Artist-witness creates exhibit for Arthouse in response to shooting at Texas Capitol

On Jan. 21, 2010, shortly after noon, 24-year-old Fausto Cardenas fired a small-caliber handgun outside the Capitol's south entrance.

Cardenas fired into the air. It was a sunny Texas January day and the sky was bright blue.

Cardenas had just left the Capitol after visiting the third-floor office of Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, where Cardenas had demanded a private meeting with one of Patrick's staffers.

Witnesses said Cardenas, reportedly a Houston-area resident, fired about five or six shots before Texas Department of Public Safety troopers tackled him. No one was injured.

Cardenas was arrested and in August 2011, pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon in a prohibited place. No motive for Cardenas' shooting has ever been discerned.

The incident — the only shooting at the Capitol in recent history — led to higher security measures, most dramatically the installation of metal detectors at every entrance.

Among the witnesses to Cardenas' enigmatic act was New York-based artist Jill Magid. "They were all over him," Magid told The Associated Press at the time. "I could hear him saying ‘my hands are up.' "

Magid's exhibit "Failed States," at Arthouse through March 4, is her creative and conceptual response to what she witnessed.

Specifically, Magid compares Fausto Cardenas to the character of Faust, the fictional scholar of a classic German legend who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge.

Conceptually, the exhibit is presented as something like a stage script unrolled across the gallery walls with prints, video and photographs in between wall text offering stage directions like "Enter FAUSTO" and "[Shots fired skyward]."

Magid penned her own 12-stanza mini-play, "Fausto: A Tragedy," copies of which are available for exhibit visitors.

Magid has also taken her project to the street, literally. She took the 1993 Mercedes station wagon that she and her husband bought as a sensible yet hipster family car and had it professionally armored to what's known in the armored vehicle business as a B4 protection level, or capable of withstanding 9 mm and .44 Magnum gunfire. With ersatz Texas license plates that read "FAILED," Magid had the car parked in the same parking spot where Cardenas parked his own car, a prime spot just outside the Capitol grounds' west gate. (The car will be in place on Feb. 4 and March 3.)

"I was so interested in the ambiguity of Fausto's act," Magid said while in town recently to install her exhibit. "Fausto's gesture can't be easily parsed. Yet I couldn't get over the theatricality of everything he did."

Heavily conceptual yet also minimal in its presentation, Magid's exhibit is neither a light nor an easy read. Yet there's a payoff from a patient consideration of everything Magid has created not the least of which is the sheer wonderment over a very curious chain of coincidences.

Challenging authority

That Magid — of all artists — happened to witness such a bizarre act is a synchronicity almost unbelievable. Or perhaps it's operatic.

Magid was in town in January 2010 as a guest of Arthouse, which had commissioned her to create a Texas-specific project. Magid's conceptual artworks explore the blurry boundary between observation and surveillance, between secrets and public revelation. She tries to undo power structures, specifically the Big Brother-like systems so prevalent in our post-terrorism world.

"I look for a loophole to get in so I understand a system of power," she said.

In 2004, while in Liverpool, England, she decided to engage the city's CCTV cameras. Wearing a red trench coat, she spent a month walking the city. Then she wrote to the police requesting that they save the surveillance footage of her, which the authorities are required to do upon request. (Otherwise footage is erased after a month.) Magid wrote her requests in the form of intimate love letters. The resulting video and letters, "Evidence Locker," were included in the Liverpool Biennial.

Magid garnered a considerable amount of art world buzz for her project, "Authority to Remove." She received a commission from the Dutch intelligence agency, AIVD, when the organization moved into a new building. (Like many places in this country, public buildings in the Netherlands have a percentage of their construction budget earmarked for public art.) Magid spent a couple of years getting to know various employees at the agency, mining them for intimate details of their private lives. Eventually Magid's installation would become a document of the AIVD's more human side, something for the agency to publicly display to benefit its community relations.