27.01.2022

Moonlight Over Texas

Articulating the complex tensions at play over Texas, curator Jennifer Teets takes a journey through the familiar, political and cultural landscapes that lie there to share some of the region’s art scene following her time at Artpace, San Antonio.

Dedicated to Josie Ann Teets

One afternoon in 1998, I bought a copy of Air Guitar, the legendary essay collection by Texan born maverick art critic Dave Hickey.[1] I didn’t know much about Dave Hickey back then and I certainly didn’t know that he was born in Texas. At the time, I was an incubating undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, Hickey’s old stomping ground. He, like another native dissident who recently passed last November, visual artist Jimmie Durham, contributed to exhibitions and cultural life at UT Austin in the late 1960’s that later would germinate and bolster years of critical attention in and beyond the international art world. The scalpel-sharp pen of Hickey in Air Guitar proved pivotal for me, especially as a burgeoning curator teetering on the fringe of disciplines. Hickey’s ability to complicate, to glide across the page—from art galleries to honky-tonks, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops, and hot-rod stores—in one go granted him iconoclast status. Texas Monthly recently published an obituary citing the author’s formative years, including an essay he wrote in 2015 titled “Don’t Move to Texas.”[2] Like this one, he was asked to compose 1,500 words on Texas; instead he wrote on why he would never move back to Texas—but it was largely a joke. “Only fifteen hundred?” he sarcastically wrote.

“Should I move back to Texas?” I often ask myself. Although I have returned for stints of allocated work and family obligations, I left Texas, albeit a self-imposed exile, twenty years ago, and never moved back. Having just celebrated the holidays, it is worth mentioning my late Grandmother’s Xmas tree ornament, “Texas, I’m wild about it.” Indeed I’m head over heels about the Lone Star State (mainly its cultural idiosyncrasies, wide skies, and little bluebonnets), but perhaps I romanticize the kind of freedom it self- proclaims? After all, think about its far right hellscape. Open-carry laws, vigilante anti-abortion laws, voting restrictions, Southern Baptist domination of state politics, heavy border control policing, etc. The list is endless and politically corrosive. The massive amount of infrastructural change and development underway in Texas is head turning too. Tesla has relocated its headquarters to the energy state[3] and bitcoin mining companies have moved to rural towns in aluminum industrial complexes. Conversely, its medical research innovation does astonish: while multinational pharma companies squabble over granting global access, a patent free COVID vaccine designed for global health has been created at Texas Children’s CVD, as a way to decolonize the vaccination schema.[4] What kind of politics go hand in hand with this kind of “transformative” infrastructure underway in the state? The message seems to sway in radical ways.

Texas isn’t as red as it seems from the outside. Austin has been labeled one of the most “progressive” cities in the nation, yet it is bordering on unaffordable housing ranked with major cities. I’d like to remember it as it was in my college years—a small town with independent record and book shops and an ecological flair, but instead it’s bustling with clichéd liberalism (very neoliberal in fact) and horrendous traffic—but could this be an all-around U.S. earmark today? Many attribute this to the California exodus that the state is experiencing: in 2019, Californians accounted for about 42 percent of Texas’ net domestic in-migration.[5] Houston on the other hand, is one of, if not the, most ethnically, diverse city in the country—the combination of its demographic profile and its no-zoning laws make it one of the most textured and complex cities in recent U.S. history. San Antonio has transformed at a slower pace, still more laid back than other cities: I’d say if looking to seize the opportunity to rear a unique smallish artistic niche, San Antonio is that place.

In May of 2021, I had the opportunity to return to Texas under the invite of Artpace, San Antonio, and their visiting curator program. It was at the height of COVID-19. Governor Abbott was (and still is) tainting the state red, with its lax COVID response, although Austin was almost entirely vaccinated and the mayor of San Antonio had launched a rigorous health campaign to vaccinate Bexar County residents after scrutiny at the onset of the pandemic. It seemed like the end was near. I hopped off the plane in Houston and drove to the NRG stadium to get vaccinated by a U.S. Air Force Airmen, then headed to San Antonio, a mere 2.5 hours away. There, I kickstarted a three week residency consisting of twenty-five statewide artist and institution visits. One of the artists I met, LatinX Evelyn Gonzalez pairs historical craft research with queer, trans, and feminist theories of materiality and embodiment.

I got to know her work through the documentation of her show Of Bodies Straining to See—where she utilizes Maya Blue and Greek “ostraka,” or potsherds to make sculptures and textile works. In it, Gonzalez explores “materiality and the body and also the implication of embodied subjectivity within these singular material ecologies—its reproduction, its dissolution, etc.” Maya Blue is a pigment that I too have worked with over the years principally in its relationship to edible clay. The beautiful hand sewn pamphlet produced by publisher French and Michigan documents two experiments inspired by artifacts of ceramic material culture and is refreshing in a city of, typically, painters. Its critical stance on gendered forms of materiality and disciplinary history signal an affective tonality that digs deep into the material’s history or as theorist Jeanne Vaccaro has written, “observing the contact and potential tensions of material thought colliding.”[6]

Another artist I met in Houston, who recently relocated to Texas from California, is Anna Mayer. Mayer’s work entangles grief, loss, and squandering in an environmental-esque ethos, sidestepping peremptory propositions. Rather her work positions that which is under way, or lying in wait, through conceptual methods. Forms of Inheritance: The Work of Anna Mayer at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft turned heads. In it, the artist references Victorian mourning wear through pieces that resemble large scale clay drinking vessels with flanked bones or fixated tassels, a contemporary annotation of “Western art”—fitting for the geographical context of the South. As people would transition out of all-black garments, they would introduce small flecks of white or gray into the black. The delicate patterns indicated the slow transition out of mourning. I learn that one of the techniques is an Eastern European process called obvara, in which the molten ceramic is pulled from the kiln at 1650 Fahrenheit and dunked in a living, fermenting slurry of yeast, sugar, flour, and water, creating dotted patterns. Various pieces align the space, overarched by a wall-sized photo print documenting a petroleum chemical processing blast. I could swear it is Houston, but it is San Juan, Puerto Rico. I stagger in my assumption. Meanwhile, I reckon with the eerie feeling of familiarity: the ambiance of the show recalls the funerary aesthetic at The National Museum of Funeral History, one of Houston’s quirky cultural establishments that “educates the public and preserves the heritage of death care.” The message is moored to the sea bottom with an anchor—Mayer “squares the magnitude of our losses within a national cycle of acquisitive, expansionist, possessive belief systems…”.[7] Indeed, Mayer’s exhibition is an intrepid act of critical bravery, not a hallucination, in a city of fossil fuel predominance where art institutions thrive from the proceeds of these corporations.

Kate Newby is also a newly minted Texan. Originally from New Zealand the artist is a 2017 Artpace alumni now working out of Floresville (a small town near San Antonio) on a large mesquite tree property where she also lives. Newby quickly made friends in the ceramics circuit with unique kilns and workshops that New York couldn’t offer. The artist works on the condition of constraint within a material’s production cycle typically within industrial or artisanal fabrication. The language that labor imbues and the conditions embedded into a material product are immaterial concerns evoked in her sculptures. She later transforms them into slight gestures necessitating perceptual awareness. Her work is an invitation to scrutinize. I’m excited to work with Newby in the context of a forthcoming project on her ongoing study of brick fabrication, for an exhibition I am curating at Artpace, San Antonio opening in May, in conversation with the poetry of University of Houston professor and author Roberto Tejada. Tejada was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim fellowship for his work-in-progress poetry collection “Carbonate of Copper” on sedimented time. In the words of Tejada on the volume, “people and environments are weathered, eroded, or worn down, outwardly placid but existing in a kind of insubordination”—pretty appropriate for the subject of bricks.[8] Clay and shale shifts around in many regions in Texas, especially in Houston, where it is characterized by its “expansiveness”. Indeed, as these geological processes take place, I’m reminded that the cultural landscape in Texas is also having its moment of expansion and recasting. Cultural production responds to the changing landscape of its political and social environment, as evoked by the aforementioned artists. Hopefully, this show will attest to some of the concerns outlined here encircling transgenerational infrastructure, family, heritage, disease, labor, metabolic rifts, and access.

Access to resources, access to space, but also what dries up, withers and regenerates. Sore spots that didn’t make it to Dave Hickey’s ironic list of moans. It is in my hopes that I make Texas proud, as my great grandmother, country and western performer musician Josie Ann Teets would sing: “From the Gulf of Mexico to the border of Oklahoma, from A. R. K. to the new Mexico line, from Louisiana to the beautiful Rio Grande, I have beautiful Texas on my mind.”

Notes

  1. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Ann Arbor: Art issues. Press, 1997).

  2. https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/dont-move-to-texas/#comments

  3. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/tesla-relocation-austin-elon-musk/

  4. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-covid-vaccine-for-all/

  5. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/opinion/move-to-texas.html

  6. http://www.frenchandmichigan.com/evelyn-gonzalez

  7. https://momus.ca/anna-mayer-reconstitutes-loss-in-houston/

  8. https://www.chicagoreview.org/poetry-staffs-march-feature/

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