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Once upon a
time five artists, working in separate and yet connected
fields, went outside their routine working spaces. They
went to a place, which is popularly called
nature
and responded to that surrounding through their work,
which is popularly called
art.
The premise
was, as suggested above by text from the exhibition
announcement, rather straightforward. Five artists went
to Palo Duro Canyon to perform intentional acts of
creativity. Also implied is the sense that these
artists were seeking, in their creative activity, to
undermine, or at least challenge, what they construed as
popularly held notions of nature and art.
After
driving for one and a half hours north of Lubbock and
experiencing flat fields of farm land as far as the eye
can see, for the entire duration of the trip, it comes
as somewhat of a surprise, suddenly to descend into Palo Duro Canyon – 120 miles long, as much as 20 miles wide,
and with a maximum depth of more than 800 feet. Into
this context the five artists, Texas Tech students
Conor Callison, BFA candidate in ceramics from
Lubbock; Shreepad Joglekar, MFA candidate in
photography from Mumbai, India; Ian Thomas, MFA
candidate in ceramics from Pittsburgh, PA; Dryden
Wells, MFA candidate in ceramics from St. Louis, MO
and Patrick Whitfill, doctoral student in poetry from
Plainview, TX, took the tools and materials of their
trade one recent fall weekend. It was a camping
trip by five college guys with a mission to “make art.”
Bridging the chasm between life and art was one of the
major threads of 20th century so called avant
garde art and included relatively well recognized
artists and art movements such as Marcel Duchamp, Allan
Kaprow (one of the founders of the Happening in the
mid-1950s) the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, performance
artists, and the like. In addition Allan Kaprow, as
critic, has written extensively on the subject as has
philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto. Yet, in the 21st
century this particular thread of modern art is not
widely known nor popularly recognized mostly due to the
hold that museums, galleries and art magazines exert on
popular culture with regards to “art.” In truth the
movement has focused on aesthetic experience rather than
the production of consumable objects and it is very
difficult for museums and galleries to “market” the
experience of others to the general consumer.
Although
the five young artists on this camping trip (all of them
in their mid-20s) are not heavily versed in art history
or aesthetic theory, their ideas about art making seem
to have assimilated many of the theories of 20th
century modern art into a lovely stew of contemporaneity.
Not having been there, it is hard to know the sorts of
discussions they had while they worked during their
camping trip.
The one night exhibit at the Waters
Gallery in Slaton included documentation of the “acts of
art” performed while at Palo Duro, artworks produced
afterwards, poetry readings and musical performances.
The displayed works indexed various discourses from
contemporary art.
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Dryden Wells,
untitled
cone 10 fired ceramics |
As one entered the
gallery one was greeted by the sound of flies (produced
digitally) and a digital projection of a drawing of a
fly by Dryden Wells. “I have never experienced so many
flies in one place,” commented Wells. Wells made
numerous drawings while at Palo Duro, including a
drawing/painting on wood of a series of faceted forms.
Wells draws over paint in quick, facile strokes,
capturing key features of his subject almost
cinematically as he provides multiple views of the same
form. The form might not be identifiable at all were it
not for the fact the Wells also exhibited a ceramic work
in proximity of the drawing. The wall mounted ceramic
piece clearly resembled a prickly pear, albeit somewhat
cubistically presented. The amusing feature is that the
prickly pear seems to have been conflated onto a cow
chip, a feature not uncommon in Palo Duro.
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Conor Callison, standing in
front of untitled concrete painting with Palo Duro trash. |
Conor Callison provided a youthful
“wink-wink” – “nudge-nudge” dimension to the exhibition
by presenting caricatures of typical landscape
paintings, rendered on concrete slabs, integrating
garbage (e.g., beer cans, maxi-pads, etc.) he had found
and collected during his hikes in Palo Duro. The ironic
juxtaposition of the clichéd picture with trash served
more as a commentary on the typical landscape lover than
on the landscape itself. Callison, in fact, had
collected every bit of garbage he encountered on his
hikes and took it away with him. From this trash, he
sifted out Palo Duro dirt which he combined with a
ceramic piece into a seperate installation for the exhibition.
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Ian Thomas, two gelatin
silver prints documenting faux fruit application to prickly
pears. |
Ian
Thomas seems to have taken a more
performative approach with his acts of art while at Palo
Duro. With chunk
of prepared clay in hand, he proceeded to alter the
landscape by adding bits of shaped clay here and there,
photographing the results as he went (as a sort of
documentation). In one “act” he created a false prickly
pear fruit and placed it on a plant adjacent to a real
fruit. In another he created a series of thumb-daubs and
added them to a tree limb. The finished application
resembled some strange insect’s home. This act gave him
the idea for the wall installation at the gallery.
Individual balls of clay were impressed by his thumb and
applied to a wall one at a time over the entire wall.
The finished piece suggests that Thomas was very much
focused on the action (his breathing, his body
movements, his thought processes) of installation. For
the viewer, the
gallery installation is strictly phenomenological in
that its content is generated by the viewer as the
viewer engages it. Particularly interesting here is that
Thomas was not so much interested in re-creating the
“acts” he had performed in Palo Duro as much as he was
interested in re-creating the experience and process
with respect to the new setting.
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Ian Thomas, installation view of clay-daub wall. |
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Shreepad Joglekar (unfixed
gelatin silver prints in water); Ian Thomas (ceramic pieces),
installation. |
Shreepad Joglekar, who unflinchingly commented that
“Nature is what it is; it just doesn’t care about you,”
was not about to produce what he called a “typical,
romantic landscape photograph.” Instead he released a
sheet of white, butcher paper into the wind and followed
it with camera in hand photographing it as it alighted
here and there. For purposes of display, he decided to
make prints but not to fix them. They were kept in the
dark until the reception started at which point he
placed them in photo trays holding water. The
photographs immediately began to darken. This way of
exhibiting the prints was integral to Joglekar’s
relationship to the phenomenology of the photo-shoot at
Palo Duro – all is in transition, any attempt to FIX the
moment is a sort of folly. Further, the photographs were
arranged in an “installation” (rather than framed and
hanging on the wall) along with ceramic works that had
been produced later by Thomas in response to Palo Duro.
Ian’s “vessels” when seen close up reveal a faceting on
the surface. Visually they allude to the abstracted
forms on the Wells drawing/painting on wood, each facet
suggesting the side of a prickly pear pad. Or perhaps
they allude to the folds in the sheet of paper
photographed by Joglekar. In this case, the vessels, not
“functional” per se, operate as sculptural equivalents
of the photographs (one was even displayed in a photo
tray).
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Shreepad Joglekar, detail of untitled drawing, charcoal and clear tape on white butcher paper. |
Photographing the white butcher
paper, says Joglekar, inspired him to produce the
minimalist drawings which he also included in the
exhibition. Using charcoal and clear tape on white
butcher paper, each of the three drawings displays a
subtle atmosphere of light and depth. Joglekar plans to
take this imagery a step further as he prepares to take
digital photographs of his drawings, add additional
imagery using digital software and then outputting new
negatives from which to make silver prints of the
manipulated digital files.
Various kinds of transgressions are at play in this
exhibition. Each of the artists, although
compartmentalized by his academic program, is willing to
work (quite competently) in a wide assortment of media.
Little or no attention is paid to differentiation
between “documentary documents” and “art documents” in
the exhibition. Joglekar in particular seems to thumb
his nose at the preciousness of the “art object” as he
allows freshly printed photographs to self-destruct
during the exhibit reception and presents drawings made
on non-archival materials, paying little attention to
the production of “consumable objects.”
Art and life are not so separate to this group of young
artists as they might have been in the pervious
century. They manage to integrate the making of art and
exhibition of art as part of their lived experience.
Patrick Whitfill’s poetry reading during the event as
well as the musical performance by Ian Thomas and
Rolando Shaw, another MFA candidate in ceramics, were as
much about the event as they were about the sorts of
activities that had taken place during the camping trip
in Palo Duro Canyon. For those of us who attended the
event it was about aesthetic engagement with what was
presented and one could almost sense the display of
experience rather than object.
 
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