what if an artist, instead of just hoping a critic might wander into his or her exhibit and review it, could order a review like ordering any other professional service? What if the whole mysterious system of which artists are reviewed by which publications (or not) was deflated? What if you didn't even need to have an exhibit to have your artwork reviewed? Such a scenario got Chicago-based art critic Lori Waxman thinking. So she created "60 WRD/MIN Art Critic," a performance during which she writes short reviews on whatever piece of art any artist brings her. This weekend, Waxman brings her project to Arthouse, the Congress Avenue contemporary art center. Waxman will set up shop in the Arthouse gallery, and for three days she will receive artists in 20-minute increments. Artists can bring in any work they choose. When finished, the reviews, which Waxman signs, can be picked up. The reviews will be posted in the Arthouse gallery and, in a special arrangement with the American-Statesman, a few reviews will be published in print Friday and all the reviews will be on www.austin360.com. Most of the appointment times for this weekend already have been booked, but Waxman is reserving a limited number of first-come, first-served walk-in appointments. Waxman guarantees that she will take all art presented to her for serious critical consideration — no matter who the artist is or what level of experience the artist has. But she does not guarantee her review will be a positive one. Waxman says the title of her performance is a riff on the measure of typing speed in the pre-digital days — a yardstick for written language that Waxman says she is kind of poking fun at, just as she is at the whole practice of art criticism itself. In reducing the act of reviewing to an almost clerical function , she hopes to undermine the elusive process of reviewing. "A review has become a commodity in itself. But who is reviewed and why isn't understood by most artists. And that makes artists feel very vulnerable," Waxman says by phone while taking a break in her office at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches art criticism. "What happens when whatever capital my reviews have then gets completely re-channeled? And does a review become worthless because the artist ordered it?" The genesis of Waxman's project, which she prefers to think of as performance, came from thinking critically about the very art of art criticism she herself has been practicing. Through deepening friendships with artists, she began to sympathize with their frustration at the way art criticism has become as commodified as anything else in the status-minded, money-fueled art world. Waxman has had reviews published in, among others, Artforum and Modern Painters and also is a freelance contributor for the Chicago Tribune. She's staged "60 WRD/MIN Art Critic" four times previously. Austin is the first of 10 cities where she'll stage the project as part of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. "Really, I'm poking fun at myself (as a critic) more than anything else," Waxman says. "Just making visible a process that is usually completely invisible is also part of the challenge. Critics rarely talk to the artists whose work they're reviewing. And it's really awkward for me to be right there handing a review to an artist. That's a completely uncomfortable moment, but it brings a very human element to an exchange that isn't normally very personal." The project is also a challenge for Waxman as a writer. " I've gotten very fast at writing. \u2026 This is sort of the extreme sport version of critical writing." |
 Francisco Matto's 'Construction in Wood' sculpture reduces animal and human figures to archetypes. |
Blanton exhibit reveals work of a little-known modernist master By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin What's the takeaway from "Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic," the stunning new exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art? That such an intriguing body of art work has lingered mostly off the radar. Francisco Matto is hardly a household name, even to many in the art world. While other artists of his milieu left Latin America for the art capitals of Europe and the United States, Matto stayed in his native Uruguay, living his entire life (1911-1995) in the same house in the capital city of Montevideo. Financially well-off and with a monklike dedication to his progressive modernist vision, Matto eschewed the globe-trotting habits of his peers and rarely pursued public exposure or even commercial attention. His focus for more than five decades of intensive art making? Matto believed that visual abstraction could be a universal artistic language, one that could transcend cultures and centuries and be the expression of the deepest part of the human soul. He strove to create a spiritual and timeless art based on mythic symbols culled from the ancient art of the Americas. Contemporary art should and would connect to pre-Columbian art, Matto believed. Matto developed his own personal artistic alphabet of shapes and forms (and sometimes words and numbers) that he used again and again in color-saturated paintings or wooden sculptures he termed "totems." Now, the Blanton exhibit brings a comprehensive selection of Matto's masterful art — more than 70 paintings and sculpture — together for the first comprehensive exhibit ever staged in the United States. Wandering the exhibit is an alluring trip into one artist's very singular vision. The current exhibit is a new version of one presented in 2007 at the Sixth Mercosul Biennial in Brazil that was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, the Blanton's former curator of Latin American art. The show's Blanton run is its only one , making it a rare opportunity to understand a rare 20th-century artist. Matto was a student of El Taller Torres-Garc?a, the workshop established by master artist Joaqu?n Torres-Garc?a, whose advocacy of modernist aesthetics re-directed much of Latin American art in the 20th century away from the traditional representative styles and toward an aesthetic of abstraction. Matto took his teachings to heart. But whereas his midcentury peers largely were not religious, Matto was a devout Catholic. He didn't marry until in his 40s and never had children. While most artists of Matto's generation believed their art was a direct expression of their politics — and though Matto lived through tumultuous decades of political upheaval in Latin America — Matto never revealed what his political beliefs were, or if he even had any. And whereas other artists strove to follow an artistic trajectory that clearly showed a progression, Matto's creative process was so inward and impermeable — so focused on a very limited set of forms and symbols — that it's virtually impossible to distinguish a chronology of his work based on style. Hence, the current exhibit — unlike so many retrospective showings of a solo artist — isn't at all organized chronologically. Really, it wouldn't help in understanding Matto if it were. Instead you can revel in Matto's almost compulsive use of the same forms and symbols. You'll see those forms — a pair of circles, a sun, a geometric "u" shape — migrate from Matto's paintings to his wooden wall constructions to his totem. Matto derived his visual alphabet in large part from the ancient indigenous art of the Americas. In fact, he began collecting pre-Columbian art and artifacts as a young man and in his lifetime amassed a substantial collection. Photographs of the artist in his studio show Matto literally surrounding himself with pre-Columbian art as he worked. And to make that connection clear in the current exhibit, Blanton curators cleverly assembled a group of pre-Columbian art from a collection owned by the University of Texas's Department of Art and Art History. "Francisco Matto: The Modern and the Mythic" builds on the success of two previous ground-breaking Blanton exhibits of Latin American art: "School of the South: El Taller Torres-Garc?a" in 1992 and "The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection" which premiered in 2007 and traveled to New York. The Blanton has long been a pioneer in presenting Latin American art in the U.S. And a side gallery in the current exhibit brings together a handful of prints and paintings from the museum's collection of the School of the South, arguably one of the best owned by any museum in the world. That mini exhibit-within-an-exhibit makes a comely connection. Matto might be unknown to most Blanton visitors. But now that the breadth of his achievement and his link to 20th century art are realized, he's bound to make it onto many lists of favorite Latin American artists. |
 'Four Walled Girl' by David de Lara. |
An exhibit in the form of art criticism By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Chicago-based critic Lori Waxman spent three days at Arthouse this past weekend reviewing art on an on-demand basis in 20-minute increments. Along with receptionist Elizabeth Spheeris, Waxman received artists and their one representative art work just like any other professional appointment or administrative service. And in a form of extreme critical writing, Waxman dutifully churned out a critical review of a few hundred words for 39 artists. After all, why not turn the complicated politics of art criticism on its head and make it available to the artist by request? Waxman's '60 WRD/MIN Art Critic' performance project at Arthouse is the first of 10 she'll stage at cities across the country as part of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. Lori Waxman's reviews at Austin American-Statesman website |
 Austin filmmaker Amy Grappell's mixed-media installation 'Quadrangle' is part of the New American Talent exhibit now showing at Arthouse. |
Secrets of suburbia exposed in artist's love 'Quadrangle' By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin In an art exhibit brimming with the exuberant brio typical of emerging artists, visitors to "NAT 24: New American Talent, the Twenty-fourth Exhibition" at Arthouse drift back through galleries of the Congress Avenue contemporary arts center and find their way to a quiet bench. Opposite the bench, a flat-panel video monitor hangs next to a half-dozen black-and-white photographs depicting what appears to be typical family scenes for suburban life in the early 1970s. Fathers with shaggy haircuts and wild print shirts hug wives in peasant blouses. Children play in neatly manicured front yards. On the monitor, overlapping diptych-style footage shows two people now in their mid-60s, one on each video channel. The piece is "Quadrangle," a video installation by Austin filmmaker Amy Grappell. The footage appears to be just innocuous interviews. But don the headphones to hear the soundtrack. What quietly unrolls in a 20-minute continuous loop is a compelling story about two middle-class professional couples — each with two young children — on Long Island. Encouraged by the free-love zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s, this pair of couples found a way out of their disappointing marriages by striking up an unusual four-way love affair. That affair eventually resulted in both families sharing a home — an oddity in suburban Long Island and far from the stereotypical notion of a hippie commune. But eventually the foursome's communal home fell apart, with both couples divorcing and marrying the opposite partner. In "Quadrangle," Deanna and Robert, seen against the leafy yards and neat streets of Long Island, articulately reflect on what drew them into a complex relationship as a twentysomething middle-class married couple. And in our reality television-blasted, social media-obsessed world where people seem all too eager to broadcast their most intimate thoughts and actions, "Quadrangle" proceeds in a remarkably subtle and quiet fashion. There's no salacious expos?, no emotionally charged confrontations and none of the self-indulgent navel-gazing that typically plagues confession-based contemporary art. Deanna and Robert emerge as likable, intelligent people judiciously reflecting on the choices of their past. That authorial distance is admirable given that "Quadrangle" is Grappell's own story. Deanna and Robert are her parents and Grappell is one of the doe-eyed dark-haired little girls seen in the photographs. The photos were taken by Robert, Grappell's father. Grappell, 44, had always wanted to tell the story of her parents and their unconventional choices. But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that she decided to give it a try. A decade in Texas far from her East Coast upbringing along with her own decision to marry for the first time a few years ago provided the necessary emotional break from her past. "I needed to feel that I had enough distance," Grappell says. "I didn't want this to be an indictment of my parents. I wanted it to be bigger than just my story. And that meant that I had to let my parents emerge as independent characters in the story and not let them be seen through a daughter's eyes." Always admiring of the free-spirited experiments of the 1960s, Grappell says she nevertheless has always found it ironic that the great social and psychological tests of those times have mostly failed. Grappell is one of 26 artists chosen from a pool of nearly 700 for "NAT 24." Arthouse organizes the survey of new national talent every summer, inviting a guest curator to make the selection. This year's curator was Hamza Walker of the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society, a contemporary arts center. Of the 26 artists in "NAT 24," 12 are from Texas, eight of whom are from Austin. "Quadrangle" is Grappell's first video art work. Since landing in Austin in the mid-1990s after a decade as an actress with famed LaMaMa experimental theater troupe in New York City, Grappell has devoted her energy to filmmaking. Her documentary, "Light From the East," about a theater collaboration in the Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union, aired on PBS. She also produced and acted in the feature film "Shady Grove" in 1996, which premiered at South by Southwest. Grappell also works as a casting agent, selecting actors for such films as Richard Linklater's "The Newton Boys." Grappell says her parents were at first hesitant to participate in her documentary art project when she proposed it two years ago. So Grappell set up clear boundaries. Her parents were interviewed separately but each was asked the same questions. Cameraman Christian Moore shot the footage, and Grappell is never seen nor heard. In fact, there's only subtle evidence in "Quadrangle" that gives the viewer any idea that the artist is a part of the story. "I wanted the audience to connect with the characters independently and to make their own decisions about the story," Grappell says. "So I had to remain separate myself from the story." Grappell is working on a feature film screenplay of her parents' story as well as developing "Quadrangle" into a more conventional documentary film. The whole process of making the video installation has proved cathartic for her and her parents, Grappell says. "In the end, it was healing for all of us." Film installation doesn't Mickey Mouse around, curator says By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Hamza Walker, this year's guest curator for Arthouse's 'New American Talent' and director of education at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society, sifted through the work of nearly 700 artists from 44 states who submitted to the show. From that massive pool, Walker selected 26 artists including eight from Austin. Walker really, really liked Grappell's 'Quadrangle.' Here's what he told us:
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 Philip Glass, 2006 digital orint. ©Chuck Close. |
Getting close to Chuck Close By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Chuck Close redefined the way we consider portraiture. Beginning in the 1960s Close started creating massive painted portraits with a distinctive photorealistic style, typically using photographs as source material. The super-large scale and hyper detail of Close's portraits — many are of his artist friends such as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Andres Serrano and Cindy Sherman — forces a reconsideration of our assumptions of what a painted portrait should, or can, be. Sometimes, people are all too human up close. Close's use of photographic source material led to his experimentations with photography as an artistic medium, something the artist has deeply explored in the last decade. 'A Couple of Ways of Doing Something' an exhibit coming to the Austin Museum of Art. The exhibit opens Aug. 22 and runs through Nov. 8. Among the programs offered is a Sept. 10 screening of 'Portrait of Close's Creative Circle,' a film that examines the artist and his circle of creative friends, including Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Kiki Smith. The exhibit features 15 daguerreotypes — which Close used as the basis to create the other works in the show — 20 digital pigment prints, seven 8-by-6-foot digital Jacquard portrait tapestries and two photogravures measuring over 47 x 40 inches. Lyrical praise poems by New York School poet Bob Holman accompany many of the portraits. Holman, a celebrated poet originated the now famous Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He now runs the Bowery Poetry Club. The exhibit is organized by Aperture, the New York-based not-for-profit organization devoted to photography. See www.amoa.org for details. |
 Carol Marine |
''Carol Marine: New Paintings'/ 'Lesley Nowlin: Guatemala' By Rachel Koper Neapolitan ice cream has three flavors in one, and it is a fine way to keep a group happy. In that spirit, two neighboring galleries are dishing up a triad of new art this summer. The front gallery at Wally Workman Gallery is chock-full of delicious-looking oil paintings by Carol Marine. Her still lifes of fruits and vegetables are more hunger-inducing than the Food Network. Upstairs, the abstract, layered styles of painter Suzanne Lewis offer a great escape into one-of-a-kind patterns and flat spaces. Also a welcome arrival in the building is the L. Nowlin Gallery, currently exhibiting photographs by owner Lesley Nowlin. Her large-format black-and-white images of marketplaces in Guatemala give documentary photography a boost with an intimate viewpoint and portraits of beautiful working women. Sometimes travel photography bores me. A recurring gripe of mine is an undercurrent of pity – I feel sorry for the poor people in the photos. Nowlin avoids this puritanical cliché by effectively highlighting positive attributes of the people she portrays. In Market Wandering, the camera is behind a shop stall, showing the backs of the sellers. As two young shoppers look down and point at something, their faces glow with a lively look. I found myself really wanting to know, "What are those two looking at?" Was it jewelry? An animal? They looked like friends out having a great day at the market. Carol Marine paints fresh produce with a loose, square brushstroke. The consistency in her brushwork signals a prolific artistic practice. Her thin layers and even surface quality are impressive, painterly, and confident. The food she paints is food I actually eat. So Marine's tomatoes, garlic, jalapeños, grapes, lemons, limes, and oranges feel like the Austin Farmers' Market rather than a crusty old meat pie or rabbit for the stew pot. These are contemporary paintings that honor the long tradition of still life painting. In a couple of pieces, Marine's sensitivity to the shadows in the overlapping vessels reminded me of one of my favorite painters of all time, Giorgio Morandi, an Italian. While Morandi's colors are muted, Marine's paintings are jumping with well-mixed and tasty color. Suzanne Lewis' paintings feel cheerful, the warm colors and bright layers seem to contain some innate optimism. Lewis uses thick and thin textures, boxy patterns, and beachy colors in this series of oil paintings. I'm reminded a bit of paintings by Andrew St. Martin. Both artists carefully flatten their picture planes, using rectangles in rhythm and creating linear forms that are organic seed or plant characters. These paintings contain thin-sanded areas, then a thick area is built up and, while wet, scratched through to reveal dark colors painted underneath. I enjoy the play of the chunky forms with the lines. Lewis searches the picture plane and reveals a balanced composition. Blues, greens, yellows, and browns hang out together in a Fifties groovy sea life ensemble. I get pretty picky about abstract paintings, and I was pleasantly surprised by the vibrancy and depth of many of these. |