Art is Big

My frenzied visits for the Texas Biennial to studios around the Big State confirmed a fact that needs to be reiterated again and again: great artists can thrive anywhere. In El Paso, Lubbock, Dallas, Valley View, Greenville, Ennis, Edinburg, San Antonio, Austin, Huntsville, and Houston, remarkable artists are making things up their own way, conjuring some kind of sense out of the confusion of our troubled culture. Loners who know what’s up, the TXB 2009 artists function on the periphery of the powers that be, satisfying esthetics they’ve developed largely on their own. No copycats allowed.

But while a certain sense of isolation fuels their work, they are hardly oblivious of what’s going on in New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles – as well as Dallas, Austin, and Houston. The state seems newly aware of its own various scenes – aided no doubt by the internet presence of Glasstire and Art Lies whose propagation of jpegs and info has sparked new civic, institutional, and personal rivalries.

Still, Texas seems largely a self-contained world and that’s what’s good about it. Like Los Angeles in 1991 – when I first started writing about art – Texas is teeming with artists making work for themselves first. The do-it-yourself/think-it-yourself esthetic fuels the iconoclastic spirit of the best Texas art – as well as fueling the by-the-seat-of-its-pants gallery scene that keeps the art afloat. TXB 2009 is all about such grassroots efforts. The artists who first organized the Biennial in 2005 have crafted an expansive event designed to celebrate and propagate the idea of Texas as a burgeoning, proactive locus for art-making.

Accordingly the group show selection process has been an attempt to cast a wide net. We don’t have as many submissions as we’d like from El Paso, Waco, Texarkana, Corpus Christi, or even Houston, but there is a wild diversity of practices evident in this year’s group shows. The group show artists have a broad range of ages, backgrounds, media, and studio environments. Multiplicity is the message. As the great, now late LA art dealer Patricia Faure liked to say, “Art is big” – meaning that beyond the museum project room and hipster gallery circuit, there are a wide variety of legitimate styles, modes, and audiences.

Visiting the Austin studio of TXB Tribute Artist Kelly Fearing put our road-trips in proper perspective. Featuring a cast of isolated mystics and enlightened beasts, Fearing’s beautifully crafted works provide a fascinating context for the allegorical and figurative art that plays a major role in both TXB group shows. Like the lonesome poets and saints of Fearing’s paintings, American artists continue to be outsiders in the mass culture. As awareness of art becomes more and more subsumed by obscene auction prices, art fair marketing, and celebrity sound bites, it is important to recognize and honor a Texas artist of deep spiritual integrity and free-spirited thinking whose transcendent esthetic achievement stands as a model for younger generations.

Our four solo artists, representing the state’s vast quadrants, are similarly independent thinkers, engaged in deep-focus practices. From Lubbock, British-born sculptor William Cannings monumentalizes the ephemeral, casting inflated pliable plastic in solid steel. Transforming the light-weight into the heavy-duty, his art twists perceptions, inviting a touch that makes all the difference. From Houston, painter Kelli Vance conjures raw psychological angst from scenes of women on the verge. The Neo-Baroque arabesque lines and torqued poses of her paintings signal identity issues that are universal, transgender, and all too real.

From Greenville, underground legend Lee Baxter Davis spins mythic tales in masterfully intricate drawings that speak of love and hate, faith and doubt. Imagining characters like Odysseus and Penelope on the Texas range, he conjures a completely personal version of Western Civ. In beautifully articulated drawings and startling sculptures, San Antonio artist, Jayne Lawrence reports on new breeds of biology, grafted from insects, plant life, and human body parts. Distinctly double-X chromosome, immaculately dressed, her protean aliens have assimilated their environment with beautiful grotesquerie, asserting procreative strength.

The seven temporary public art projects, funded by the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places, reflect TXB 2009’s penchant for direct communication and DIY esthetics. In wildly different mediums, Bill Davenport – with a cluster of behemoth mushrooms – and Colin McIntyre – with a towering metallic sprout of wild onion – defy ordinary expectations with sculptures of over-scaled organisms. Also playing with size, Buster Graybill tells a whopping fish story, presenting a behemoth catfish in shimmering bronze.

All the projects are site specific. Emulating the grove around it, Ryah Christensen’s beautiful portal is an intermediator between art and nature, offering a gateway for meditation. Opening up a populist dialogue with the world outside the art gallery, Sasha Dela ornaments the Mexican American Cultural Center with plastic rainbow-colored streamers. In his large scale sculptural map installed in Festival Beach Park, Ken Little toys with the clichéd idea of the American white picket fence, commenting on our twisted notion of nationalist protectionism.

Finally, onstage at Fiesta Gardens on March 27, performance artist Jill Pangallo unleashes her inner angels and demons in a raucous spectacle of clashing alter-egos, therapeutic psychodrama, and cathartic release.

With its sprawling array of artworks and projects, TXB 2009 surveys a slice of underground culture thriving under the radar screen of the mainstream U.S. art press and marketplace. The Biennial only skims the surface of Texas’s amazing esthetic produce. But here are artworks by 73 artists who do it for me – and hopefully will so for you.

Michael Duncan, L.A-based independent curator and critic
2009 Texas Biennial Guest Curator