Andrea Dezso: Houston, We Have an Imagination

The Rice Gallery on the Rice University campus always has interesting installations.  Artists are invited to create installations specifically for the space.  These installations often have a light-hearted, even humorous feel to them, like Wayne White's Big Lectric Fan, which I wrote about in this blog last fall.

Andrea Dezso's wonderful installation, "Sometimes In My Dreams I Fly," is not as laugh-out-loud funny as White's big puppet head of George Jones, with its mouth opening and closing as he snores, but it is still delightful.  Dezso's sensibility is that of the rare adult who has preserved a child-like faith in the importance of imaginary worlds.  Her installation takes the space program as its starting point--appropriate for Houston on the fortieth (!) anniversary of Apollo XIII.  But Dezso grew up in Communist Romania.  The space program that fired her imagination was the Soviet space program.  She collected stamps with images of astronauts and space travel and followed the news of their flights.

In a video on a screen in the foyer, Dezso explains that she thinks the ill-fated Apollo XIII flight ("Houston, we have a problem") was actually interesting mostly because it didn't get to the moon.  She says that even if we don't actually get to go to the moon or into space in our real physical bodies, we can go in our imaginations.

When I was a child, I had a book called You Will Go To the Moon.  It was written in 1959.

It's amazing that in 1959, people really believed that children born in the fifties would someday vacation on the moon, sort of like people in the fifties drove to the Grand Canyon.  Like Apollo XIII, though, I have not gone to the moon and never will.

Dezso's installation is based on her previous series of tunnel books.  A tunnel book is a three-dimensional book that you look into as if looking into a tunnel.  Pages are partially cut away in front to reveal other scenes behind them.

These books are small, perhaps 6"x 8" and about six inches deep.  For the Rice Gallery installation, she imagined tunnel books big enough to walk into!  And then she built them in the gallery space.  You can't actually walk into them:  you look into them through the big glass windows in front of the gallery.

The effect is mysterious and tantalizing:  you can see deep into this "scene," but you can't exactly crawl in there and explore it.  Careful lighting makes the back of the "tunnel book" brighter than the foreground, creating the "repousse" effect of 19th century romantic landscape painting.  Silhouettes of strange creatures are seen prancing and flying against the background colors.

The invented creatures are probably the most interesting part of the show.  Part insect, part animated plants, part astronaut, they fly and swim and crawl, reminding me of Arthur Rackham's silhouette illustrations:

Like Rackham's fairies, Dezso's space plants, insects, and people seem not entirely benign, although they are not exactly monsters.  Carrot Man, for example, has a kind of manic grin.  The average child would not be entirely pleased to meet him.

(Dezso has cut out huge life-size versions of some of her creatures and attached them to the exterior doors of the gallery.  Carrot Man is one of them.)

But who wouldn't want to be a Female Astronaut with a Leaf-Powered Propeller?  As a child, I, like most children, sometimes did dream I could fly, and the cartoon images of the Jetsons flying around with jetpacks on their backs made it seem that maybe I would Go To The Moon, or at least fly around Nashville with my jetpack on.  Apparently Romanian children were having the same dreams and fantasies, as we all cowered under our mutually assured mushroom clouds.  For the space program was the flip side of MAD:  technology's benign side, like Our Friend the Atom.  We all loved Tang and Space Food Sticks, the only discernible benefits of the space program.

And so there are both utopian and dystopian elements in these scenes:  the leaf-powered propeller hints at a time when plants might provide people with some new kind of alternative "green" transport; but at the same time the landscapes are replete with machines and power lines.  However, the machines look more like carnival rides than like gritty industrial rust-belt relics.

The power lines just look like power lines.  That in itself is a little jarring:  in this fantastic world where people have propellers on their heads, they also have these banal power lines or drilling rigs.  It looks like Texas.

Dezso has impressive paper-cutting skills. I'm impressed because I think she must have done most of the cutting with an Exacto knife, and I am trying to get better at using one of those tools.  Paper cutting is hot right now in the world of contemporary art:  there's a show at the Museum of Arts and Design called Slash: Paper Under the Knife. 
Dezso has a tunnel book in that show, and another long-time cutter of paper is also in the show:  Kara Walker, whom I immediately thought of when I first looked at Dezso's show.  Walker's cut paper figures are, of course, much more disturbing, even nightmarish:

Dezso seems to draw on this work, and perhaps that of Arthur Rackham, to evoke a not-quite-benign, but nonetheless tantalizing dream world, in which one might experience flying, if not to the moon, then at least with a leaf propeller on your head.

Sally Heller, "Ab-Scrap"

Ab-Scrap is an interesting installation at Lawndale, by New Orleans artist Sally Heller.

 

The title seems to refer to the fact that the installation is a kind of abstract three-dimensional "painting" made with scraps of fabric and jewelry, beads, mirrors, string, and wire.  

You can walk around in the installation, as if it's a kind of landscape.  It even has trees.

  

  

The colors, beads, and trees reminded me of New Orleans after Mardi Gras, when you see beads hanging in live oak trees.

 

Charles Brindley, part II

Yesterday I wrote about Charles Brindley, an artist who lives in Kentucky near the Tennessee border. He grew up in Nashville, and so Tennessee can claim him too.  I am especially interested in his large-scale drawings of deciduous trees in winter.  But Brindley also makes large oil paintings of our local rural landscape.

Brindley traces his interest in landscape back to his childhood in Nashville.  He was the youngest of several children, and his grandmother and great-grandmother lived with the family.  So sometimes his mother would take the elderly ladies out for a drive in the country.  He was too little to stay home by himself, so he went also, and spent long hours gazing out the windows of the car at the landscape.  This was in the early 1960s.

I think a lot of Americans experience the landscape at first this way, and mainly this way.  I've wondered why there aren't more paintings and photographs of the road, with the landscape falling away on either side.  I guess it's because it's hard to draw and drive.  I remember long drives in the country in the early 1960s also, when my family would drive to Wilson County to visit my grandparents at their farm.  My earliest attempts at landscape painting probably resemble the view through the back seat window.

Of course, Brindley gets out of the car now and draws on site.  His graphite studies are used to make large oil paintings in the studio.  Some are panoramic in format, such as "Flat Agricultural Landscape":

When you drive to Adairville from Nashville, you drive through an area known as the Hidden Corn Belt.  This is a four-county area north of Nashville where a great deal of field corn is grown, in huge fields.  Brindley's landscapes often reflect a fascination with the graphic qualities of the lines of the furrows, some just beginning to sprout corn.  When you get up close to this painting, you can see that the earth is rendered in an almost Pointillist style, with tiny touches of color juxtaposed.  The color is not simply naturalistic: it seems saturated, and oddly, more saturated in the background than in the foreground, which is the opposite of classical atmospheric perspective technique.  This gives the impression of bright sunlight falling on the yellow field at the far right, whereas the foreground appears somewhat overcast.

The lines of the furrows on the middle field create regular linear perspective, but in a way that actually suggests a mound rather than a flat landscape.  Is it flat, or hilly? This ambiguity gives the space a sort of vertiginous quality, as if you are flying over it and changing your angle of view as you fly.  In some ways it reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton's undulating landscapes:

Benton has been called a Regionalist painter.  American Regionalist painters in the 1920s through the 1950s rejected abstraction and modernism in favor of a more representational style of painting, and their subject matter became the rural landscape and small towns of the United States.  You could say that Brindley's work could be categorized this way.  His landscape painting, though, is much more representational than Benton's.

 

An example might be this painting of the trunk of an old beech tree.  In this painting, there are no large passages of hyper-saturated color; the overall effect is more naturalistic.   But when you get up close you can see again that Pointillist effect of juxtaposed intense color.  This painting reminds me more of the work of American 19th century landscape painters of the Hudson River School, like Cole and Durand, than it does of any 20th century painting. I saw a show once of small oil studies by Asher Durand, and Brindley's study of this beech tree seems to have much in common with Durand's meticulous studies.

But of course, as a 20th and 21st century painter, Brindley has a different attitude toward the application of paint.  His paintings don't have the "licked" surface that the almost photographically real Hudson River School paintings of the 19th century had. Brindley draws your attention also to the flat surface of the canvas and the fact of the material presence of paint on it, like a good modernist would.  He has obviously thought a lot about how tiny spots of colors work when juxtaposed, which was the obsession of 19th century French painters, Seurat being the most famous practitioner of that technique.  But Monet also thought deeply about the effect of small touches of color that the eye mixes, instead of the painter mixing the colors on the palette.

This juxtaposition of tiny touches of color hits a high-water mark Brindley's "The Green Man":

 The subject matter here is a rock formation, another favorite landscape feature for Brindley.  But the real subject is the broad spectrum of lichen colors on the rocks.  It takes a minute to find the Green Man:  a green figure reaches toward the center of the painting from the right hand side, as if he is jumping to catch a ball.  The Green Man is described by thousands of tiny spots of color, mimicking the tiny spots of lichen on a rock.  The rocks themselves seem to be abstract paintings made of many touches of color:  nature as Abstract Expressionist?  And the forms of the rocks, cropped and devoid of any other context, compose together an almost abstract, sculptural form.

There's a tension in Brindley's work between his representational impulse--the desire to record every branch and twig on a tree for example--and this drive toward abstraction.  But they are not really contradictory:  the Romantic landscape painter has been a driving force in modernism, and toward abstraction, from the beginning of Romanticism in the early 19th century. 

Charles Brindley and Big Trees

On New Year's Eve of 2009, instead of buying a bottle of champagne, my partner and I treated ourselves to a visit to an artist we admire:  Charles Brindley, of Adairville, KY. Brindley grew up in Nashville and studied art at MTSU and at the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg.  He is best known for his large-scale, meticulous graphite renderings of giant, ancient deciduous trees of the Southeastern mixed hardwood forest.

I first encountered Brindley's work on the cover of a program guide from WPLN, Nashville's public radio station, in the 1990s. It was a drawing of a bare tree in winter. I pulled the cover off and thumb-tacked it to the wall over my desk, and I looked at it every day for a long time.  I think it may have influenced my early photographs, many of which were studies of trees.  Brindley's monochrome drawings are so detailed that they look like photogravures from a distance, with their matte surface and their long gray scale.

My second encounter with his work was recently, at the Belle Meade Club in Nashville.  Three large drawings of trees on the Belle Meade Club golf course are hung in the downstairs lobby of the club.  Again, from a distance, one might mistake them for photogravures, but on second inspection they have an otherworldliness that is definitely not photographic.  One notices, for example, that there is nothing in the drawing but the tree:  no background of other trees, no hills, no people, no golfers.  A few birds may perch in the bare branches, and a few old leaves cling to the branches.  There's a suggestion of a big cloud behind the tree. The tree stands alone.

The drawings at the BMC are oaks, but this osage orange portrait below suggests the scale and ambition of these drawings.

These drawings are impressive on several counts. First, they are big.  The one above is 23 inches by 29 inches, and Brindley does the drawings on site.  (Sometimes, if it's cold or rainy, he draws from inside his car, a feat in itself.)  Second, the draftsmanship is very, very good.  Brindley has been drawing for thirty-seven years, and he became obsessed with drawing trees in 1985.  From 1985 through 1991, he says, he drew trees almost constantly.  It shows.  Eventually he challenged himself to do twelve large drawings a year, and he has done this consistently every year since, amassing a large body of work on the subject of deciduous trees, especially large, old trees, and mainly depicting their forms in winter when the structure of the tree is easiest to see.

Brindley's medium for these drawings is the humble graphite pencil.  He goes through a lot of them every year, and he uses all the grades.

 

For early 19th century American landscape painters like Cole and Durand, drawings done on site in the landscape were a means to an end:  they used these drawings as references when making larger oil paintings in their studios.  In the late 19th century, the French Barbizon painters pioneered the idea of painting directly from nature, "sur le motif," instead of in the studio. This became the signal method of modernist landscape painting, in the hands of Cezanne, for example.

Brindley does both.  He makes large, finished drawings "sur le motif," in five or six visits to the site, but he also makes reference drawings outside, in the landscape,  that he uses later to make larger composite drawings later in the studio.  And he makes paintings from these reference drawings.

Here is a study with notes written directly on the drawing, in true 19th century style:

And here is a composite drawing based on several drawings put together. This is a commission for the MBA school, and the subject is some trees on the MBA campus.

Tomorrow I will be writing about some of Brindley's paintings and  more about him, his work, and the Northern Romantic landscape tradition.

Contemporary Korean Photography

The MFA in Houston has an interesting exhibit of contemporary Korean photography. The above image is by a photographer called Sungsoo Koo, and it's titled Tour Bus.  Most of the photographs in the exhibit were very large, very sharp color photographs like this one.

But this one was not my favorite:  my favorite was by an artist named Won Seoung Won. I could find nothing about her on the internet, but her photograph was a digital collage that showed a fantasy world with a castle, a dragon of some kind, and two little girls, one riding a dolphin in the water below the castle, and the other riding a carousel horse on the land.  The photograph is called "War of Sisters," and the wall plaque says that the photographer wanted to make a piece about the rivalry between her two little nieces.  The younger one is cuter and gets more attention from the grownups in the family, which makes the older sister jealous.  Won Seoung Won imagined a world where the younger sister could rule the sea, and the older sister could rule the land. The charm of this photograph is that the scene looks entirely convincing, as if she actually photographed it rather than collaged it together, and so it looks like a photograph of the world of mythic struggles that children inhabit in their imagination.  The older sister is wearing a Snow White costume straight out of the Disney cartoon, but she's not a cartoon character.  Somehow the juxtaposition of these cartoon elements and real little girls is powerful and wonderful, as if somebody photographed a dream.

The color photographs show a Korea that is much like the United States:  an affluent consumer society.  Sanggil Kim's photograph, "Offline Burberry Internet Community," shows a group of Koreans who met online because of their fascination with Burberry plaid products.

I had just read an article in The New Yorker about people starving in North Korea, forced to eat weeds and corn cobs just to fill their stomachs.  Estimates vary on how many people starved to death in Korea in the nineties, but some estimates go as high as 2.5 million people, 10% of the population.  So it was strange to see these photographs of South Korea, where apparently people live in a fully modern, high-tech, consumer society.

There were a few black and white photographs too.  One was truly monumental:  about seven feet tall, and its subject was the pine trees around a temple in Korea.

I thought a lot about how this photograph by Bae Bien-U was made. I think he must have used a panoramic camera set up vertically.  Then the film was scanned and printed with a digital enlarger, like other large color photographs are printed these days, but with silver gelatin paper and chemistry rather than C-print paper and chemistry.  I think there are a few labs that do this in the states.  I liked it a lot.

The Korean landscape is apparently spectacular. Another photographer, Kim Young-Sun, photographs the many dolmens in Korea. I had no idea that dolmens were found in places other than Europe. They look very much like the dolmens in the UK and France:  standing stones and also post and lintel structures like Stonehenge.  They  were erected around 3000 BC.  Korea has about 25,000 megalithic dolmens, but it once had as many as 80,000.  Some were destroyed by development.  I couldn't find a copy of the photograph in the show online, however.

Korea is undergoing rapid transformation and development.  A tryptich called "Lights of Weolgok-dong" by Ahn Sekwon shows the destruction of a shanty town on the outskirts of Seoul.  The brightly-lit shanty town gradually fades as bulldozers destroy it to make way for more construction:

This shanty town, built on the side of a hill, looks very much like the busy shanty towns of Lima, Peru, which I saw in the summer of 2005.  Steep pathways cut up a hill with densely packed neighborhoods of cinder-block buildings and jerry-rigged power lines.

South Korean photographers are obviously ambitious and technically very skilled.  We can only imagine what their cousins in North Korea could be photographing if they had access to cameras, photo labs, and an audience.  Maybe some day we'll find out what North Koreans were looking at while South Koreans were busy buying Burberry accessories.

Cool Globes in Houston

There's a show at Discovery Green in Houston called Cool Globes.  Fifty styrofoam balls about six feet in diameter have been decorated by artists to illustrate various themes related to climate change and the environment.

It seems that each artist or group of artists got to pick a theme from a list, as no two themes were alike.   There was one about windpower:

And one about the curse of the car:

 

The car one reminded me of an art car, in that it had a lot of little cars glued to it. Art cars frequently have a lot of little things--sometimes other cars--glued to them.  (The Art Car is a special Houston art form, and we have a big parade and contest in the spring of Art Cars.  There's also an Art Car Museum in Houston.)

This one was about biofuels.  It had a nice painting of a corn stalk on it, but it didn't really examine the ethics of using corn for fuel instead of to feed people:

In my view, perhaps the most important thing we could do to "save the Earth" is to stop making so many new people.  It's hard to get away with saying this, though, because people think that means you want to kill babies or something.  I was glad to see that there was a globe about population growth. It had different colored dots on it, and presumably the dots represented a certain number of people, but there was no legend with it, so you couldn't really tell how many people an orange dot represented in India, for example.  But at least this globe had a kind of elegant minimalism about it.

This one was about recycling, I think.  I liked it because it had a kind of Rauschenberg combine style:

Usually I think that overtly didactic art doesn't work very well. This exhibit proved me right, I think.  It's really hard to make something with a  clear political message that doesn't beat you over the head with its message.  There's so little ambiguity and room for interpretation that the Cool Globes come across more as propaganda than art, albeit propaganda for a good cause.

Art Zone

At the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, there's a show called No Zoning. The name alludes to the fact that Houston is the only large city in the US that doesn't have some sort of zoning, and that that creates a kind of creative anarchy that artists thrive on.

Well, maybe. It also means that some people have to live right next to refineries, but so what, if it results in great art? Besides, the people that like to go to the CAM and buy the book about the show are not the people who have to live next to the refineries.

The show itself, in the cavernous dark spaces of the CAM, is a bit depressing. There's a big ark of a disassembled house in the center of the space, put there by Dan Havel and Dean Ruck. They took apart a bungalow that was about to be razed, and moved part of its insides to the inside of the CAM for us to look at. It's kind of interesting, and that's about all you can say about it.

Somewhat similar is a boat-making workshop in another corner of the space, where apparently a boat was actually built by Benjy Mason and Zach Moser, but it was gone by the time I got there.

The handrail outside the museum was decorated with some knitting done by a collective of knitters called KnittaPlease. They "tag" signs, handrails, fire hydrants, etc with knitting. It's as if they make cozies, or socks, for various metal things sticking up in Houston. It reminds me of a jokey poem I heard once:

"In days of old when knights were bold and rubbers weren't invented,
They tied a sock around their cock and babies were prevented."

Sadly, the knitting is very ugly: the yarn is awful acrylic and they knit it on huge needles, so there are lots of holes when it's stretched over whatever metal thingy they're covering, and it doesn't look very good. Also, it's never cold in Houston so it just looks strange, and not in a good or edgy way; just in a sort of cluttered, trashy way.

The best thing in the show is the allusion to the work of the Flower Man, Cleveland Turner. I found out about his house shortly after I moved to Houston. His house was covered with fake flowers, dolls, toys, stuffed animals, and just anything colorful or shiny that he could find. I loved it immediately. But sadly, it burned a few years ago.

Then Cleveland Turner moved to a house of his own (rather than a rental) and began working on a new installation, near Project Row Houses in the Third Ward. We drove by it today on the way home. It's not as ornate and baroque as the previous place was, but it's getting there. It sustained some damage during Hurricane Ike, but volunteers helped Cleveland Turner repair his installation.

The CAM invited the Flower Man to make a similar installation outside the museum. Some of his objects were displayed on the lawn in front of the museum, but the rest were locked up in a sort of shed in front. An employee of the CAM told me that Mr. Turner comes by on Saturdays sometimes and gets the stuff out of the shed and arranges it around on the lawn, but he didn't come today because it looked like rain. This is somewhat ironic, because his real installation, on his house, is there to get rained on and bleached by the sun all the time, and that's part of its appeal: the way it has weathered.

The effect of the Flower Man's installation outside the CAM was nowhere close to the way it looks at his house. At the house, the sheer amount of stuff, the crazy juxtapositions of stuff, the wild color and sparkle of it, and the rich texture is what makes it great. At the CAM, there just wasn't enough stuff and it wasn't close enough together.



The theme of "junk" was repeated throughout the CAM: another artist, Bill Davenport, made a mock-up of his junk shop in the Heights, called Bill's Junk. I used to live in the Heights, but he started the junk shop after we left last summer, so I haven't seen it yet. But the Heights has always had great junk shops, and I'm sure his is no exception. Still, the fake one in the museum wasn't particularly interesting.

Downstairs there was another show by an artist named Jason Villegas. Again, it was made out of junk: mostly old tee shirts from thrift stores it seems. It seems as if there is a lot of this kind of sculpture around: assemblage made from stuff that would have otherwise been thrown away. The work in the show I reviewed at the Blaffer last week was largely made out of old toys and stuffed animals. There's nothing wrong with this idea; after all, it goes back to Picasso and Braque, who sort of invented modernist collage. Assemblage is just the three dimensional version. But not everybody can pull this off. A lot of times it just looks like...a pile of junk.

The problem, I think, is the palette: too often a pile of old tee shirts is used willy nilly with some plastic tarps and some painted lumber, and the colors of all this trash don't really go together. It's important to pay attention to formal elements like color even if you're using junk as your medium! The people that do pay attention to color are the ones that do this most successfully I think: people like Thornton Dial, who sometimes uses the junk as texture and then paints it all one color; or people like Jason Villegas, who is careful in his selection of his old tee shirts.

This particular piece looked a bit to me like a Tibetan thanka, or some other artifact of an Asian religion of some kind. The little flags looked like prayer flags to me, and the whole thing looked a bit mandala-like. But the video running next to it made it clear that it is also meant to allude to a used car lot, and the little triangular flags that for some reason always adorn them. The piece is called "UB Sales Banner." So, maybe consumerism is like a religion for us? On the wall a sign said that the objects are "totems that speak to the zealousness of want and the consequence of waste." Ok, maybe. But nobody would want most of the stuff that these "totems" are made out of; the second part seems more plausible, about the "consequence of waste." What it looks to me like is, some future dystopic civilization making use of what it can find, after the apocalypse, to make religious emblems with.

Houston is a junky, ugly place. It's amazing when somebody can make all this junk look pretty good, as Cleveland Turner does. But it's not easy, and most of the artists featured in this show don't really succeed. The Art Guys married a tree, for example, as part of their participation in No Zoning. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.