artists

• David Adey
• Roxanne Bartlett
• Cherie Benner Davis
• Leonardo Bravo
• Jamison Carter
• Cole Case
• Trygve Faste
• Samantha Fields
• Beverly Fishman
• Alison Foshee
• Benicia Gantner
• Margaret Griffith
• Jeremy Kidd
• Keith Lord
• Brian Mallman
• Mary Jean Mallman
• Mery Lynn McCorkle
• Darren McManus
• Margaret Meehan
• Christina Muraczewski
• Thomas Müller
• Tucker Nichols
• John David O'Brien
• Matthew Penkala
• Bill Radawec
• Samantha Scherer
• Kyungmi Shin
• Noah Simblist
• Klutch Stanaway
• John Stoney
• Jessica Swanson
• Tao Urban
• Andre Yi

artists login

snapshots

Jamison Carter at HAUS

contact

search

green site

“The earth will be a heaven in the 21st century in comparison with what it is now.”

Madame Blavatsky

This proclamation, written in the late 19th century by a founder of the Theosophical Society, an esoteric group that studied and practiced an amalgamation of world religions and philosophy, is called into question with one glance at a newspaper today. That countries in the Middle East and Africa, where genocide and civil war conveniently stay at the margins of most Westerners’ daily existence, are dealing with the legacy of European imperialism carried out at the very moment that this optimistic proclamation was issued makes it especially suspect.

The artist and collector Katherine Dreier was a follower of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy, along with many of the artists that she collected and exhibited, including Piet Mondrian and Vasily Kandinsky. Along with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Dreier in 1920 set up the Société Anonyme, the focus of a startling exhibition recently at the Dallas Museum of Art and now at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, as a way to promote modern art that held the potential for radical social and spiritual transformation similar to that espoused by theosophy.

Between 1920 and 1940, the society held 80 exhibitions, as well as sponsoring lectures, concerts and publications. In the process, the Société Anonyme introduced America to the most progressive and radical experiments in art going on in Europe at the time. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the only other institution doing similar work. But Alfred H. Barr Jr., its first director, had a different vision of modernism, a view that remains with us to this day as the dominant historical model.

Noah Simblist is an artist and critic living in Dallas, TX
(Copyright Noah Simblist 2008)

Click Images To Enlarge

Katherine Drier

Still wondering about the Arts in the state of Texas? Need more insightful issues from Noah Simblist? For more great Lone Star Reports and Past Issues, Click Below and Scroll to find the Issue

Some ideas don’t fit in the spaces we create, and instead fall between the borders of opinion and critique, fiction and poetry, news and entertainment. They seek only to wonder and question rather than to explain or to tell, composed of words that can’t seem to, maybe don’t even want to, pull themselves into anything specific enough to call an article or a blog or a book. Like many artists, I used to rail against categories, and I still do in a way, but I’m beginning to see the value of boxes and lines. I don’t accept them blindly, but categories certainly are useful in helping to corral ‘ideas we have’ about ‘things we know’. Yet even when at peace with them, categories can get weighty. Sometimes I want to fly into a cloud of words with no specific import, words that simply sail or sing or fail or dance or die or whisper, words with no purpose but their own attempt to make sense of life and feeling and yes, finally, back to the topic at hand: Art - in its myriad manifestations.

Between now and the last time I wrote a section of Art and the City (has it really been a year?), I published a book of fiction. This was pretty exciting in itself, and also part of a larger effort that challenges and defies categories, but more on that at the end of this post. In my book, "Navigating Ghosts", I attempt to make sense of, elaborate on, characterize, and explore the variously strange and curiously intense feelings associated with death, in particular with the death of a loved one. Two recent exhibitions circle around this theme in entirely different ways. One of these I know quite well (because it belongs to my husband). I have seen it develop from an idea into a sea of wires mixing with a chorus of synthetic sounds and finally into a completed work. Dane Picard’s installation at the Pasadena Museum of California Art explores the blurred lines between the very real experience of death and the numerous constructed scenes of death that surround us in the media.

The second is a video of a performance, one of many powerful works in the exhibition Make Art/Stop AIDS at UCLA’s Fowler Museum through June. In “Requiem” (1990), Tracy Rhoades stands on a bare, black stage, narrating the straightforward but poignant tale of the passing of his lover. Told in concert with objects, Rhoades removes his clothing, one garment at a time, each a gateway to memory. First come the converse sneakers, one red and one turquoise, a thoughtful gift that remind the artist of a rare smile from his lover at the computer terminal. Next come the socks, one holey (Rhoades’s) and the other not (his lover’s). Pants recall a trip to the Gap when illness had already taken hold, and a traumatized sweater is a sad reminder of an incident of violent prejudice. When Rhoades arrives at the undershirt, we are deep in their lives and feel as concerned as they must have when their parakeet is accidentally caught in a mousetrap, as Rhoades's lover sits gasping for air. It’s a poignant and straightforward account of devotion, loss, and all the minutiae of living that remind us of these, at the end of which Rhoades pulls on simple black pants and performs a beautiful, mysterious dance complete with bird-like hands fluttering skyward, and creating an oval around his heart, all the while moving balletically but purposefully, as if directing an orchestra composed of air.

In response, I offer the closing passage of “Hover”, an account of the day my father died in 1995, after a lengthy bout with a disease that attacks the nervous system.

Annie Buckley is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA
(Copyright Annie Buckley, February, 2008)

Click Images To Enlarge

Tracy Rhoades, Requiem, 1990 (photo by Reed Hutchinson)

Dane Picard, Screen Deaths: Visitations, 2008

Nothing Moments, 2007

For more great articles by Annie Buckley and Past Issues, Click Below and Scroll to find the Issue

Thinking about a past Travelogue, or just can't seem to get enough? For More Great Travelogues and Past Issues, Click Below and Scroll to find the Issue

A quick way to see all Museum events and exhibitions closing this month

Getty

Ten Years of Drawings: What, How, and Why
Through May. 4

Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Allegories of Love
Through May. 4

LACMA

Hammer Museum

MOCA

Red dates indicate opening receptions posted on Around Town