The idea of grouping works on paper -- drawings, watercolors, prints, photographs, etc -- in a single category is a very practical one. Museums are tasked with preserving and storing different kinds of art, and anything on paper requires certain conditions regardless of what the paper was used for. There has also been a sense, historically, that works on paper are inherently of lesser value than other kinds of art. If it was meant to last, the artist should have carved the piece in stone, or painted it with good oils on a canvas. Traditionally these are sketches, studies, preparations for the real work of art (except in a few situations, such as illuminated manuscripts).

In recent decades this paradigm has been turned on its head, as permanence and rigidity started to be seen as liabilities rather than virtues in certain critically celebrated approaches to art making. Paper is a media that is used widely to disseminate information and to shape public opinion, and as such it has become an attractive material to use for critiquing society's foibles. Paper also has a feeling of intimacy and humility, and thus can convey honesty. The sketches and notes we make in notebooks or on slips of paper, the snapshots we take and stuff into albums, make up the small gestures that become the detritus of daily life.

 

 

Curator Mary Mikel Stump* makes a virtue of the uncertain status of works on paper with a show called "On, Of or About: 50 Paper Works" at Texas State University Gallery. The exhibit, much of which comes from the private collection of Timothy Woolsey (credited as co-curator), explores the avenues that artists have been driven down by adopting paper as a substrate or even a primary material. This is a dense show which moves in a number of directions simultaneously. Text-based compositions mingle with textural and minimalist drawings, paper-based sculptures, and representational pieces. Although it could be considered a kind of survey of contemporary paper-based art, "On, Of or About" makes no claims to comprehensiveness, and eschews photography in particular.

Many of the works on view take advantage of the properties of paper to blur the boundaries between sculpture and drawing, and at the same time between surface and image. A number of the pieces employ cut paper and feel like three dimensional drawings. In others, the natural warping of the paper gives an almost sculptural feel to the surface. The use of cut books is also a repeated theme, blending print-, text-, and sculpture-oriented approaches into singular objects.

"On, Of or About" is packed with interesting approaches to composition, and a wide range of conceptual frameworks underlies it all. The playful fantasies of Jayne Lawrence rub up against the diagrammatic text in Christopher McNulty's "Everything," both hanging across from an altered telephone book by Kristiina Lahde. Nearby hangs Laurie Reid's "Speechless," an organic manipulation of paper with watercolor  The seemingly occult geometries of Louise Despont, drawn on an antique ledger book, give way to a series of five minimal, gradually lightening circles by Gloria Ortiz Hernandez.

It's an exhibit that's impossible to sum up, but shouldn't be missed. "On, Of or About: 50 Paper Works" runs through October 22 at Gallery I, School of Art & Design, Texas State University - San Marcos.

The list of participating artists: DL Alvarez, Jaq Belcher, Joe Biel, Astrid Bowlby, Val Britton, Lynne Clibanoff, Annabel Daou, Louise Despont, Brian Dettmer, Leonardo Drew, Will Duty, Adam Fowler, Jacob El Hanani, Roland Flexner, Sabine Friesicke, Alexander Gorlizki, Victoria Haven, Gloria Ortiz-Hernandez, Christine Hiebert, Kristiina Lahde, Jayne Lawrence, Il Lee, Mona Marshall, Christopher McNulty, Jill Moser, Renato Orara, Gloria Ortiz-Hernandez, Justin Quinn, Laurie Reid, Charles Ritchie, Viviane Rombaldi-Seppey, Sebastian Rug, Eduardo Santiere, Mark Sheinkman, Jeffrey Simmons, Brent Sommerhauser, Stephanie Strange, Randy Twaddle, Liz Ward, Lynn Woods Turner, Will Yackulic, Daniel Zeller, and Eric Zimmerman.

*Correction: originally credited Becky Kerlin as curator. She gave a lecture for the exhibit, but was not involved in curating.

The Land Heritage Institute is a fascinating organization, if difficult to pin down. Beginning in 1979, the City of San Antonio began to explore the idea of building a reservoir along the Medina River south of the city to provide for future water needs. As part of the process, the city brought in archeologists to excavate sites on the property alongside ongoing dam construction. Around 80 sites were eventually identified, but when the citizens of San Antonio voted down the reservoir project in 1991, archeological research halted along with the resevoir construction. Through a rather circuitous process, the 1,200 acre site was handed over to the Land Heritage Institute, which is an independent non-profit with ties to a strange assortment of groups: the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, San Antonio's Department of Parks and Recreation, the American Institute of Architects, the Texas Equestrian Trail Association, San Antonio Water System, etc.

In an apparent bid to add to this menagerie of stakeholders, LHI is now reaching out to the art community. Yesterday the organization hosted a site-specific photo installation by local photographer Ansen Seale. A group of light boxes, collectively called "The Corn Crib," was installed in a small stone building once used to store corn for drying (in the days when the property was used as farm land). This show acts as a prelude to next month's "art-sci symposium," The Nature of Place -- with participants including Sandy Stone, Lucy Lippard, Joan Jonas, and Anjali Gupta, to name a few. The LA-based Center for Land Use Interpretation is also involved.

 

 The first part of the installation is the journey to reach it. A long drive south on Highway 281, then down some winding roads through the rural areas on the south side. That this is still within Loop 1604 brings home how lopsided San Antonio's development has been -- travel the same distance north from downtown, and you'll be mired in strip malls, if not stand-still traffic. Out here it's ranches and miles of empty, two-lane farm roads. Eventually, there's a small sign indicating the turn for a long, windy one-lane road to LHI's headquarters. Reach the end of this road, and you're still a hay ride away from the one-room stone gallery.

Inside the darkened gallery, Seale's installation is composed entirely of photographs of corn displayed as light boxes. The photos fall into two groups, which alternate in the installation. The first group is straight-forward photos of corn (fresh and dried) on a black background. For the second, Seale rotated the corn as he shot it with what he calls a "reverse-panoramic" process, effectively flattening the entire ear like a world map into a rectangle of kernals. The product is entrancing images of some of the most visually stimulating corn cobs I've ever seen. Or maybe I just never bothered to really look before. At any rate, I had to ask the artist just to be sure there was no digital manipulation of the images (there wasn't). A friend of mine who's a fan of Ansen Seale's work once told me he considers Seale more of a scientist than an artist. At times his work goes too far in this direction, feeling like a slightly cheesy science museum display without an explanation, but much of the time it is effective. Buried in a stone hut in the semi-wilderness, it works. And as an overture to the art community it strikes all the right notes: the installation embeds the simple act of seeing in the cultural and ecological history of a contested space through a technically rigorous process, without a hint of pretension. 

 

 

I suppose Elaine Wolff should be forgiven for proclaiming in a recent review that Daniel Saldaña's scultpures are "post-contemporary in another key way: They’re unmistakably narrative." And also for pitting Saldaña against "the many artists who have spent the last three decades struggling with the tyranny of the object, who have worked to destroy and undermine it through physical negation and conceptualism." But I have to wonder who she's talking about, and what she could possibly mean by "post-contemporary." Most of the artists I'm familiar with make objects and expend a great deal of effort affirming the power of objects. Perhaps Wolff hasn't yet heard of Damien Hirst? Neither is narrative entirely missing from the contemporary art landscape (see: Matthew Barney), and certainly not the kind of loose suggestion of narrative that Saldaña demonstrates.

I recently attended a symposium of San Antonio artists in which Chris Sauter described his own work as "conceptual." This is a far cry from the art for which the term was coined: art from which the artist's hand is removed, which is often rendered as a set of instructions to be completed by an installer. Sauter's pieces are certainly not this, and in my opinion, are more notable for their formal qualities than for their theoretical underpinnings. Which isn't to say that his work leaves the viewer with nothing to ponder. But he creates seductive objects (even if that "object" happens to be a carved up wall) which exist in a kind of harmony with ideas. The aim of most contemporary "conceptual" artists is to extend the formal beauty of the object into the realm of thought, not to negate the object. In the same way that a chess game can be beautiful, so too can a work of art. This need not imply a dematerialization.

But when I say Wolff should be forgiven, I mean it. She reads press releases all day, and art exhibit press releases are all too often baffling mazes of nonsense. While the general trend in art making is toward a kind of beauty that marries object with concept, the narrative all too often tries to foreground and fluff up theory, no matter how tenuous its relationship to the actual artwork.

There's another point that needs to be made here. Art has always embodied ideas, consciously or not, and its degree of success has usually been measured by how well it sets up a dialogue between form and concept. Duchamp's Large Glass is a wonderful formal composition; da Vinci's Last Supper grapples with theological ideas. Any major revolt against the object's place in this dialogue has been greatly exaggerated. As Jed Perl pointed out recently while discussing the Met's Pictures Generation show in the New Republic, painting was very much alive during the '70s. That the critics chose (and choose) not to focus on it, does not mean that Alex Katz (for instance) wasn't making great paintings. It would also be a mistake to say that the artists who first earned the "conceptual" epithet were not concerned with aesthetics or beauty. Sol LeWitt's work has an undeniable aesthetic impact, to the extent that LA Times art critic Christopher Knight has deemed the artist's long-term retrospective at MASS MoCA "America's Sistine."

The big problem here is that to a segment of the broader public, contemporary art is seen as cold and stuffy on one hand, and aggressively political (read: manipulative) on the other. These concepts of contemporary art are holdovers from decades ago. Why does the public still hang onto these myths, and why is someone as cultured as Elaine Wolff perpetuating them?

(The teaser image for this post is a photograph of a text piece by Stefan Bruggemann)

With the extension of the Riverwalk, San Antonio got some new high-visibility public artworks by people like Bill Fontana, Donald Lipski, and Stuart Allen. The city has also invested in public art from the airport to the Lavaca neighborhood in recent years. But I've always been interested in those rogue attempts to place a visual stamp on the city: the street artists that work with the mindset of a public artist.

The typical street artist tends to repetitively brand the sides of buildings, billboards, trains, and other large, flat surfaces with what amounts to a huge signature (even if the artist isn't using a "nom de rue" she often repeats the same image over and over, so that it becomes like a signature). These artists also tend to work in situ, creating their pieces relatively quickly and then moving on. The typical public artist works on large, one-off pieces with city-owned space or infrastructure, adding interest to what might otherwise be a dull, lifeless area. Donald Lipski and Bill FitzGibbons worked with TXDOT to install under highways. Anne Wallace stamped fresh sidewalks with oral history as the city poured them. These artists usually work on elaborate designs that have complicated fabrication and installation processes. These pieces are largely anonymous, apart from whatever press they get when they are unveiled. The vast majority of the viewers will never know who made them, and there's no sense of identity like that which is formed by repetitive tagging.

This brings me to a series by Aaron Forland, who works between these two artistic spaces of "street" and "public." He has installed a small group of pieces along Durango street between Main and Alamo, using the little doors on the bottom of the traffic light poles:

 Like a street artist, he uses spray paint on an existing surface, and doesn't ask permission. But more like a public artist, he takes his time and carefully works over composition and placement (Forland removes these electrical covers, takes them home, methodically paints them, and then replaces them). Some of these pieces are months in the making. He also takes a painterly approach, and the series is much more reminiscent of a series of paintings than a group of tags:

 

Another key to these pieces is that they are framed within the industrial design of existing city infrastructure. By using these removable plates, Forland creates pieces that feel as if they are part of the infrastructure. By contrast, most street artists work in a way that shows little sensitivity to the texture, dimensions, or placement of the underlying surface. Forland's little murals enrich the public space in a way that is more subtle than most public or street art (being below the line of sight, it's easy to drive past these pieces for months or years without noticing them), but engage the methods and ideologies of both. 

BONUS: I went by Aaron's apartment to shoot sneak peaks of his two newest, as-yet-uninstalled pieces. Keep an eye out for these as you travel on Durango near King William: