October 6 - November 10, 1007
Else Madsen Gallery
411 Brazos Street, Suite 99
Austin, Texas 78701
Rating: 7.1

Are humans just elaborate machines? This is one of many questions that come to mind when viewing Making it Better at Else Madsen.

Before showing works from the three artists on display at Else Madsen, I want to reference one of my favorite examples of generative art, UNIV44 from Bubble Chamber by J. Tarbell:

Looking at this artwork immediately reveals how the art was created: the artist wrote a series of instructions and then told a computer to carry it out over a number of repetitions.

The three artists in Making it Better take a slightly different approach and don't let computers interfere. Rather, they allow themselves to be used as computers and be the vehicles for their own algorithms.

Here is Clayton Armstrong's strikingly similar Opera:

Sennelier ink, alcohol, water, soap on Rieves BFK, Feb. 2007 ($500)

And here are works from Troy A. Allen and Shelley N. Nottingham.

Troy A. Allen, Cambrian Era, Print and drawing collage, 2007

Shelley Nicole Nottingham, Good in the World, Bad in the World, Monoprint, continuous line drawing, 2007 ($222)

What I imagine the artists doing is putting aside most of their artistic tool box and deliberately limiting themselves to a few primitive actions, like drawing a line or repeating a shape. They then envision some kind of algorithm or process and simply carry it out. Their process is then a performance, of the marching-band kind, that mimics a computer generating art. This brings up questions about the nature of creativity and consciousness.

Daniel Dennet argues, through a series of articles and books (in particular, Consciousness Explained), that our brains work in an entirely deterministic manner, much like a computer. In 1996, a computer beat a world chess champion for the first time. Whether or not we believe that our minds are machines, we do have to face a future when computers will aquire more and more high-level human skillsets.

I don't believe that the artists in Making it Better are making a claim on either side of the argument. However, their work (and others in the same genre), are visually representing an ancient debate that has recently, by way of the information revolution, become a real issue, not just a philosophical one.

As far as overall impressions, I found the show to be poignant but light-weight. It has such a limited selection from the individual artists, and the artists have only scratched the surface of their ideas. Compare this with Lasers in the Jungle by Gibbons and Green, which has simpler themes, but ones that are fully realized. However, it's amazing that these three local artists came together, looked at each other's work, and found a semi-strong coherence. This is also some of the best-looking—for lack of a better word—"generative-ish" art out there, and so their shortcomings may have more to do with the immature state of the genre. There's a good chance one of these artists will create the defining piece of this movement.

Madsen photos by Claude van Lingen
Bubble Chamber graphic from Gallery of Computation

September 7 - November 4, 2007
(Wed. October 24, free lecture 6:30 p.m.)
Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum
605 Robert E. Lee Road
Austin, Texas 78704
Link to David Everett's Site
Photos of his work in progress
Rating: 8.1

David Everett's sculptures are wood carvings of animals. Humans appear every now and then, but they appear in some ways the equal of the animals, at least in spirit. The humans are generally riding on top of animals, but otherwise, the animals are the same size as the humans. I don't have any pictures of these human-with-animal sculptures, but here are some of his other work.

David Everett's "Medallion", Painted Woodcarving, 14 1/4 x 24 x 16", $8,000.00

David Everett's "Caravan", Painted Woodcarving, 30 1/2" x 38" x 21"

Two big associations came to mind when experiencing his work. The first association is the image of Chukwa. In classical Hindu texts Vishnu's second avatar was the tortoise Chukwa who supports the elephant Maha-pudma who upholds the world.

Everett's Industry on Parade looks like this except it has a nurse and a miner holding hands on top of the animals. According to Everett, the two humans are his parents.

The idea of animals as an atlas holding up the Earth is a recurring motif in myths:

Mongolians tell a tale of how their lands sit upon a golden frog. Native Americans have a sea turtle with the world and the sky on its back. The Aryans think their earth rides on a giant serpent with a thousand heads. (Link)

Another place where the turtle-atlas motif appears is the phrase: It's turtles all the way down! That's what you say to a skeptic that asks, "If the Earth sits on the elephants, and the elephants stand on the turtle, what does the turtle stand on?" So if you ever see a sculpture or image of a stack of turtles, this is likely the reference.

The second big association is that of Walt Disney! Who else represented animals as human-like more famously than Disney? I suspected that Disney, like Everett, grew up with nature:

Roy (Disney) remembered their new home as "a very cute, sweet little farm, if you can describe a farm that way." The forty-five acres included orchards of apples, peaches, and plums, as well as fields of grain, and the farm was home to dozens of animals—hogs, chickens, horses, and cows. (Link)

Everett's and Disney's attitude toward animals is best described by Margaret King's article The audience in the wilderness: the Disney nature films:

As America's popular naturalist, Walt Disney expresses the human-nature relationship as a series of filmic themes: anthropomorphism, selective perception, mixed motifs of pet/wild animal, the child/dog team, the cuteness/violence dualism, and a heavily edited version of natural events and processes.

...

When Americans talk about nature today, it is as dwellers of the suburbs and cities. In the beginnings of our history as a nation and a culture, nature was a competitor, a harsh environment to be subdued. Once under control, it no longer posed a threat but an opportunity for aesthetic and recreational exploration. Thoreau's Walden Pond essays were written in what we today would recognize not as the wild, but as the suburbs. Thoreau wrote them within a close commute from his family's Concord home (where his laundry was done) and those of his urban friends such as the Alcotts, where he routinely dined, leaving to those on the frontiers of Ohio and Kentucky the genuine hardships and deprivations of living with untamed nature (Edel).

...

This is nature, but a very special kind: not an ecosystem, but an ego-system - one viewed through a self-referential human lens: anthropomorphized, sentimentalized, and moralized. Critics of this approach called it sensationalizing and patronizing. Those who saw in this new breed of documentary an innovative and positive appreciation of nature called it subjective, approachable, and humanizing.

...

These films can be viewed as a concentration of the general public's longing for a mythic agrarian root system, a return to the spatial relationships of the early frontier - that is, the frontier blurred by nostalgia, minus the danger element - in an odd hybrid of the custodial and hunting ethics. Our billion-dollar collective obsession with pets as family members - half of all American pets received Christmas gifts in 1995 - is a link between humans and the wild. Disney's nature has been for Americans what Sumerian myths and Aesop's Fables were for Old World cultures.

...

They taught Americans to think of nature in terms of "courageous" ants, "playboy" fiddler crabs, "industrious" bees, and even "successful" wild oats such as in Secrets of Life

I give the show an 8.1. The sculptures and drawings have a consistent quality about them. Together they are powerful, as you can tell based on the associations I drew above. The representation of some of the animals, like Crossing Gold which shows a road runner (I think), gives animals a certain dignity. It's not a dignity wrought from fanciful regal poses, but through subtle expressions and postures: a little quizzical look from a road runner in that piece, or a real sense of affinity between a raccoon riding a fish in another. The show doesn't get a 10 because a lot of the pieces are just good animal carvings. The gist of Everett's work (at the moment) can be compressed to about three works. There is still some unrealized potential and unexplored angles in the ideas and aesthetic that Everett is getting at.

Images from artist's website

September 1 - October 6, 2007
Art Palace
2109 Cesar Chavez
Austin, TX 78702
Link to Eric Gibbons
Link to Nathan Green
Rating: 8.2

A one-line summary of Lasers is "a pair of monomaniacs." Most of Eric's paintings are about Paul Simon. And most of Nathan's are florescent slabs of thin rectangular orgies.

An uncharitable version of monomania is OCD, and a charitable interpretation is about focus. I'd say the two artists are on the more charitable side, with Eric (the more experienced of the two) especially showing the signs of a maturity evolved from getting an ever-increasingly clear understanding of Paul Simon. Eric said he listened to Paul Simon all of this past year.

Think what you will of Paul Simon (kitsch, silly, whimsical, or genius), there is something to be said about listening to a song a hundred times and finding the secrets of it that even the creators did not intend. To me, that is one of the great beauties of art. It's that the work is sublime even to the artist himself. Coincidences and connections that the artist never intended live on well after the short handful of hours it took to concoct the piece.

It's easy to get lost in Eric's work, as you see more and more layers over time. Maybe it's an iridescent ghost in the corner or noticing the subtle (or not-so-subtle) references to Renaissance Christian forms. Things are presented slightly, such that grasping the paintings takes some time. So at minute one you notice color, at minute two you notice that Paul Simon's forms are disfigured, and at minute three you comprehend the sadness of it all. A good stare-worthy piece sinks in different ideas upon further inspection. A classic stare-worthy piece sinks in forever, and we'll never know about status of Eric or Nathan's pieces until forever happens.

Name to-be-filled-in later by Eric Gibbons, $???? 2007

Nathan's artwork reminds me a lot of my own. Here's an example of one of mine. Someone once told me, "Phil, you use a lot of bright colors, you must be happy." While as both Nathan and Eric use bright, dangerous colors, Eric shores them up with the sand of sad grays and off-whites; Nathan's the happier of the two, and his work shows.

Name to-be-filled-in later by Nathan Green, $???? 2007

Pieces can have many different aspects that speak to you: the colors say one thing, the shape says another, the topic another and so on. Eric's works are an ensemble of each aspect having something different to say. The depth of Nathan's work, on the other hand, comes about by intersecting different stories. I imagine a pair of graffiti artists taking turns working on the same pieces. Ultimately, Nathan shows a mastery of dangerous colors, which is no small feat—I've seen many examples of amateur attempts to hawk bright pieces at street faires.

What is the relation between the two artists? According to them, they're friends, and they have collaborated on a show or two together, at least one of which involved a cross-country trip to West Oakland (no doubt in or near Emeryville, the up-and-coming hip part of the SF Bay Area). I didn't spend enough time to see more similarities between the two than that they like to play with bright colors. However, I had this funny serendipity googling the word Fauvism; if Eric and Nathan are binary stars, then this is the midpoint:

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse (The green line), 1905

There is something unfortunately simple and childish about Eric and Nathan's pieces, which is probably why the pieces don't command the serious dollars that something exhibited in downtown Austin might fetch. However, these pieces are much more personal and more about the future of art. I see in these pieces and in the Mission School the budding of a cohesive art movement around regressed sentimentality, childishness, otaku, and nostalgia.

And for my parting shot, I'd like to apologize to the people who I accidentally elbowed into at Art Palace. The space is incredibly small for receptions, and makes you feel like you're stepping on the pieces. Kudos, though, for creating merch in the form of posters and booklets, a way for plebes like me to support the arts.

Images from exhibit website and wikipedia