An abortive gesture…
If one wants to survive as an artist, one has to learn the skills of cultural analysis. My investigation of Austin’s art scene was moderately exhaustive, conducted over several years. Ultimately, the cons outpaced the pros. The following is a rundown of what I discovered about Austin while casing the city for an artist’s livelihood, on the ground and in production.
Artsies and artsy lovers generally were overwhelmingly encouraging, until I actually moved to Austin to live and work. In hindsight, it was like a cop con to get a fugitive out hiding with the old fake lottery ticket score angle. I’d gotten such wonderful first impressions from all the cultural administrator types I met with on my nearly monthly fact-finding visits in 2003 and 2004. Each one faded away almost as soon as I unloaded the truck.
For instance, I contacted Ballet Austin, to see if they were interested in exploring a multi-media, multi-disciplinary collaboration. I’d worked with dance companies before, and Austin’s premier outfit seemed the best prospect. I got a go-ahead signal and sent a proposal package and portfolio. Stephen Mills’ assistant suggested I attend a performance, so I flew in for one. I bought seats up front, and the show was lovely. During intermission the company’s CFO joined me and invited me backstage curtain dropped, where I met Stephen Mills and some of the dancers, while nibbling tasty treats. We talked a few more times, I found out a little about their situ, post-Austin dot com bust, and realized two things: Stephen Mills was an ambitious, extremely talented choreographer and director, and was going places; that the onus to finance any art that emerged from our talks would be on me. Whatever, nothing unusual about that – the next part, though is fuzzy in the details but clear in the outcome. Once I’d relocated to Austin, the nascent discussion dissolved.
This sort of thing happens, of course, all the time. Building working relationships among creatives, especially busy ones, is an extremely fragile enterprise under the best of circumstances. What’s the troubling thing in my Austin scenario? It happened every time. Now, you should know, dear reader, I’m not encouraging you to deduce anything yet, and I especially don’t want to give you the impression that Ballet Austin was in the wrong here. I don’t feel aggrieved by them in any way. Hell, they probably don’t even remember who I am. Anyway, it’s nothing personal; just business. Over the next couple of years, though, I gathered enough data to make some assumptions about Austin that a few thousand conversations and a couple of productions gelled into opinions.
Here are some. Austin (for the sake of the discourse I’m going to personify the city) commonly projects an image of itself as a wide-open good-times town with a frolicking hippie (recent) past. “Keep Austin Weird”, the obsequious bumper sticker states. Over coffee at Magnolia’s and Jo’s I heard numerous tales of joint-smoking days of guitars and free love and VW bugs and bliss at Barton Springs. After making the rounds of sit-downs and yuck-ups and art biz meetings and gallery visits, I grokked that a goodly portion of those folks who back in the day bounced happily from anti-war protests to UT ball games to all night hallucinogenic misadventures nowadays hold many of city’s key cultural positions in Austin’s arts infrastructure. Their perspectives on visual art are often brittle, hardened and closed. These are the ones who survived the failures of the era, got older, and committed to social activism from within the system. Towns that exhibit this particular dynamic in the niches of cultural power-brokering, often are identified as very “artsy” with strong “creative” communities. I did a series of residencies in Eureka, California, and the situation was comparable. Such towns almost never have an art market, as such, and “traditional artists”, say, people who make a living from selling paintings or sculptures in gallery shows, almost never can do this strictly through patronage from within their community.
The “Idea” has reigned in art for at least fifty and arguably a hundred years. Sometimes important ideas outlast the movements out of which they emerge. The legacy of influential critical theorists known as the “Sixty-eighters”, like Foucalt, Derrida, et al., is alive and well in Austin. For the Continentals, crushing the old capitalist hierarchies of “quality”, “value” and “meaning” was necessary to revolutionize culture. As one might imagine, in a community proud of its roots in the sixties and seventies, the “Everything is Art & Everyone’s an Artist” polemic, a la Warhol and Beuys, is firmly entrenched in the city’s cultural biosphere. The applied theories and polemics of Marxism, feminism, “cultural studies”, gender issues and the like are heavily embedded in the Austin cultural fabric. Unfortunately, these movements characteristically seeking to dismantle existing hierarchies and willingness to co-opt any communicative tool to that end has evolved into a sort of “New Colonialism”. Translation: Artist Beware; you are entering a censorship zone. As is common, in a community dominated by adversarial or oppositional thinking, if one doesn’t kowtow to the ruling regimens of discourse when navigating in culture circles, one will be set upon as if one lay down upon a nest of fire ants. Or tripped into a rink full of roller girls.
Tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, and darkly circled eyes are prevalent among the young acolytes of this sept. If this is one horn of the pincer squeezing the artist, the other is the buttoned-down, tightly coiffed and gym-muscled aggroids’, fervently conservative and Christian, ditto-headed and reactionary. These represent the rest of Texas in Austin, who know where the city got its name, and rankle at the idea that liberals congratulate themselves on maintaining Austin as an oasis in the desert that is the unenlightened rest of the state. These camps seem to only commune around kegs, and only if the average age of the communicants is less than thirty years, or if the band is the uniter and not the divider kind. The illegal aliens will have built the stage for such a party, cooked the food, and cleaned up after everybody’s gone home.
I scoped out ArtHouse and AMOA, and liked the shows (Andy Warhol and Terry Allen are shows I recall); went to the openings, wrote and dropped off letters, pressed flesh, did glib-talk with a couple of the young, cool hungry ones dues-paying there. The ArtHouse annual “New American Talent” is usually good, thanks in large part to the guest curators. Jerry Saltz, one of my faves, gave an art talk there one afternoon that possibly saved my life. That’s about all I ever got out of a bunch of submissions, notes and attempts to parley with ArtHousers and AMOA’s respective staffs. I made inquiries at the Creative Research Laboratory, attended an opening or two, met the director, e-mailed back and forth, and popped in for openings. CRE turned out to be a dead end, after the director I’d been talking to quit, because she was overworked and underpaid (bad sign). I checked out Flatbed press, and Guadalupe Art Center (burned down), and F8, and David Berman’s gallery (they like to watch your development for a few years before taking you seriously enough to have a conversation – it helps, though, if you’re UT-affiliated). Everyone in the little Austin art market seemed to have an angle that was established as such. I talked to city government officials about matters such as culture incubation matching funds, and such. I passed around info packets to all the main culturati, info-dealers, commentators, pundits, gallerists and institutional artsies. Boy, was that an exercise in smiling while tossing shekels down a deep shit hole! More on this later. I frequented the coffee shops and met a few artists and such. My friend Jack Spencer shows at Stephen L. Clark gallery, so I introduced myself there. Of course, I stumbled up and down South Congress with everyone on First Thursdays. That was particularly depressing. This is Austin’s biggest ongoing art happening, and it’s much more a kegger block party and hippie craft fair than anything resembling give-a-damn about art. Dougherty Art Center turned out to be a good place to get a low-paying teaching gig. Mexic-Arte presented some good exhibits, and the mission of the museum matters, but as a McLean born in West Virginia, I didn’t see much of a future with them. I looked for art and found it hanging in the usual other-dedicated places, on consignment mostly (a bad sign), places like hair salons, restaurants and bars. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve shown my share of young artist paintings in such cruddy enviros, cruddy in the sense that art has little hope of doing anything meaningful there, other than supplying free decor for the owner and an artsy ambiance for the typically busy-with-something-else-besides-looking-at-art-at-the moment clientele. It’s just that the prevalence of “alternative” wall space in a city in the absence of an art market usually spells doom for the budding artist’s going concern. I attended an absolutely atrocious couple of performances at the Blue Theater. I tried, at a friend’s urging, to develop something with a high-profile boutique hotel owner, but soon realized she was more interested in appropriating concepts than ironing out a deal. In the hopes of connecting with multi-disciplinary-minded musos, I stomped along with the madding crowds of Sixth Street, SoCo, Lamar clubs and bars, some of the bigger venues, the multitudinous mini-stages in eateries and drinkeries; though I have to admit I really only made a small dent after thirty or fifty performance venues, not counting backyards and living rooms, in the Live Music Capital of the World. Music, however, is not visual art, and visual art is generally defined as something more than nightly entertainment, and it’s not often one can find a friend who’s inclined to compare the merits of Odd Nerdrum and Joel-Peter Witkin in an eardrum-busting music bar. I did discover that most local musicians get paid diddly and are treated generally as well as the day laborers who gather on street corners across the city every day. That managerial mentality predicated on the notion of an always-available immigrant workforce for-hire pervades the art scene in Austin, just like it pervades in most all of Texas. I didn’t have much luck approaching impressively-monikered (but itinerant) AMODA, or Austin Museum of Digital Art, and I didn’t try too hard after I discerned that this outfit was mostly an academic hobby for UT artsy-dayjobbers. There’s a lot of that UT boosterism in Austin, as it turns out. The University of Texas culturati are pervasive throughout Austin’s art scene hierarchies, though it’s doesn’t to be a function of any rigorous meritocracy. Many of the city’s “important artists” are either employed by the school or recently graduated from it. These don’t seem to mix well with others, which seems convenient. It’s easier for an artist to appear generally relevant when his art is presented in a context that is mutually-congratulatory by design. This is a trick one learns in the halls of academia. One night, to illustrate, ArtHouse had a big opening (for its annual) and The Creative Research Lab had a big opening. I attended both, and did not see more than a handful of people who crossed over whatever line separates UT from everything else artistically vital in Austin. The work at ArtHouse never failed to outshine the work at CRL or the Blanton, or any other UT exhibition space. Beautifully edgy-cool architectural enhancements aside, all the neon, vinyl and spiff identity work on the face of a building does not ensure, as Austin demonstrates, that one will find art inside the building that is at least commensurate in quality. Further, if the typical commercial artist/creative type believes his product (designed to sell cars, food, Texas, clothes, whatever) is Art, and said commercial artist is competitively natured, he will undermine however he’s able the status of the fine artist, for obvious reasons. I could continue to outline the details on the backdrop for visual art in Austin, but I think now I should interject a little screed that points to the real rattler under the bed. I wrote this right around the time I buckled down to do my first Austin exhibit, so maybe it’ll help the reader who’s craving a little more gonzo in the narrative find an even livelier sense of displacement:
Twangtown
The absolute most godawful thing happened when I moved to Twangtown, Tejas. All, or at least some, of the fevered Brisket dreams - brought on by almost a full year of drop-ins and expensive recon forays into the sweaty, river bent burg in the cleavage of the continental divide between North & South Americas - dissolved into a foot-weary, bug-bit near fatal personal cataclysm that revealed the ugly underbelly of the Republic of T’s vaunted big-tooth/hair blonde Bethann and big bicep/10 gallon Bobby Ray hey’yall friendliness. No Yeehah welcomes for this Road dusty traveler. Just artsy bluster and nobody-bigwigs pretending there’s an art market here, a cultural haven, a reason other than window-dressing that even one decent gallery exists here (showing – what else – cowboy art).
It’s a bizarre thing to scope the 2004 Presidential Campaigns through a Twangtown lens, embedded in Halliburton Holler. We all can agree that our Prez Bush, Elf 2, is the Golden Boy product of a few generations of selective breeding. His handlers and he were formulated from Yankee DNA in vats of crude ole, grabbed at taxpayer-hired gunpoint 70-80 years ago. Like some ice-crazed orphan of a mad whitecoat experiment gone awry, our all-American, misunderestimated hero has stumbled into the role of point-man for the greediest, least scrupled band of shadow robber barons this country has seen since the War Between the States spawned the first generation of genocidal megalomaniacs, those Fausts whose gore spattered names adorn University t-shirts stretched taut over the nubile teenage breasts of our best and brightest Girls Gone Wild on Springbreak 05. Speaking of wilding, Twangtown’s where the new Robber Barons bring their oil-royalty partners from the sandy kingdoms across the great pond to whore and get fucked up & get a taste of world class nobody-or-somebody-who-gives-a-shit bleary, authentic alt.country. Anyhoo. The Roves and Swift Boat Vets for Sale and the Bakers and the DeLays, all the horned and hoof-footed players in 04 PC cycle through Twangtown on their way to Houston, Dallas-FW, San Antonio, Indonesia, Kuwait, China, Columbia, Russia, London, etc. This is where the first palms get greased. It’s a deal-maker’s town, a country club town, a town of who you know and what you got. No bones about it. It’s a cultural thing here to define the boundary of your pack’s territory by skinning a patsy, as publicly as possible. The definitive moment, the signifier for the bully-king meanness, a signifier for the local proclivity for lynching, you may recall, branded Dallas, the year before I was born. That’s the steak side of town and the taco side of town, both. I’ll get to UT (see above and below), and its tight-lipped “academic” stench-of-beer stranglehold on Twangtown, later, balanced by an ode to the finest Brisket God ever made. First, an aside. In and around Twangtown, people drive trucks up your ass so hard, you think you’re eating your mattress in one of the State’s privatized hellhole Pens, where they fry or dose to death black, brown and white murderous bastards daily. It’s only when you’ve had this happen 40 or 50 times (the tailgate horror, I mean) that you begin to notice a pattern. The fierce road warrior you thought was reaming you is a scrawny or blob-bellied yuppy pussy or a bob-haired fish-on-the SUV’s backdoor skeleton-faced soccer mom, most of the time. The other times it’s a heat-hardened and sun-blasted middle-class contractor on his way to his night job, cursing the Ken Lays and praying for his three kids’ college education. On the other side of the tracks, or MOPAC, it’s a steak and taco town, decorated with the dreams of nice dreamers and lovers, who cover, cower, entertain, satisfy, suffer and service the Reapers of the Republic. It’s a flea-centipede-spider-tick-scorpion-fly-mosquito-cockroach-wasp-infested sticker bush of a place, with more gorgeous girls per capita than anyplace I’ve seen outside of Manhattan or Israel. Then again, I haven’t been to Paris or Scandinavia, so what the fuck do I know. Never enough, I suppose. One thing I do know. I’m a Texan, now. & Texas, aside from being the proudest, most powerful Republic on Earth, is the best, most juicy place an artist could hope to find himself in, on the spinning orb today. For the next five years at least, she’s going to be the home of Art for Humans, The Journeyman Project, The 4D Media Program, 01, and DDDD, and yours truly. Sorry, Big Apple. No matter how much I love you (and you know I do), if you can’t make it in Twangtown, you can’t make it anywhere.
…
Okay, I think it’s time for an Extended Aside. So maybe it sounds like I’m going overboard with the Texas being the best place on Earth for an artist exhortation. That would be true, if I were talking up Austin, or even Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. I’d fairly be vulnerable to accusations of brandishment, as a ridiculous hyperbolist, if we combined all those cities’ art scenes in the breadth of my acclaim. As it turns out, I wasn’t extolling the virtues of Austin’s artistic environment (or all the others, though each Texan city has its bright spots and the collective is noteworthy). In fact, as you may ascertain from my overview of Austin’s scene, I consider that city to be a very difficult place for an artist to succeed as an artist. I haven’t even broached the others as a topic of inquiry. Nope, I was rhapsodizing Marfa. I just didn’t know it at the time.
Confused? Well, don’t be discouraged. This business of Toucan Sam (“I follow my nose; it always knows…”) culture sleuthing can be discombobulating, and “the introduction” is as good a place as any to attempt to clarify potential points of fuzziness, such as my Gaussian ways of figuring out what the hell I’m thinking, or maybe more importantly, how I’m thinking. Let’s start by defining my approach towards arts reportage as “Asymmetrical.” As in: at first you thought I was writing about Donald Judd and Marfa. Then, I was writing about Austin. Now, we’re back to Marfa. See what I mean? Let’s break it down.
I’m not attempting any sort of strict linear chronology here. An obvious example is the above Twangtown screed. I penned that gem long before I ever drifted down Highway 67 to Marfa. Call it intuition, revisionist history, whatever. I like to call writing like this anecdotal. Editors like to call it feverish, incomprehensible, obtuse, and cetera. What you’re reading certainly isn’t journalism. What I’m sharing is my cultural analysis, a study of creative production pipelines and my impressions as an artist, arising from that distinctive and singular point of view. It’s one of the reasons why I’m going to such great lengths to preface and introduce this story about Donald Judd, Marfa, Austin, and the big pile of other information included in this story. If you didn’t notice, dear reader, this is what they call in the word business a “full disclosure”, a disclaimer that’s alerting you to the fact that I might have a vested interest in the matter of record. Truth be told, I do.
What’s my angle? My motivations for writing this “Transmissions from Marfa” are not the same as the typical travel feature writer’s. Marfa’s been covered by quite a few of these, as you’ll discover if you do a Google search, like I did. I’m not focused on the oddities of Marfa, the queer lights that dance around it, the movies past or present filmed there, or the chow or flop houses. These are all worthy topics for a travel writer, and most of them spend oodles of word count delving into such concerns. I have deeper fish to fry (sorry for the goofy food thing again – see “Why Texas Is on my Mind, Part One). I’m an artist groping for the Muse, so to speak. I’m downloading, surveying, processing, inventorying, and perusing the scene for Art and art-making purposes. The information I gather I hope to put to use in my own practice. I am only objective insofar as one must be in order to ascertain a real picture of the subject. That “real picture” part is what I try to share with the general reader. However, I’m composing “Transmissions from Marfa” in the proud tradition of artist-writers/critics like, that’s right, Donald Judd.
I’ve been quoting Judd liberally throughout the preface and introduction. If one
Much of what is included here may seem tangential, and, in fact, it is.
So I moved to Austin, and threw together a mini-retrospective on the fly. I hadn’t managed to find a gallery to show the massive collection of work I was hauling from West Virginia, because Austin doesn’t have a retail gallery that can afford in space or resources to mount a major exhibit by an individual artist (bad sign). So, I did what I swore I would never, ever do. I rented a gallery for a week: run-down Gallery Lombardi, with its patina of past significance and owner problems and ugly storefront. Gallery Lombardi…
