Sketch Artist 
Art
Then and Now
Two San Antonio shows examine how Texas artists interpret the state’s past and present.
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Robert Onderdonk’s most distinguished pupil may have been his son, Julian, long vilified as the father of Texas bluebonnet painting, but on closer scrutiny a painter of talent and depth who deserves a prominent position on the second tier of American Impressionists. Julian lived and studied in New York for almost ten years before returning to San Antonio in 1909; Scene Near Sisterdale (1909), painted in an earthy green and sienna palette, seems more like New England than Texas. And the younger Onderdonk’s bluebonnet-speckled landscapes were nothing like the clichés they inspired; Dawn in the Hills (1922), painted just before Julian’s death at age forty, is a transcendent vision of pale sunlight struggling through a dusty purple mist.
Julian Onderdonk’s demise marked the end of San Antonio’s artistic hegemony; Dallas became the hotbed of Texas art in the thirties, and Houston usurped the title in the early seventies. But in recent years San Antonio has experienced a contemporary art revival that should quicken with the opening of SAMA’s new William L. Cowden Gallery, a vast warehouselike structure intended to function more like a freewheeling alternative space than a sedate museum salon. The inaugural show offers the best of both worlds, the professionalism of a major museum installation and the off-the-wall (often literally) excitement of an alternative setting. Scouring the state for new talent, SAMA curator Jim Edwards has come up with several dozen young, generally little-known artists who have created a remarkable assortment of thoroughly post-modern artifacts and agitprop: twenty-foot-tall totems assembled from lawn mowers, lamps, and myriad other household objects; a thousand-pound bomb stamped with passages from Longfellow and the Bible; inflated globes bobbing on the updraft of whirring fans; live doves defecating on passages from the Bill of Rights.
Surprisingly, most of these visual theatrics have a point and succeed in making it. The show’s title, “The Perfect World,” is a pun on the Post-Modernist faith in the world’s imperfectibility (in contrast to the Modernists, who believed that straight lines and perfect curves could solve most of society’s problems.) But if this is a particularly skeptical generation of artists, it is also unusually issue-oriented, tackling everything from sexism to censorship to Gulf War jingoism. Jean Goehring’s billboard-scale Then: Light Mechanical Laughter (1991) depicts a row of rifles against great streaks of lightning, an obvious reference to Desert Storm; the title of the piece, printed in large type beneath the image, offers a trenchant commentary on our armchair consumption of a war with a made-for-television happy ending.
Most of the artists in “The Perfect World” similarly play language against image. Joe Allen’s Stayin’ Alive (1990) appropriates the title of a seventies disco favorite for his color photocopy of nineteenth-century French romanticist Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa, a melodramatic scene of desperate shipwreck survivors, over which Allen has stenciled a mock personal ad: small group of dallas area couples seek other couples who enjoy boating.... In the context of AIDS, Allen’s text, title, and borrowed icon create a new composite message that is both cautionary and grimly humorous.
Few idols are spared, and more than a few strange new ones are invented. The art world gets a dose of self-criticism in Mark Flood’s Untitled (1990), a painting that consists largely of silk-screened, paid advertisements from various Houston galleries and nightclubs. The Western myth is lampooned in Chase Yarbrough’s assemblage Surrounded by the Faintness of a Honky Tonk Love Song…(1991), a post-apocalyptic, life-size white rocking horse with a bomb slung beneath its belly, a toy train running through its neck, and a miniature Boot Hill cemetery on its rump. Helen Altman creates an ironic domestic mythology by converting fifties kitchen appliances into magical artifacts of a suburban golden age; Vesuvius (1990) features a row of flickering, flamelike light bulbs seemingly popping out of a chrome toaster.
Even the most high-minded pieces have an appealing sense of uncertainty. Rachel Ranta takes the ordinary into the realm of metaphysics with a series of small, ghostly, monochrome-on-flat-black paintings of isolated objects—silverware, a bottle, a string of pearls—accompanied by a single word. A pair of spectral, almost skull-like dice seem suspended in the void; the caption, “gravity,” suggests the inevitability of their fall, and in a broader metaphor the ineluctable physics of death and decay. Kate Breakey, an Australian-born Austin artist, recreates high school physics experiments in a series of large, hand-tinted photographic prints. In Surface Tension (1991), the principal of molecular attraction is illustrated by a double-edged razor blade floating on the surface of a bowl of water placed against a dark velvet backdrop; the elegiac, antique-looking image has a taut undertone of psychological drama.
The exhibition also includes a two-and-half-hour video program featuring fourteen separate pieces; instead of interminable Warhol-esque video vérité, today’s video artists go for snappy, com- mercial-quick cuts and MTV brevity. Which isn’t to say that they aren’t subversive. Gomer Pyle Is God (1983), by Jim Kanan, with music by El BJ, is a hilarious, remarkably professional send-up of music videos, while Robert Cook’s quirky Mac Tonite: of Marx, Sharks, Burgers, and Brecht (1990) intercuts scenes from various film versions of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera with a repeated McDonald’s commercial, suggesting the progressive trivialization of art by an omnivorous popular culture. The most compelling piece is James Chefchis’ 63 (1988), which mixes original footage of school hallways with newscasts of the Kennedy assassination. For baby boomers who first heard the news at school, Chefchis’ eerie montage—accompanied by a score by Stan LePard that includes Telstar satellite telemetry, chanting monks, and spectral bits of period pop songs—is a spooky journey through the corridors of memory.
“The Perfect World” is the most exciting and iconoclastic exhibition of Texas art in recent memory. Less than ten years ago Texas artists were suddenly being discovered as accomplished allegorists working predominately in traditional forms of painting and sculpture; with this show we witness the clamorous arrival of an entirely new generation of social satirists who create decidedly nontraditional art. The sweeping pace of change underscores the extraordinary vigor of contemporary art in Texas; whenever we think it has arrived, it’s already moving somewhere else.
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