16
Passing Strange
Journey of self-discovery hampered by play’s location.
Appears in the Austin Chronicle
Samuel Clemens’ wife often dismissed her husband’s frequent diversions with a sigh. “Ah, youth,” Olivia would say. Oh, how that phrase must have stung. Imagination, that winsome childlike enthusiasm, is both the artist’s greatest collaborator and his most distracting playmate.
9
‘Everything’
On the artist who doesn’t give an eff what I think
Appears in the Austin Chronicle
An art critic is compelled to describe and justify the achievements of a particular artwork, perhaps by identifying its place in art history or by connecting it to the time and location, even if the critic does not recognize the work’s merits.
This approach is subject to debate, however, if we value personal experience; what effect does the viewer’s mood have on her interpretation, for example? Or how does her experience limit, rather than expand, her view?
By the length of this introduction, you might assume I’m taking a personal approach to “Everything,” the mixed-media group show at Gallery Black Lagoon. The review starts out that way, but then finds some objectivity in that point of view.
9
The Chimponauts and the Mechanical Phantom
Silly Fun for Everyone
Appears in the Austin Chronicle
The Chimponauts and the Mechanical Phantom is a silly show.
The multimedia, puppet-theatre production by Electronic Planet Ensemble fast-forwards to the year 2113. Earth’s population has reached 10.5 billion, and “starvation is rampant,” as a news report in the show’s program explains.
2
Studio Practice
Canopy tenants love the Eastside art studio complex, even if they’re not from the Eastside…or artists
Building 2 of the Canopy’s three-building complex, and the breezeway connecting Buildings 2 and 3 (photos by the author)
Appears in the Austin Chronicle
Lynn Brotman is closer to her dream than she’s ever been. The retired merchandiser and her husband moved to Austin from points east in 2011. For years, she had worked on her fabric designs ad hoc from the kitchen table, and she had endured the heat one summer in the garage of the Austin Screen Printing Cooperative. But the native Texan really began to see her work evolve when, back in February, she moved into Canopy, the new Eastside studio complex run by the ubiquitous arts organization Big Medium.
2
Come Into Focus
Semester’s final Focus Group features Jonas Mekas
Appears in the Austin Chronicle
The filmmaker Jonas Mekas, now in his 90s, is one of those rare artists who uses his work to promote and discuss works by other artists, which makes him the perfect study for the seasonal closing of Focus Group, a screening series at the University of Texas’ Visual Arts Center.
1
Going WEST in Austin
Navigating the suburban studios of North Austin requires a little DIY help (all images by the author for Hyperallergic)
Appears on Hyperallergic.com
AUSTIN, Tex. — A few months ago, when Salon.com announced its search for a new culture editor (who would be based in New York City), a fan quickly snarked on Facebook that Gotham is passé; Austin is the new home of American culture.
In truth, anyone involved in the arts has more than likely been to, or at least heard of, a festival in Austin honoring her particular form of creativity. For those of us who live here, the number and frequency of gatherings instigates an instinctive eye-roll — as happened to me the other day when a Whole Earth Provisions employee asked me what I was doing with the particularly gentle, sunny Sunday afternoon?
30
Absent Minded
The Veils’ Finn Andrews never knows where he’ll go next
Appears in Magnet Magazine
South By Southwest rages in the city around me as Skype trembles with Finn Andrews’s digitally warped sentences. My recording is a mess, and my notes sparse, but I’m left with a sense that the singer/songwriter behind London’s The Veils is that rare artist among rockers—a musician aware that his best songwriting occurs during his absence.
21
El Motivacion
A Bolivian City where art means activism
A work by Li Q (image via Facebook)
It’s a drizzly Sunday in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the cafés near the Simon Patiño Cultural Center are closed. We duck into Blueberry, a Bolivian knockoff of the Pinkberry franchise, where on a warmer day, affluent teenagers might be making out on the candy-colored couches, the boys occasionally turning to tease each other, while English speakers crowd the benches with gossip from home. But today, I sit in the stark-white space alone with the street artists El Dengue, Li Q, and Machy, as well as an interpreter, to discuss the local urban art movement over hot, too-sweet coffee. Immediately, we recognize the irony of our location. “Bolivia is a country for sale,” El Dengue says.
21
‘Wunderkammer’
This ‘cabinet of curiosities’ works best when specific and personal
Appears in The Austin Chronicle
Given the desire of contemporary artists to play with the boundaries of materials, galleries provide the distinction between ordinary and artistic objects by casting the latter into rooms with white walls, track lighting, and a price list.
However, the interplay of an artwork with other objects (ordinary, artistic, or otherwise) in spaces designed for living or working or just passing brings said object out of a context of mere observation so that we might interact with it honestly.
In “Wunderkammer,” the gallery obfuscates the emotion that an object attempts to transmute simply by being itself.
19
“Van Dough”
Harper’s Magazine published a letter-to-the-editor I wrote. It’s pretty chopped up from the original (and maybe more to the point), but I’m still stoked.
Here’s the edited version that appears in the magazine:
Kabir Chibber ignores an important question implicitly posed by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in its decision to tax sculptures and installations as the sums of their materials instead of as artworks [“Blind Appraisal,” Annotation, February]. The judgment presented the art world with an opportunity to discuss the nature and boundaries of art, but the galleries involved instead approached it as a question of money. The tribunal was about more than whether particular materials constitute art. It asked who gets to decide what art is, and the art world failed to make its case to the broader public.
