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  Winchester by Jeremy Blake |
'The Gospel of Lead' captures the spirit of guns' victims 'The Gospel of Lead' captures the spirit of guns' victims By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Queue up the "Twilight Zone" theme music. Days before "The Gospel of Lead" -- Jeremy Blake's and Dario Robleto's joint artistic riff on war, American history and the Winchester Mystery House -- opened two weeks ago at Arthouse, the U.S. Repeating Arms Co., makers of the Winchester rifle, announced that it would close its last remaining United States factory. The "gun that won the West" will be made; it will just bear "Made in Japan" or "Made in Portugal" on its barrel. OK, the timing of the exhibit and the factory closing is pure coincidence. But in a timely manner -- the United States is, after all, at war -- Blake and Robleto, thirtysomething artists currently generating lots of art world buzz, have mutually channeled America's violent past. San Antonio-based Robleto was invited by Arthouse to choose an artist with whom to mount a joint exhibit. He selected Los Angeles-based Blake, whose work Robleto admired but whom he had never actually met. Rather than just stage a simple two-person show, the pair decided to morph their recent work into one cohesive installation. Blake's digitally animated, three-part, 51-minute "Winchester Trilogy" is a visual epistle about the Winchester Mystery House, the 160-room Victorian mansion built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the rifle company fortune. Haunted by the sudden deaths of her husband and infant daughter and guilt-ridden by the casualties caused by the source of the family fortune (today, she would be a billionaire), Winchester embarked on a singular form of expiation: She built a house in San Jose, Calif., to appease the angry spirits killed by Winchester rifles, believing that as long as construction continued, the ghosts would be happy. A design of her own making, the outrageously complex structure features oddities such as staircases and halls leading nowhere and doors that open to walls. Construction continued 24/7 for almost four decades until Winchester's death in 1922. The house is now a popular tourist site. For Robleto's part, he culled sculpture from his "Southern Bacteria" trilogy of exhibits centered on the story of a fictional Civil War soldier. The Arthouse installation is haunted-house-meets-conceptual-art, with the gallery configured as three darkened, velvet curtain-lined rooms, the first two connected by an odd long hallway. A large screen in each chamber features one of Blake's continuously looped and digitized images, each acting as sort of a painting in motion. Blake combines historic footage and contemporary photos of the Winchester house, along with silhouettes of cartoon cowboys, or architectural details, drips and splashes of vivid color oozing over each montage. Though the three films together total almost an hour, each moment is exquisitely beautiful. (If you didn't see the first, "Winchester," when it was at the Blanton Museum of Art three years ago, shortly after that institution acquired an edition, now's the time to make up for your oversight.) Lit by solitary directional lights, each of Robleto's objects could pass as antique relics. But read the label next to the doll-sized rocking chair or clothing: "child's mourning dress made with homemade paper (pulp made from sweetheart letters of soldiers who did not return from various wars, ink retrieved from letters, sepia, bone dust from every bone in the body), carved bone buttons, hair flowers braided by a Civil War widow . . ." If they weren't so lovingly and thoughtfully rendered, Robleto's sculpture would seem macabre. Or worse, nostalgic. But he manages to use each to subvert the other. What remains are fascinating new mementos charged with the symbolic meaning of the material they're made from -- material revealed by a prose poemlike label. Even if the borderline funhouse presentation detracts a bit, Blake and Robleto still cleverly plumb our nation's history of violence, war, penchant for firearms and ensuing guilt, offering us not pat answers, but a rich palette to explore. |
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 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, photo by Wolfgang Volz |
The fabric of art By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Whatever you do, don't call Christo and Jeanne-Claude the wrapping artists. "Simply because we are not," says Jeanne-Claude emphatically. "We have created so many works that have nothing to do with wrapping." True: the husband and wife creators who eschew last names and share a birthday -- June 13, 1935; he was born in Bulgaria, she in Morocco to a French family -- have gained worldwide fame over the past four decades by wrapping, among other things, the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf, Paris' oldest bridge. But they've also installed hundreds of umbrellas in California and Japan simultaneously, temporarily divided Colorado's Rifle Gap valley with an enormous orange curtain and just last year plunked 7,500 saffron-colored gates along the pathways of New York's Central Park. "What is really the common denominator is the use of fabric," Jeanne-Claude explains by phone from New York. And another thing: Don't compliment the fundraising abilities of the artists, subjects of a current Austin Museum of Art exhibition and speakers at the Paramount Theatre in March. "We never raise money," she says in an arch Parisian accent. "When General Motors sells a truck, they're not raising money, they are selling a commodity. And we do the same. We sell everything we have." That's true, too. In order to earn the millions -- $21 million for "The Gates," in fact -- to pay for their massive artworks, the artists sell preparatory drawings, collages and scale models. The couple serves as their own dealers, avoiding the usual 50 percent commission due a gallery owner. They sell everything directly from their Soho loft -- the same one they've occupied since arriving from Paris in 1963. Shortly before the Gates opened last year, small drawings were going for a reported $30,000; larger wall-sized ones for between $600,000 to $1 million. More than 70 of those preliminary works are on now on view in "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection." Culled from the private museum established by German industrialist Reinhold Würth, the exhibit is on its fourth stop of a five-museum United States tour. So why the scrutiny into how the artists fund their projects? Because unlike most art, the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude starts in the public spotlight years -- sometimes decades -- before it's ever realized. A painting, sculpture or even a complicated video installation is typically created -- and paid for -- in the privacy of an artist's studio and then brokered discreetly by a private gallery owner. Even the majority of public art is created within the confines of a government or corporate program that sets the parameters and provides the funding. That route isn't an option when your aim is to bundle more than 119,000 square yards of silver polypropylene fabric and 17,000 yards of blue rope around the historic German parliament building or if you want to string 24 miles of white nylon through the hills of Northern California. To accomplish that, you need to involve a lot of people and government agencies. "Nobody discusses a new painting before it is painted," Christo says, getting in on the interview after Jeanne-Claude has vetted a reporter's questions. "Nobody argues about it, criticizes it. But everybody discusses a new bridge or skyscraper before it physically exists. And everybody discusses our projects before they exist. That's because we borrow regulated, designed space and create gentle disturbances for a few days." But unlike a bridge or a skyscraper, the disturbances Christo and Jeanne-Claude make don't come with predetermined permits. Hence, the pair engages in years of politicking before getting a green light. In the case of "Wrapped Reichstag" it took 24 years of negotiations including a vigorous debate in the German parliament. Perhaps occupying center stage in the public eye accounts for the couple's own scrutiny over their image. Their Web site -- www.christojeanneclaude.net -- includes a lengthy, detailed "Common Errors" section that addresses misconceptions (" 'Mr. Christo.' NO. Christo is his first name and the only one he uses"). And because the artists receive no royalties from the sale of books, posters or postcards about their work, they go so far as to insist that a sign declaring so be posted wherever items are sold. "By accepting commercial money, we would lose our freedom," Jeanne-Claude explains. "If you start with small commercial things, like postcards, then one day you'd find that you have given in to every commercial opportunity." Of course, the artists do receive handsome payment for public lectures, such as the one they'll be giving in Austin next month. The museum, which has already sold 800 tickets, set the $48 admission price and declined to make public the artists' fee. Without a doubt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude take an unabashedly entrepreneurial approach. Indeed, it's an unabashedly American approach for two foreign-born artists. Born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria to an industrialist family that operated fabric and dye mills, Christo showed an early talent for drawings, studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia before emigrating to Western Europe in 1956. Settling in Paris, Christo eked out a living painting portraits by commission. He met the carefree socialite Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon when her mother hired the penniless artist to do several portraits. After they married, the couple for a time earned the scorn of the wealthy and influential de Guillebon family, though by the 1980s Jeanne-Claude's father would use his connections to then-Paris mayor, and later French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac to advocate in favor of wrapping the Pont Neuf. The couple has one son, Cyril, a poet, who uses Christo as his last name. In 1994, after three decades of attributing all their projects to Christo, the couple began sharing credit, though it's widely understood that Christo is the artistic generator while Jeanne-Claude rides herd over the more earthbound affairs. Yet while Christo speaks astutely about how their very public creative process "creates a dynamic about the work before it physically exists that is absolutely part of the final object," it's Jeanne-Claude who insists on a poetic last word. "We create works of art of joy and beauty," she says. |
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 Ove ja negra by Oscar Riquelme |
Pulse: Oscar Riquelme By Rachel Koper Sheep and shepherds are mentioned 247 times in the Bible, but what is the meaning of Oscar Riquelme's painting series called Herd Behavior? Sheepishly cute, his use of traditional sepia washes encourages the implication of pastoral bliss and barn paintings. Each sheep painting includes a square of burlap, and its texture works in the piece on several levels, both literally, as reference to the texture of wool and the rough linen that is gessoed by oil painters, and as a politically charged focal window. Currently on view at F8 Gallery is a three-artist show called "Pulse." It features fairly humorous photographs by Faustinus Deraet, taken in Mexico City. A series of metal- and wood texture-based compositions by Randall Reid show a Lance Letscher-like attention to color and distressed materials. Oscar Riquelme exhibits oil paintings for the last time in Austin before he moves to NYC. The ambitious Riquelme shows three large-scale paintings, the sheep series, and on the back wall a series called Red Suspension, featuring photo-transfers of Communist leaders on glass. Each face is hinged and when lifted reveals a square of text quotations floating inside. In a statement the artist says, "The portraits of historical characters appear translucent, almost fading into the air. In contrast, a representation of their thoughts incased behind their ghostly images remain, transcending the figures' mortality. Because the perception of reality has become skewed, it is not surprising that the agendas of the unions and of the civil rights movement have grown stagnant and have, in many cases, become obliterated." After viewing the Communists, I went back to the sheep paintings, and political commentary abounded. In a pamphlet published in Lithuania in December, 1941, the Holocaust-resistance leader and Hebrew poet Abba Kovner used the phrase "like sheep to the slaughter" to encourage Jewish people to become politically active and to fight the Nazi empire. Now, Riquelme is South American and versed in various forms of government. When viewed as political metaphor, these paintings take on a whole new light. The separation of one sheep from the rest of the flock or the inclusion of a black sheep among white ones makes a subtle statement about the role of the individual in society. How does one speak out against popular ideas? The sheeps' vacuous stares begin to feel more confrontational, as if by their direct gazes one is asked rather personal questions. One piece features three sepia-toned sheep huddled closely together staring straight out. The central foreground animal has a burlap square over its head and is painted in full color, but there's a red woven grid between its eyes. It creates a depth of field and possibly some kind of head wound. The piece is called Mind Trap. I think he's looking for the brains behind the zombified stare. His technique is decisive with clean direct strokes and thin surface layering. Riquelme's paintings are attractive, accessible, well composed, and layered in subtle politics. |
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