'Helmut Barnett: Maximal/Minimal'
Wally Workman Gallery through Sept. 30

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
September 12, 2008

Some people don't like abstract art, or most abstract art, because it doesn't seem like a whole lot of thought or work went into it, or, worse, it often doesn't even look that good.

Which is why we're especially pleased by this "Maximal/Minimal" show of Helmut Barnett's at Wally Workman Gallery: A lot of thought went into it, a lot of work went into it, and it looks great.

Here are colorful abstractions – sharply defined and precisely rendered colorful abstractions – arranged to achieve uncommon balance or to affect a sort of kinesis via static articulation all stacked and staggered, the bright shapes often against a ground of collaged diagrams and texts. Imagine: The baby Jesus had a hissy fit while playing with Colorforms in an antique-book binder's studio, but (baby J being the divine infant, after all) the results were heavenly and wholly coherent. There are several of these, and they're only part of the show.

Elsewhere, in a series of paintings of "Caryatids," the main forms are silhouetted like overlapping, vertical sine waves stark black against backgrounds formed of industrial color swatches: Red Caryatid, Yellow Caryatid, and – bright polychrome in the middle – Carnival Caryatid. On the wall to the left of these, there's a different pair called Garden Scape I and Garden Scape II; they're intricate microcosms of acrylic on paper, a gathering of objects composing the sort of beauty that George Herriman might have created with a fierce and steady brush in the midst of an Ecstasy bender. (Really good abstract art, our thesis insists, requires such metaphors as these.) A viewer can sense, in some of these works, faint echoes of de Chirico or Miró, but always the force that drives these flowerings is clearly Barnett's own. That's the "Maximal" part of the exhibition, and it's a doozy.

"Doozy" comes from Duesenberg, of course: the American-made automobile of the 1910s-1930s that was the epitome of luxury and grace. We mention it because the "Minimal" section of Barnett's show features large paintings of what the artist calls "the couple," a simple glyph like the corporate logo for Togetherness or perhaps sexual union as streamlined for immense inscription on the Nazca Plain. First it's rendered black on white, then white on black, acrylic on paper at 43 inches by 30 inches, and it's an excellent icon well presented. Why Duesenberg, though, is because the image would make, in three dimensions, a fine hood ornament for a car as elegant as a Duesenberg. As if precognitively acknowledging this idea, Barnett's created a paper stone maquette of the thing, 3D Couple, that commands attention from one lucky corner of the Workman Gallery's second exhibition room; except that, given the size of this particular "hood ornament," the corresponding doozy would have to be big enough for Paul Bunyan to drive. Even the minimal here is, in a way, maximal.

The entire show affords maxi-mum enjoyment for your eyes, an intricacy of balances and references for your mind to happily puzzle upon.

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'Sean Perry: Fairgrounds'
Stephen L. Clark Gallery through Oct. 8

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
September 12, 2008

Twilight. Midpoint between day and dark. An ideal time for passing between worlds, for moving from our humdrum workaday domain to a place of blazing electrics, great whirling machinery, and danger. That's the realm we visit in the compelling images of fairgrounds by photographer Sean Perry. He trains his lens on a staple of American amusement and offers a view of it that's somewhere between what we know and what we don't. The rides may be recognizable, the bright lights familiar, but this isn't the carnival as it's so often celebrated on film, the saturated color stock capturing the midway's unrestrained revelry in all its lurid, scarlet spectacle, like the inside of a screaming mouth. Rather, the exquisitely shaded black and white of these photographs, shot near the hour of dusk, move us onto a shadowy plane, artfully perched on the edge of night and disorder. It's no less exciting than the carnival in color; indeed, it may be even more alluring because it appears more secretive, half-hidden in darkness. The shadowy figures seeking thrills here are doing something surreptitious, which just adds to the adrenaline rush of being there.

That we're aware of people in these photographs is a bit of a departure for Perry. In series such as "Transitory," shown at Stephen L. Clark Gallery two years ago, the image-maker honed in on the geometry of the environment: the shapes of buildings and their architectural components as set against nature. There's still a wealth of that in "Fairgrounds" – the curve of a roller-coaster track, the crisscrossing lines of steel support beams for thrill rides such as the Claw and the Steel Spider, the circle of the Ferris wheel – and you draw from these images the same appreciation of form that you do from Perry's others. In the lower right quarter of Promised is a graceful arch silhouetted against a sun too low to be seen. Skyline situates a Ferris wheel similarly low in the frame, but the heavy circle of it is topped by a breathtaking skyscape, with a thick, winding river of cloud backlit by a masked yet still dazzling late-afternoon sun. But whereas Perry's other architecturally oriented photographs often play off the absence of the people who built or inhabit the structures depicted, suggesting a sense of them being deserted for some time, the images here project a strong sense of human presence. These midways aren't the abandoned amusement parks of noir films but ones full of working attractions, turning, spinning, and rolling for people who may not always be seen but are clearly felt.

A few times, Perry lets us glimpse those patrons of the carnival, not in some traditional way (faces in close-up, eyes wide and mouths open in glee as a coaster car starts its terrifyingly delightful descent) but as black legs hurled through space by the massive machinery of the midway. The upended legs of The Claw and the ones sticking out from flying swings in and around ... provide more evidence of the fairground as a world between, where things hang suspended. (The latter image gets my vote as the most captivating in the collection, capturing the mechanics of fun and a swirl of motion with startling clarity and the richest gradations of gray.)

As anyone who's paid attention as night falls can attest, twilight goes quickly. So it must be enjoyed quickly, and the blurring in photographs such as The Mariachi We Met and From Earth to the Moon suggest swift motion, like the haste of kids racing to get in one more ride before the midway closes. Indeed, Perry depicts The Last Ride here, its silhouetted figures mere graphic forms lost in deep midnight black. Seeing them calls up that wistfulness that comes with the carnival's departure. How we're drawn to that thrilling twilight world. The sun is setting. Quick, let's head to the fairgrounds.

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The Politics of War'
Flatbed Gallery through Nov. 4

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
September 19, 2008

Artists mollify their fears with their creative processes. They attach pictorial references to things that threaten their peace of mind, their pursuit of happiness. Things that upset an artist's sense of safety and security must be studied and understood on an internal level. Maybe artists are the canaries in the coal mines; they help us all process and articulate cultural reactions to things such as war. Flatbed Press has created a timely exhibit of etchings, lithographs, Conté drawings, and gouache and acrylic paintings by Chris Reno and the late Robert Levers called "The Politics of War." To open an art show on 9/11 and close it on election night with a viewing party gets directly to the point of addressing fears – right off the bat, well done.

This is a large and varied show, with works by Levers that date from 1969 through 1991, addressing Vietnam and the Gulf wars, and works by Reno that were made from 2004 through 2008 and address the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's fascinating to see the prescience in Levers' work. In several of his soft-ground etchings, various terrorists are leaping barefoot, as if over hot coals. In works such as Doin' the Terrorist Strut Again (1988) and Terrorist Juggling Plates (1990), a soldier and a captive enact grim dramas. The fact that this art about torture predates Abu Ghraib and other recent events is one aspect of the show that will keep you reading the dates on all the cards. Some imagery involves skeletal forms dancing or talking with soldiers; some is vigorously abstract. Levers' excellent group of works on paper is a great legacy. Katherine Brimberry said Flatbed had received the works on paper from the Mary Moody Northen Gallery from the artist's estate. They decided that with the upcoming elections, now would be a good time to show them, and I agree.

Chris Reno is currently working in Iowa after living in Austin. Here, he displays some fine hatching textures in portraits of people such as Bush (titled Lebanon 2), Cheney (titled Our Pal), and Rumsfeld (titled WTF). These characters mix with Colin Powell and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. These are all timely portraits of powerful men. Reno also has a series of paintings that are very well-made. They have a Works Progress Administration-mural vibe with a little Diego Rivera and a little Georges Braque mixed in. But they are small, densely personal paintings. I think my favorite is Red Snapper, in which young men dressed in rather Western-looking sportswear are helping dig a man out from the rubble of a wall. The rhythm of the debris is so well accomplished that at first you don't notice the odd fish in the rocks. Peculiar Species, which shows a police training yard, is quite stark and a striking piece. I like that this show isn't exclusively prints; it's just a big, lush mix of works and opinions.

This show will end on election night but will give you something to think about any day of the week. To temper a state of violence is to lessen its emotional intensity. Consider the time lapsed between The Art of War by Sun Tzu, sixth century BC China, and The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli, 16th century Italy. Both remind us that violence is part of our heritage and future, and as humans we must cope. These ancient books and this contemporary art show remind us of another commonality: the urgent desire to civilize barbaric acts.

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'Reset/Play' captures promise, perils of technology
Exhibit offers cautionary tales of through video-game-inspired art.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
September 25, 2008

'Reset/Play," a new exhibit at Arthouse that has been curated by new media artists Paul Slocum and Marcin Ramocki, offers a modest yet interesting survey of some of the trends current to video-game-inspired art.

For all the unbridled geeking out — i.e., celebration — over the magical possibilities of technology that's evident in "Reset/Play," there are plenty of cautionary tales about technology's intervention into human life. And that's not exactly a wholly new sentiment.

Remember the 1972 performance "Media Burn" by the collective Ant Farm — creators of the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo — that had the artists driving a car into a bank of burning televisions?

We've got much of the same here; it's just a new kind of media that's being questioned and criticized.

Cory Arcangel offers one of the more poetic examples of technology's relationship to human culture with "Beat the Champ." Arcangel offers a self-playing Sega Genesis bowling game programmed to show an endless loop of gutter balls. At Arthouse, viewers are invited to sit in a legless video game chair and watch "Beat the Champ" in futile passivity. So much for human power over technology, Arcangel seems to suggest.

Kristin Lucas likewise spins a cautionary tale of the futility of technology with "5-Minute Break," a digital video. A pigtailed female avatar wanders the World Trade Center's empty subbasement (in 2000 Lucas herself was a resident artist in the World Views artist studio program at the World Trade Center). The avatar drinks a soda and runs into one dead-end of a boiler room after another. It's as if whoever was playing this video game just left and left the avatar — curious and seemingly full of energy — to wander on autopilot.

"Reset/Play" rewards when artists make broader strokes and reconsider video games in a larger cultural context. Take Brody Condon's "Judgment Modification (After Memling)." Condon's dramatic digital image — projected movie-screen-size on the gallery wall — is a digitally animated riff on a 15th-century Flemish painting depicting the Last Judgment. Though it resembles a fiery and theatrical early Renaissance painting with its apocryphal and religious scene, Condon's tableau quivers with slight motion like a video game left on pause. What's more the root of today's violent behavior, Condon seems to ask — video games or society's entire historical trajectory of violence?

Perhaps whatever is new is old after all.

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'Past: Paused'
Davis Gallery through Oct. 11

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
September 26, 2008

Time is out of joint in the Davis Gallery on 12th Street, the temporal parade staggered as in some artier Tarantino film.

Because China is ancient, isn't it, with its Great Wall and its architecture harking back through enough centuries to cause a thinking traveler cognitive vertigo? And the USA, why, that's just an upstart, some Western punk still wet behind its economically bewildered ears, its first purloined Marlboro not even half smoked. And yet, in the Davis Gallery, everything new is old again – and vice versa.

China is ancient and riddled with the ghosts of history, yes, but, especially in the cities, its oldest parts are shriek by howl with modernity, the antiquity of artisanal terra-cotta jarred by the bright polyurethane of mass production. And the United States is relatively bratty and young, although a recent era – the shining, TV-modulated culture-scape of the 1950s – has achieved the depth of myth within American shores if not, via mid-20th century cinema, around the world.

Now there's a fine mess of words for evoking, but we know that a single picture is worth a thousand of them. And humanity's newest arena of art and industry, that hyperlinked www, likes to demand: Pictures or it isn't true.

There's a whole lot of truth in the pictures currently on display in the two-person exhibition "Past: Paused" at the Davis and a whole lot of time-shifting going on. Matthew Fuller's photos are of these United States; Faustinus Deraet's are of China; the new is juxtaposed with the old, yes, that's a rather obvious grouping. But, wait, here's the deeper strangeness, the next level of chrono-shenanigans: Fuller's polychrome, postcardic images aren't precisely his own; the artist has, instead, digitally enhanced photographs taken by his grandfather in the 1950s. These storied snapshots of happy days among finned Buicks and pre-McDonald's eateries and on-vacation vistas earned strictly 9-to-5 have been vastly enlarged and treated with the imaging equivalent of steroids. Their colors are of an almost Lovecraftian intensity, burning the captured scenes – at once quotidian and, from our perspective, iconic – into the mind's eye and the retinas of the body's actual eyes. A few minutes of witnessing these wonders in the fiery main room of the Davis may send you, seeking surcease of Technicolor overload, to the cool pool of soothing black-and-white in the next room – where China awaits.

Deraet has nixed digital enhancement for the images chronicling his recent two-week journey through that teeming country. He's eschewed color for monochrome and has even ditched the precise possibilities of Leica and Hasselblad: All the photographs improving the walls in this room have been taken with a plastic toy camera, lending a sort of pinhole-photography look to the intriguing display, providing a view, like that of Fuller's grandfather, that is more personal and intimate.

This two-person, two-country show is damned appropriate to the current times, as the United States stumbles, gasping, into economic shambles while China seems to be reiterating the rah-rah burgeoning of wealth and power that the U.S. knew when Grampa Fuller was snapping Kodaks of his relatives in their Sunday best. For that reason alone, as well as to experience the contentious eddies of time and the beauty of photographic art (timeless, after all), this show demands your attention.

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