TXST Galleries: “Out(Side) of Time” + “Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier”

[TXST] Galleries is nestled in the art building on the Texas State University Campus in San Marcos and consequently, it’s probably overlooked and underrated. Mounting consistently interesting shows concurrently in its spacious two rooms, it deserves to be mentioned in the same company as the Visual Arts Center in the UT art building in Austin, and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston. Its current duo of shows are among the best I’ve seen there — each is intellectually provocative, aesthetically rich, and contains the ineffable frisson of a good show — where you walk into the room and sense quality and intention. 

Installation view of Kathleen McShane’s “(OUT)SIDE OF TIME”

Kathleen McShane’s OUT(SIDE) OF TIME is visually dazzling and imbued with a relaxed profundity. McShane moves effortlessly across mediums — paper works, collage, canvas oil works with different planes and tactility. McShane’s background includes work as a draftsperson for Sol LeWitt installations, and one can see, or rather feel, that LeWitt vibe of playful rigor. The paper works are intimate yet beautiful, the collage and canvas pieces have an air of mystery required for abstract/geometric works in 2024 to rise above fungible hotel lobby bric-a-brac. McShane sprinkles literary references throughout, around, and in the works. A lacquered, charged ceramic piece in the corner sits on a copy of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness by Edmund Husserl, a collage has a double cover of Walker Percy’s moody, existential jaunt The Moviegoer, a glass display case contains works and references to legendary surreal Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. What is the connection? Phenomenology — the labyrinths of perception, consciousness, and experience. 

A work from “(OUT)SIDE OF TIME”

Husserl is a key founder of phenomenology, positing the concept of “The Now” — conscious life’s absolute point of orientation, or put more plainly an experience so etched into ourselves they become a permanent part of our consciousnesses. A literary example of The Now: In William Gaddis’ epic novel of art and authenticity, The Recognitions, the protagonist, tortured but talented painter Wyatt Gwyonn is thunderstruck by Picasso’s luminescent Night Fishing in Antibes, remarking: 

“When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it…You can’t see them any time, just any time, because you can’t see freely very often, hardly ever, maybe seven times in a life.”

 In The Moviegoer, jaded stockbroker Binx Bolling wiles away his days in New Orleans watching movies before taking a seemingly aimless cruise around the Gulf Coast, at one point stating: “What is the nature of the search?” you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” 

Artwork from Kathleen McShane’s “(OUT)SIDE OF TIME”

In Borges’ short story Funes the Memorious, a teenage boy, paralyzed in an accident, has the ability to imagine a changing flame with the clarity and definition an average person might conceive of a triangle.  McShane writes in the wall text: “If thought occupies space, the works give form to some sense of that fleeting placeness.” This elusive and alluring concept of placeness connects The Now that Binx searches for and Funes can visualize effortlessly, this placeness might be the way a good work of art situated correctly might lead one to experience understanding without knowledge or knowledge without understanding, either of which is richer and satisfying in its unfurling regeneration than a pat and didact sequence of the two. This placeness speaks to the inherent worth of art made with curiosity and care, a worth that needs no more justification than a glorious high-enamel sunset or a gentle afternoon breeze through the trees. 

Lauren Kelly accomplishes the treacherous feat of addressing a controversial, contemporary political issue without a trace of tedium or didacticism. Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier deftly wades into the issue of museum repatriation. As you probably know, most museums have some skeletons (sometimes literally) in their closets — objects procured illegally, seized in colonial plunder, or during war time, or by a shady chain of ownership. The most famous and contentious examples of these are the Greek Elgin Marbles at The British Museum and the West African Benin Bronzes at various institutions. Some of the Benin Bronzes have been returned, but the Marbles defiantly remain. Most of us have a sense that they should be returned, but also probably a bit of Gollum-brained greediness to see them in person at a more convenient international hub. This speaks to our hunger for aura, as articulated by Walter Benjamin and John Berger, an original art object’s unique presence in time and space. 

Installation view of Lauren Kelley’s “Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier”

A recent experiment by The Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague claimed to prove that one’s emotional response to real works was more powerful than to a reproduction. Viewers of Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring were outfitted with EEGs which measured a higher response to the original. One wonders what (to use another Berger term) the mystification of the museum added. Did its hallowed and hushed space, its cold marble floors, the painting’s heavy gilded frame burnish the aura? Could you put a high-quality 3D printed reproduction in and fool the viewer? This actually is a proposed solution for works like the Elgin Marbles, laser cut a new block for the Brits and return the real deal to the new, state-of-the art museum in Athens. The reticence to this proposal speaks to the same tug or yearn of those who still tremblingly want a “real” diamond, when lab cut ones are more perfect, less expensive, and unencumbered by a centuries long legacy of exploitation. This is a feeling that should be interrogated and perhaps diffused, no? 

An artwork from Lauren Kelley’s “Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier”

Kelly answers these thorny questions with a kind of reverse aplomb. Her reproductions of African objects — in animation, floating in snow-globes, racked into assembly line sequences, form a cannily oblique hieroglyph of kitsch with an icy, Kubrickian resonance. Yes, these objects can be reproduced, they can be many things, often simultaneously, and the fascination with the originals not only implicates a possessive, colonial obsession, but also is deeply limiting. Look at what is possible when you let go of old ways of seeing. 

An artwork from “Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier”

These shows have a genuine spiritual nourishment. I don’t mean that in the way middlebrow and mediocre works of all mediums will flatter the viewer with platitudinous delusions to make one “feel better”, but rather embodying this statement by Leonard Bernstein: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and it’s essential meaning is the tension between the contradictory answers.” These contradictory answers murmur and echo between the shows, like this sequence of dialogue in Waiting for Godot: 

All the dead voices.
They make a noise like wings.
Like leaves.
Like sand.
Like leaves.

Kathleen McShane’s Out(Side) of Time and Lauren Kelly’s Scene 8: Aircraft Carrier is on view at [TXST] Galleries through November 10th.