ARTS

The University of Texas' new faculty art exhibit sharpens its focus

A curated triennial produces a sharp, relevant showing of new work by faculty artists

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Sunday, May 04, 2008

Studio arts programs in major research universities are vexing entities. Where — and how — do the producers of art fit in with the scientists, mathematicians and other professionals with whom they share a campus? How does the art faculty conduct its research and make contributions to its field — research being the measure of achievement at any major university such as the University of Texas?

A new exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art proposes some refreshing answers to these sticky questions. "Atelier 2008: Selections from the Department of Art and Art History Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin," on view through June 8, is the first faculty group show to go on display in the Blanton's 2-year-old building.

It used to be that new work by UT's art faculty was dutifully assembled annually and put on exhibit with more or less something from everyone on the ever-growing roster of studio art professors. That open invitation gave UT's annual faculty show an always loose and very often haphazard feel.

Not so any more.

A guest curator of national stature was invited to make selections, without any restrictions or parameters, for what is the first triennial faculty exhibit. The exhibit's judge? Interestingly, a curator from another university art museum: James Elaine, from the Hammer Museum of Art at the University of California-Los Angeles. He chose the work of 15 of the art department's 37 studio art and design faculty. What the Texas-born Elaine has assembled is a gathering of artwork that is fresh, lively and — perhaps most importantly — feels relevant and alert to today's rapidly roiling arts landscape. Forging new paths is, after all, a recognized measure of good academic research.

Really, this is art that is alert to our contemporary condition — in particular the tentativeness of society in the new millennium, the uncertainty of meaning, the impermanence of place.

Without a doubt, the artists in "Atelier 2008" who use video and performance as their principal media produce some of the most captivating experiences to be had in the exhibit. The discipline demonstrated by Bill Lundberg, Michael Smith (working here with Seth Price) and husband-and-wife collaborators Alexander Birchler and Teresa Hubbard is much appreciated, especially as too many artists get lost in the fluidity of video and film.

Lundberg, arguably one of the most important American pioneers of film and video installation, demonstrates his practice of creating metaphysical meditations out of quotidian moments in three beguiling installations. Lundberg takes ordinary experiences — typing a letter, walking up and down a subway staircase, paddling a boat solo down a river — and accentuates just a few details by isolating certain motions or sounds. For example, only the hyper-realistic ping of footsteps on concrete stairs — no city noises — is heard in "Passages," 14 minutes of continuous loop footage showing people moving in and out of a Rio de Janeiro subway entrance. There's something exacting but also delightfully elusive about Lundberg's semi-silent urban scene.

Likewise with Hubbard's and Birchler's "Single Wide," a six-minute continuous loop high-definition video: It's specific with detail, fuzzy on resolution. We watch a distressed young woman snatch a few belongings, leave a modestly furnished mobile home and get in a banged-up pickup, which she then rams into her home. Every six minutes, the story folds into itself once again as the camera tracks evenly around the action in one smooth flow. Just when does this tale actually begin and end? Or does it, like any story, really have an exact beginning and ending?

John Stoney messes with time, too — big chunks of geological time that clash with the relatively miniature sense of time of human existence. "Explaining Time to a Dead Hare" finds a cast of a rabbit (a model of one found in an Albrecht Dürer drawing from 1502) on top of a chunk of petrified wood, the two objects then coated with shiny gold leaf. Who do we think we are that we can try to trump the ancient and powerful natural phenomena that petrified the wood with a little gold leaf and the image of a hare ripped from a 16th-century painting?

Stoney's "You Can't Go Home Again" is an almost 10-foot scale model of Niagara Falls cast in exacting detail in pale beige plastic. Below the charging falls lies the figure of a whale, unmistakably a beached Moby Dick, perhaps American literature's most notorious mythological animal. Romanticized natural landscape — formed from the result of millennia of surging water pounding the topography — meets the romanticized fictional beast of a relatively young nation.

Kenneth J. Hale also tinkers with history. As perhaps fitting for an artist who has spent the bulk of his career in a university teaching position, Hale pokes at art history in the most fundamental way. He uses images of famous paintings torn from art history textbooks as backdrops for intricate collages of trees made from scraps pilfered from garden magazines. With thick layers of semi-transparent gouache and a little digital editing, Hale obscures iconic paintings by Johannes Vermeer or Sandro Botticelli, the hand-torn trees looking simple yet new against such a complex background.

You feel compelled to look again and again at these layered images in order to sort out what is what. Is that Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" under there? Or is it Hale's variation? Or both?

But that's exactly what Hale, like rest of his colleagues in "Atelier 2008," entices us to do: Look, and then look again.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699