I keep finding myself getting into conversations with people about what artists in Austin need, what it means to be an artist in this town and why things "just aren't working out. " It happens more often than not really. The conclusions are almost always the same: there's "no money" for the arts in Austin. It's not that there isn't money in this city. There's plenty of people who have what it takes to be collectors. Some do. A few. But despite the large crowds events like B-Scene at the Blanton, Art City Austin or First Night attract, how many of us actually feel like being an "Austin artist" is a viable alternative?  It seem one of the only choices is to focus our time, energy and money on making inroads in Dallas and Houston. Commuting is really the only alternative.

Sure, we've got some top-notch institutions like the Blanton and Arthouse that showcase some pretty great art more often than not, and there's a couple of local galleries that do a fine job. Lora Reynolds Gallery obviously takes the cake in terms of making ends meet and actually selling work. But they play a different game. They aren't involved in a local scene and there's nothing wrong with that. They are vital in this community for what they expose us all to. Art Palace, Women and Their Work and Okay Mountain are really the only galleries showing local work that is involved in a dialogue with contemporary art, but despite their commendable intentions, art doesn't necessarily get sold sometimes.

Maybe we haven't thought about the ways in which art gets sold and potential collectors become actual ones: gallerists and art dealers. Who in this town is actually working to help artists keep working? Sure we have public arts initiatives that allow for work to be created and for the public to interact with art, and sure we have street fairs where yuppies can feel special and cultured in between runs to Whole Foods and Terra Toys to buy their kids prizes for behaving in public. And sure, local government has panels to discuss these issues but somehow they end up missing the point, patting themselves on the back, not listening to artists, and coming up with cuddly solutions that lead nowhere for contemporary artists unless we want to put some shit up in an empty garage on New Year's Eve or be granted the honor of having our work be seen by city employees on their lunch break. All this piss and vinegar is leading to a point: we artists are doing our part, we're "providing content" for the KLRU "Downtown" specials, benefits, auctions, street fairs, festivals, and we're making sure that we Do It Ourselves at MASS Gallery, Monofonus, Co-Lab, Big Medium, Pump Projects, the Texas Biennial, etc. But do we really have to keep subsidizing it for everyone else?*

 

 

 

 

 

 

*This is mostly a rhetorical question, of course. But should it be?

I feel a personal connection to this project because the first screening of work happened during the last edition of Cinematexas in 2006. It was great. We had a big BBQ picnic to celebrate. Filmmakers and artists got to chit chat and make friends with each other. I'm still Facebook friends with a good number of them.

What other sorts of "alternative economies" can we create for ourselves here in Austin and how can we create larger networks with organizations outside of the city? An example can be seen in Okay Mountain's links with the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City. When it comes to the creation of new artworks, Austin Video Bee's 2 "commissioned" videos by our friends to make part of our second release. Fusebox, coming up next week, has also been involved in commissioning original work and enabling collaboration between artists. And of course, Co-Lab is doing an amazing job at this as well, pairing people for installation, having critique sessions, and a host of other things. So let's keep it up everyone, and let's support these grass-roots initiatives by SHOWING UP and PARTICIPATING.

Last month I went to the opening for Artpace's first New Works series of the year (09.1 for those of you who love numerals), curated by Trevor Smith from the Peabody Essex Museum. Not that it's a competition or anything, but the premise of their series - one International artist, one national artist and one Texan artist - makes it almost impossible not to compare and contrast the relative merits of each artist's production over the course of their residency in San Antonio. This is part 3 (read Part 1 here and Part 2 here) of 3. 

I think I enjoyed and was impressed by Sterling Allen's Housing Edition the most. For his first foray into large-scale sculpture (as explained in the gallery notes), Allen created "a constellation of three identical miniature houses and a triptych titled Stillwater Shanty." What isn't explained as well in the notes and the thing that really got me, was how Allen covered his little houses in identical elements in identical configurations: old VHS boxes of mainstream Hollywood movies like Father of the Bride or My Best Friend's Wedding, and old records that are now more often found in thrift store bins than turntables, mass produced plastic knick knacks from dollar stores and other artifacts that for better or worse form a base level upon which our ladder of conspicuous capitalism can rest on.

 

Every single piece of old painted wood, Moonstruck box on the roof and plastic collander is placed in the exact same spot in each of the three houses, creating an "editioned" sculpture, where the elements, because of the scars incurred by falling out of favor from the public's taste in disposable cultural artifacts and works, form houses that in a history of cultural artifacts, point to a specific ideal of what Americans were told to aspire to. It's all flotsam and jetsam when we stop being interested in Brendan Fraser's dealings with mummies, or Julia Roberts's turn as a hooker with a heart of gold; just a bunch of accumulated crap that clutters thrift stores and garage sales everywhere.

 

The paintings that make up Stillwater Shanty show three almost identical images of the houses in the gallery in idyllic, Thomas Kinkade-ish settings, seemingly implying that accepted cultural ideals of what constitutes an ideal American living situation for most people is a complete construct, more often than not fed to them through their wholehearted, though more often than not unquestioned, participation in the cultural hegemony of their times (and more often than not, made in China). The Kinkade business sells a slightly less sensational brand of idealism that perhaps Field Of Dreams does, but in the end, it's a similar conceit, a similar swindle.

 

 

Last week I went to the opening for Artpace's first New Works series of the year (09.1 for those of you who love numerals), curated by Trevor Smith from the Peabody Essex Museum. Not that it's a competition or anything, but the premise of their series - one International artist, one national artist and one Texan artist - makes it almost impossible not to compare and contrast the relative merits of each artist's production over the course of their residency in San Antonio. This is part 2 (read Part 1 here) of 3. 

"Second place" in New Works 09.1 goes to Richard Grayson. Interestingly, Grayson's video installation The Golden Space City of God, which I was not particularly interested in based on some of his earlier work I'd researched and seen online, proved to be just the sort of thing I can sink my teeth into. It's a large video projection of a choral performance based on some texts from The Family/The Children of God religious cult found online (yay internet!). It's mostly a wide shot of the performers singing, with some added close-ups provided by a floating, creeping camera, an all-seeing eye that, like UFOs or angels, floats in space and records impressions of the individuals that make up the choir. Aesthetically it's not all there, because there just isn't enough consideration of aesthetics. It's sort of not the point here. Instead, Grayson's video installation is perhaps best thought of as something conceptually viral, taking up space in your brain and evolving over time. I understand it and think about it more now, a week after seeing it, than I did right after seeing it, or even while I was still at Artpace. It's terribly British, recalling other photography and video works by Gillian Wearing or Phil Collins: chock-full of references to Medieval and Renaissance religious images and elements, "regular people," and is very interested in the implications of the act of looking and recording.

Also of note is [Marfanite? Marfan?] Adam Bork's WindowWorks project Horizontal XXV. It's gorgeous and hypnotic, especially at night, when the streets are empty and the 25 vintage Commodore computer monitors that line up to create a long horizontal line really glow and manifest saturated video hues, color fields reminiscent of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman. A steady and reverberating electronic drone sountracks the piece and feels synaesthetically linked to the gently cycling colors on the monitors. It's a fantastic formalist exercise in what these monitors, and video as a medium, can achieve with color/light.