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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 12 > Entry
Texas Biennial brims with brio: 1
Sassy, bright, overflowing with verve and up-from-your-own-bootstraps independence, the Texas Biennial brims with brio. Curator Michael Duncan has rounded up a herd of exuberant, spirited Lone Star artists determined to make their presence known.
Is all of it really great art? No, of course not. Only a very few works are truly great, and only a few more are very good. But all of the sprawling Texas Biennial — the two group exhibits, the four solo shows, the seven public projects — makes for rewarding, delightful viewing.
It’s the do-it-yourself spirit that makes the Texas Biennial ebullient fun: Indie, artist-run, never-mind-the-art-world — full speed ahead! We do what we like in the Lone Star State and we don’t need to explain it to anyone.
But that doesn’t mean we have our heads in the Gulf Coast sand. Quite the opposite. As the mostly emerging or mid-career Texas Biennial artists prove, they’re acutely aware of what percolates around the now-global art scene. It’s just that these Texas artists don’t play slave to those trends. They do their own thing.
And because there are lots of things that they do, we’ll be making multiple posts to this blog as we peruse and review the Texas Biennial. And forgive the long, image-heavy posts, but it’s just no fun if you can’t see things.
Buster Greybill’s “Bait Box” is brilliant — and also a heartfelt and honorific memorial to the All-American fish that’s swum decades of folklore and tradition. The Huntsville-based artist crafted an enormous bronze catfish and enshrined it on a high voltage box near a forgotten boat launch in the park along Lady Bird Lake, just east of IH-35.
Greybill elevates the ubiquitous bottom-feeding fish to a new level, literally placing it on a pedestal. Albeit, it’s an ubiquitous pedestal (an ordinary utility box), but that makes Greybill’s homage all the more endearing.
Everybody has a fish story to tell — a tale of the ‘one that got away.’ Greybill’s is sharp and sweet and funny.
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