'Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something'
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown Through Nov. 8

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
September 11, 2009

"Have you seen her face?"

That query from the old Byrds song might well be what Chuck Close is asking from the 8-by-6-foot self-portrait that greets you upon entering the exhibition of his recent work at the Austin Museum of Art. For in this collection of portraits, the artist focuses intently on the human face in a way that invites our scrutiny, that draws us to linger over its features – those lips, those eyes, that dimpled cheek, that creased brow – and study both them and how they coalesce into a countenance. We look at faces all the time, but how often do we see them? Here, Close is inciting us to do just that.

This is hardly new territory for Close, who made his name in the Seventies with outsized photo-realist paintings of faces in, excuse the pun, extreme close-up. But the novelty of his approach here is that Close offers two and three versions of the same portrait, playing with scale and technique in ways that will have you scanning the works for differences. Does his nose seem more pronounced in this one than that one? Is her smile warmer in one over the other?

The foundation of the show is a series of 15 daguerrotypes, made with that early silver-mirrored photographic process that creates exceptional clarity of image and richness of tone. Displayed together on a shelf, they're relatively small – each one 10 7/8 by 8 15/16 inches – and shielded because of their sensitivity to light. So to see them, you really have to draw near, so near that no one else can look at one at the same time you do. It's as if you're having a private audience with the subject, a whispered exchange to which no other soul is privy. And because of the personal manner in which Close shot most of his subjects – gazing directly into the lens with at least one eye in the point of sharpest focus – your sense of intimacy is intensified. You come away from one feeling that you've been entrusted with a secret.

Elsewhere in the gallery, you may find a larger reproduction of one of these daguerrotype portraits, a 26½-by-20-inch ink-jet pigment print, and though you'll know it's made from an image you've already seen, you may find yourself looking at it as if it isn't. The jump in scale makes certain features more prominent than they appeared when the face was small enough for your eye to take it all in in one glance; you find yourself suddenly noticing the roundness of Laurie Anderson's nose or the fullness of Andres Serrano's lips or Philip Glass' chipped tooth when you hadn't been conscious of them before. And the larger countenance seems much more of a public face, one in conversation with the masses rather than you and you alone. The image is still startlingly clear where it's most in focus – in some portraits, you can appreciate the clarity even more – but the fuzziness beyond the center is also more conspicuous; you're more attuned to what's blurred and drawn to study it. (That hazy, heavy-lidded right eye of Glass' now seems like its own essay on wearying age.) And whether it's owing to the size increase or printing, even the warmest faces seem a little less warm than in the daguerrotypes.

That's even truer of the largest images, the tapestries which include that gargantuan portrait of Close in the front room of the galleries. Woven by mechanized looms using a computer program rendered from a digital scan of the original image, they're all but indistinguishable from photographs at a distance, but the closer you get to one, the more you can read the thousands upon thousands of colored warp threads. The edges within the image soften, as in an impressionist painting, and the image as a whole flattens out. They're no less remarkable to look at – indeed, they may be more so – but they also offer a cooler representation of the subject, something akin to a map, on which you can study the topography of the face.

When you've completed that study, you may find yourself pulled back to its companion portraits, to let your eye roam over them and parse out their distinctive qualities. (All three versions of Cindy Sherman's portrait are grouped together, creating an ideal opportunity for you to compare and contrast them.) And when you leave the gallery, you'll likely do so with a keener appreciation of photographic techniques from the form's earliest days to now and what we've improved upon and perhaps what we haven't. But for sure, you'll be able to answer one particular musical question in the affirmative. Her face? Yes, you've seen it.

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'24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project'
Rome wasn't built in a day, right?
In 24 hours at Arthouse, artist Liz Glynn guides the public in the building and destroying of an empire

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Or so they say.

Beginning at midnight Friday, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn will orchestrate a 24-hour participatory event in which the public is invited to Arthouse, the Congress Avenue contemporary art center, to help Glynn build — and then destroy — a miniature version of ancient Rome entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials.

More than a millennium of Roman history is traversed in Glynn's "24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project," from the city's founding in the middle of the eighth century B.C.. to the sacking of the Roman Empire in 410 A.D. by the Visigoths.

"It's about 1.238 years per minute," said Glynn by phone recently from her L.A. studio.

And she plans to keep the schedule on track — down to the minute — with various happenings to mark notable historical episodes. At 7:30 a.m. Saturday (aka 509 B.C.), the Roman Republic will emerge. Pizza will be served when Carthage is destroyed at 12:27 p.m. (146 B.C.) Greco-Roman wrestling will be demonstrated by members of the University of Texas wrestling team at 2:27 p.m. to mark Rome's shift from republic to empire (27 B.C..). And from 4:39 to 4:56 p.m., a fiddler will play to mark the reign of Nero and the burning of Rome in 64 A.D. Live music, poetry readings and lectures on everything from the Roman perfection of the arch to the Roman invention of concrete will offer participants and viewers a greater understanding of historical events.

All along, the city of Rome will evolve at a playhouse scale, built from cardboard, lumber scraps and other found materials. Using Samuel Ball Platner's and Thomas Ashby's "Topographical Dictionary of Rome" — a classic academic volume — Glynn mapped out a historical topography of Rome, creating detailed histories of the known buildings and monuments and charting their various stories of creation, renovation and destruction. Participants follow Glynn's plans as Rome's architectural infrastructure morphs through history.

Just as Glynn's project marks an auspicious era in Western civilization, so does it mark an auspicious moment for Arthouse. The oldest statewide visual arts organization in Texas, Arthouse, which started in 1911 as the Texas Fine Arts Association, is about to begin a major $6.6 million renovation of its downtown Austin home. Once a 1920s movie theater, then a department store, the building at Seventh Street and Congress Avenue will be transformed once again to become a modern contemporary arts venue suited for flexible arts events and multimedia creative displays. The Rome project is the last public event at Arthouse before it closes for a year. It will re-open in fall 2010.

"The layering of our building, the history, the re-building — there's interesting correlations between what we're doing as an institution and what (Glynn's project) suggests," says Arthouse curator Elizabeth Dunbar. "Plus it's just a big fun bang — a way for people to remember us while we're closed for a year."

(The Roman theme will start Monday with a screening of Eve Sussman's art video "The Rape of the Sabine Women." See related story, above.)

The Arthouse iteration of "24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project" is the third time Glynn has staged the marathon public art building extravaganza. She first did the project in Los Angeles in 2008, then did it again last year at New York's New Museum.

But in true Texas style, at Arthouse, Rome will be bigger. The ancient city will have 3,000 square feet of gallery space on which to grow. And drywall and lumber from the recently disassembled movable gallery walls will give serious heft to the mini-monuments beyond the cardboard Glynn used previously. The entire 24-hour project will be filmed in stop-motion for future viewing.

By no means a lifelong Roman history buff, Glynn started contemplating the contemporary use of the clich? "Rome wasn't built in a day" as it cropped up in conversations and public chatter about the re-building of war-ravaged Iraq and post-Katrina New Orleans.

"It's the clich? I was drawn to more than anything else," says Glynn. Then she began considering what notions of contemporary empire building (and destroying) were implicit in that clich? and what kind of artistic exercise might spur discussion about it.

"The best part of the project has been the conversations that start spontaneously among participants. People start sharing their specialized knowledge or help each other problem-solve, and whatever issues arise from the project are all discussed publicly," says Glynn.

And while the fervor of a marathon group building project might spark interesting exchanges, the final act of destroying Rome brings out a very different kind of group response.

"Destruction is a very human impulse, and some people have no compunction about jumping in and stomping on (what's been built)," says Glynn. "I find (the destruction) a little emotional, actually. It's a little hard to watch. But then, it's a part of the whole story."

Early Roman tale told in 1960s-set film

It's "Mad Men" meets Roman myth in Eve Sussman's breathtaking, extravagant 80-minute art video, "The Rape of the Sabine Women."

Conceived as something of a dialogue-less visual opera, "The Rape of the Sabine Women" is a video musical reinterpretation of the legend of the founding of Rome, in particular the episode in which the first generation of Roman men acquires wives by force from the neighboring tribe of Sabine.

Sussman - a Brooklyn-based video artist and art-world favorite - has updated the mythic tale by transporting it to a trendy, hyper-polished 1960s midcentury modern setting. In Sussman's Rome, the warriors are slim suit-wearing James Bond types while the Sabines are stylishly coiffed women in large sunglasses and Jackie Onassis-style dresses.

Arthouse presents the video in a free screening Monday night at the Paramount Theatre. Sussman will be on hand for a post-screening Q-and-A.

Sussman took as her launching point the artistic interpretations of the Sabine tale as it was rendered memorably in paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David - especially David's 1799 "Intervention of the Sabine Women." But Sussman modernized the background of her artistic riff on the ancient tale. Shot against sleek settings in Berlin and also in Athens' gritty Agora meat market and at a classic 1960s modernist dream house overlooking the Aegean Sea, the lavish production involved hundreds of actors that dramatize the painterly scenes.

A riveting score by Jonathan Bepler adds to the visually intense story and acts as a stand-in for any dialogue. Bepler recorded sounds live on site and also included an ensemble of bouzoukis (Greek stringed instruments) and a chorus of 800 voices.

Sussman's extravagant retelling of the Sabine tale delivers viewers to a pleasant point just before sensory overload.

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The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project
Was too built in a day!

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
September 25, 2009

At midnight, here come Romulus and Remus to construct the huts that will kick-start the Eternal City. When next midnight tolls, in swarm the Visigoths to trash the town. And in the 24 hours between, small cardboard and wood buildings will be constructed and destroyed, representing in miniature the rise and fall of Rome, from its legendary founding 750 years before Christ's birth to the Roman Empire's last gasp 1,163 years later. The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project is the brainchild of Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn, who got tired of hearing pessimists discussing the reconstruction of Iraq or New Orleans trot out the bromide that you-know-where wasn't built in a day and decided to prove them wrong. And she did – twice, actually: at the alternative space Machine Project in Los Angeles and at the New Museum in New York as part of the exhibition "The Generational: Younger than Jesus."

Glynn leads her third construction of Rome this weekend in Austin, in the front gallery of Arthouse at the Jones Center. In a significant scaling-up of the project – a Texas-sizing, in Arthouse's words – every space except for the offices will be given over to a re-creation of the seven hills and the city that rose on them, with more events and activities than have been part of the project before. As the clock moves forward, the project will track through Roman history – 12mid-5:02am, archaic Rome; 5:03am-2:27pm, the early republic; 2:27pm-12mid, the empire – with specific events to illustrate and inform the period, including a 3am lecture on the arch by designer J.M. Tate, a 7:30am performance by experimental band No Mas Bodas to mark the Gallic invasion, a midday pizza party for the destruction of Carthage, a match by the UT wrestling team (2:30pm), Grammy-winner Danny Levin fiddling as Rome burns (about 4:45pm), William Meadows performing a musical work to honor the development of concrete (5pm), and performance artist Silky Shoemaker ushering in the Christian era as the emperor Constantine (9:50pm). There will be a workshop on pouring concrete, readings of texts by Roman authors, more food (French breakfast! German snacks! Bacchanalian feasting!), and, throughout the 24 hours, dozens of volunteers crafting temples, monuments, bridges, arenas, houses, and other historical structures from recycled materials. And come midnight again, noise band Waco Girls will provide the soundtrack to the destruction of Rome – accomplished by participants stomping on the faux buildings.

If it sounds like a big blowout, it is – one calculated to coincide with Arthouse's own construction project, the long-anticipated renovation of its upper floor and rooftop, set to begin this fall. The idea came from curator Elizabeth Dunbar. "I did a studio visit with Liz in the summer of 2008 and talked to her then about presenting this as one of our final projects in the current building," she says. "Obviously, the ideas of building, destruction, and rebuilding resonated with our building project. Plus, it would be a great way to go out with a bang, so people would remember us during the downtime. Not to mention that I am very interested in producing projects that cross disciplines and which get the public involved in a participatory way."

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'New Talent'
Wally Workman Gallery Through Oct. 1

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
September 25, 2009

Understand the context of the show called "New Talent" at Wally Workman Gallery, lest you do a spit take upon seeing it and the acai berry juice you've just taken a mouthful of winds up on the wall like some deep-magenta Pollock approximation. Know, specifically, that the talent referred to is that of artists new to the Workman Gallery, added to the venue's roster of brilliants in the past year. That knowledge will make the show's title easier to accept. You won't be confused when, perusing the "new" talent, you see works of art by people who've rendered reality in discernible, distinctive visuals in such precise and effective fashion along two dimensions that you'll think they've been at it for at least half of your own lifetime.

Two dimensions, yes: These are paintings, specifically, enlivening the gallery's elegant setting. Physicists tell us that there are many more than even just four dimensions – that there may be 16 dimensions, perhaps more, a possible infinitude, overlapping and provoking qualia beyond consensus. Qualia? That is to say: You call it red, and I call it red, but what is each of us really seeing?

Just the reality we all take for granted, the usual three dimensions plus the matrix of time, can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people perceiving. The talent that is new to the Workman Gallery offers us a quintology of gorgeous interpretations.

Richard Ewen's bright watercolors frame what's been previously framed, providing scenes captured through (or partially reflected upon) the storefront windows of fancy emporiums, the shoppers and their outward surrounds ghosting the more substantial world of commercial offerings the way an art lover might haunt the paintings on display at a gallery. One has to buy into such a metaphor, as the phrasing goes, but we're definitely sold on this.

Angela Fife, working in oils on panel, leaves those frames beyond the artist's choice of depiction to be added later. Her scenes of fine garments arranged upon manikins and accompanied by symbolic bird shape or shadow suggest personal narratives as deep as the history of ornithology.

David Fowler. Not the usual sort of name for a superhero, but it certainly seems as if this artist, while attending a still-life exhibition in his teens, was bitten by a radioactive set of Colorforms. But Fowler's arrangements of visually simplified household sundries eschew any four-color comic-book garishness, their oil-on-canvas hues muted and subtle, the artist doing things with light that seem a flattened version of what Edward Hopper did with shadow.

Scott Kiche spreads his oils on panel, his works the ones most indebted to photographic realism. How unusual for a man who arranges the subjects of his attention in interesting ways to not do so in a manner that's precious or trite. How refreshing that a sidestep or two toward surrealism doesn't, as that of lesser talents too often does, reek of secondhand Dalí. How are we to ever see another piece of fruit without wishing Kiche would create its portrait for our hungry walls?

But hungry walls suggest blank walls, and blankness there could always instead be covered, if less successfully, by wallpaper, right? Somewhat more successfully if it were paper designed by that friend and contemporary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Morris. And perhaps as successfully, according to one's taste, if it wasn't rolls of printed paper at all but the acrylic-on-board paintings of Erika Pochybova-Johnson. The artist captures creatures of the wild – a toucan, a green sea turtle, a jellyfish, each to a single board – in the midst of environments of Morrisian complexity, all rendered in such polychrome pointillism that it could make you weep for the colorblind.

This is the collection of works in "New Talent," a five-person show that we suggest is well worth seeing. Your own qualia, of course, will vary.

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East is bound to West in artist's work
In her first Austin solo show, Beili Liu makes fragile, profound connections

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Sunday, September 27, 2009

Beili Liu starts with patience, time and the utmost regard for a sense of the process of art-making.

"I wait for the moment of surprise," says the Chinese-born artist. "Then I let the materials guide me."

Where the materials have lately guided Liu is to create a series of ethereal, beautiful fragile sculptures that currently fill D. Berman Gallery in the artist's first solo exhibit in Austin since she joined the faculty of the University of Texas' department of art and art history in 2008.

In Liu's hands, burning incense sticks become delicate paintbrushes that leave graceful, wisplike marks — hundreds of them — in mesmerizing compositions on sheets of rice paper. Each drawing takes long hours to complete. With one wall installation, "Toil," luscious cream-colored silk organza — the edges of the gorgeous, delicate fabric burned brown — are wrapped into small spirals that seemingly erupt out of the gallery wall like strange plants.

In another installation, "Miasma," unspun black wool forms ghostly, spiralling columns that cluster forestlike in the gallery. The columns seem suspended in midair, the filament they hang from invisible. "Miasma" is menacing, yes, but beautiful too.

The tug between East and West — that feeling of being suspended between two diverse and often contrary cultural value systems — is a constant for Liu.

Born in the small town of Jilin in northeastern China, Liu grew up in the city of Shenzhen, the first of the special economic zones in China. It saw rapid growth and commercialization in the past few decades, going from a modest fishing town to booming metropolis of more than 10 million — a pattern of culture clashing that still resonates in Liu's art.

Liu, now 35, came to the United States in 1995 to study art. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee and her master of fine arts at the University of Michigan. Her work has steadily garnered critical attention and exposure. This year, Liu had solo exhibits in Los Angeles and in Shanghai. Since she moved to Austin, Liu's work has been seen in a faculty exhibit at UT and included in the People's Gallery exhibit at Austin City Hall.

"I'm never far away from the past," she says. But she remains very much in the present, always feeling the conflict of the two sometimes contradictory cultures.

"Beili has such a distinct artistic voice that draws strongly on her upbringing in China," says Anatasia Colombo, associate director of D. Berman Gallery. "Her work is very immediately compelling and instills a feeling of curiosity. The strength of each piece is partly because of its subtlety and an elegant sense of balance."

Colombo became intrigued by Liu's work that was featured in the UT faculty show and offered the artist an exhibit.

"Bound #2" stands as something of a centerpiece of the current exhibit. Two weathered, human-sized oak columns (reclaimed wood from shipping containers) stand in opposition to each other, thousands of gossamer red threads spanning the distance between them. Liu explains that the piece is based on the Chinese cultural myth of the red thread of destiny — the idea that when each person is born, they are connected to their soulmate by an invisible red thread, a thread that extends through a soul's many lifetimes.

"There's a sense of longing (to the work)," says Liu. The two posts read as bodies, she explains. And yet there are thousands of delicate red threads between them. Which one connects the soulmates?

The process of connecting and disconnecting is central to everything Liu creates. As much as she strikes a delicate balance between two different cultures, it's the process of connecting — the process of discovering where the materials in your hands are leading you — that's as important to Liu's work.

"Tie, Untie" is a three-minute looping video in which we see Liu's hands as she unties a jumble of fine red thread. Liu's hands are under water, and the illuminated image undulates as Liu's hands fish through the floating thread trying to untangle the frenzied mess. Adding to the tangle, the video is projected onto a billowy heap of white thread that cascades out of a gallery corner onto the floor.

Eventually, we see Liu's hand find the ends of the red threads. Liu calmly ties them together. And then, without a stop, the video — and the untangling, and the two lost ends finding each other — begins again.

Perhaps, Liu's video suggests, the secret to connecting is in the process of seeking.

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