Culture in art from texas

 Culture in Art from Texas (USA)

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

Written and composed in English by abdel Hernández san Juan

 Texas culture is a unique phenomena in the unites States. While there are of course to many interpretations on the issue given the fact that Texas has embodied seen from outside of the state several stereotypes of common sense meanings such as for example the image of Texas as the main land of the oil, on the one side, or as the state which capsulate the more technological and modern towns of the country toward ideas of future cities and or by being the land of nasa, such outside stereotypes creates an image of course unrecognize Texas cultural specifities. 

  There are as ever to many ways of course to afford culture but one of the often privilege way to go in deep around a culture revolves around discussing its art. 

  In this sense instead of discussing Texas culture by affording it as a text directly I would like to do in this text a sort of move, I want to discuss Texas art as a text through which we can at least offer several hermeneutical views of the texts of Texas as culture.           

  This is not a way to say that I am far to recognize a Texas art scene, there is, without doubt, a Texas art scene, but such an scene is bigger than what I can cover as a single critic including in the visual art thousands of galleries and museums. Instead of it I prefer to focus myself in a more near single perspective discussing according to my experience specific artists based in studio visits, dossier critiques and a variety of meetings 

  One of the best exhibits for example I has seen in many years an especially in the whole Texas art scene, offers a fascinating overview on the issue of subjectivity in Texas culture in the genre of environments installation can be the sound of silence by usa artist Cristina Jadic.     

  Cristina in my concern she is herself a significant phenomena both looking to art itself and examining ways to discuss the relation between art and culture and or on how to discuss culture according to or through the semantique analysis of the way art texere and or Philigrane cultural forms. Her background in print making is possibly related with such a unique form to engage cultural issues, the exhibit in question focused a phenomena in a first level mostly natural like it happen in the traditional form to afford for example landscapes, however, very far to landscaping her motive, she ingeniously transformed her nature motive in a cultural one. 

   In such an exhibit she choiced to afford an issue almost undiscussed before in Texas art and however culturally important in the area. Texas as a cultural region is defined at least the south side of the state by the imminent presence of the gulf coast sea, the Mexican gulf, many letlee villages and communities are in fact unfolded through the coast such as, coming from Houston, the Galveston village, a very old western typical village while also taking a way toward el paso and Monterrey, beaches cities such as padre island and corpus cristi not to mention kimas. Paradoxically, however, probably related with the very modern development of the main center cities such as Houston and Dallas and the phenomena of the Arizona desert incredibly Texas subjectivities are in general forgetting the relevance of the sea. 

   The assumption of a natural phenomena as a way to explore cultural ones is being certainly often and not completely new in Texas, Terrell James for example have an incredible serie of abstractions directly using geological motives show casing it and Tracy Hicks explored several times amazing inventories, collection and recollections of objects from everyday life mixed with geological elements and conserved under natural and chemical liquids thinking for example about his inventories of books under geological matter, but the way Cristina has afforded the gulf is definitely unique and without precedents.             

  She first explored to do a collection of many of the matters usual’s but often unrecognized in the gulf coast environment such as kinds of sacks in several grains, waves and colors, kinds of sands in several grains, tones and colors as well as woods, sticks and campeachy woods. After doing a kind of meticulous inventory of it she afforded the whole Texas art supply gallery by fully transforming it into a virtual gulf coast environment, disseminating the sacks on the flour and building tridimentional structures of woods internally lighted within the whole gallery. She builded it with the several sticks and campeachy woods collected while covering each one with the sacks around in several tones and grains. 

  The internal lightings of the structures passing by or through the sacks grains produced a phenomena of relation between light and shadows that Philigrane and tamize in terms of subjectivity the impressions of the whole transformed site. 

   The exhibit, however, was far to just be an inventory of collected stuffs, she also did several films in clouse ups of the sea specially the moment when the wave arrives to the border of the sand including sounds of it and projected the films images over walls extended sacks and the sound of it      

  The already described environment engaged the Texas viewer through subjectivity by calling the attention on his sensorial and multisensorial body memory, on how to evoque in the body memories forgotten and or unattended but significant clues of a natural memory culturally important, the main way to explore within the exhibit forms to call the multisensorial experience of the body memories of the natural phenomena under subjectivity toward culture consisted about how she spatially interrelated photos of her own shadow with the relation between light and shadow created through the Philigrane of the matters collected from the natural environment.

  Houston as city like Dallas use to be environmentally speaking in term of subjectivity mainly a capsulated technology body phenomena city, while the city itself have, of course, a lot of fascinating cultural phenomena’s in terms of architecture and well as in terms of communities, customs and values, the very modern and high technology development of the city tend to overwhelm citizens sensations under artificial environments producing with time a sensation of technologically capsulated bodies far to nature, while in term of culture Texas is being stronger in idiosyncrasies and traditions both in terms of native Anglo-American traditions, as well as in terms of the mixtures and hibridations created by the subjectivities of the borders including how Mexican culture reflects and echoes in Texas cultural sensibilities, feelings and identities, the clues of nature in contrast with the artificial environment of the main modern cities are important in terms of the semantique body memory to bring awareness on cultural issues.

   we should not forget at this semantique level of analysis on the fact that discussing the interpretation of signs and visual icons, this is not the first time cristina explored the meanings of her own body shadows. A year before to an exhibit at Foley during the biennale of photofest cristina created an individual exhibit inside a showcase of an older and relatibly abandoned old no longer working shopping center of the city mainly transforming the show case with photos of the shadows of her own body surrounded by corns a food connected both the tradition of native Indians with the modern mass media and or massive custom of eating porn corns during washing movies in the film theater or television, a presentation titled connections and disconexions, and she also used images of the shadow of her body printed under a variety of textiles, fabrics and print making evoquing the woman tradition of waving in her family in her exhibit cultural bodies at Sicardi gallery.

  

  Turning the attention to completely different phenomena in Texas art and culture we have on the one side the amazing surrealist landscapes of Italian artist long time living in Houston who late moved to Dallas and late to the north of the country. Donald Caledare, who use to work in his commerce galpon, developed big bidimensional landscapes of imaginative worlds. 

  His landscapes suggest something mix the imagination of places out of the earth like landscapes of undiscovered planets with the idea of possible landscapes, its surrealist effects are less related with the usual mean of surrealism toward tropes and metaphors of dreams or the exuberant fictions of imagination to invent over reality unreal landscapes of the imagination and more with a certain curiosity on undiscovered landscapes but to a certain point possible if we use our memory on the logical and structural principles regulate nature under earth landscapes.

  In this sense Donald landscapes can be discussed as landscapes of the possible or as landscapes of the imagination of possibilities, he uses what is logic in earth landscapes but to figure out possibilities of such a logic to generates relationships between surfaces, volumes, colour and accidents at least by now inexistent or undiscovered in the earth. 

  By this mean his landscapes are ambiguous phenomena’s of the imagination inhabit in between a feeling of the imagination of landscapes out of the earth and or the idea of how imagination can create congruent ideas of hypothetical realities transforming the figurations of the possible in a kind of means of experimentation, surreal because not in existence under earth topographies but naturally possible his universes are in between philosophical imagination and science fiction. 

  There is something also at Donald landscapes that remember recreated universes around far and or palimpsests of culture as for example in film the series of Indiana johns explored travels to far lands and culture as forms of travels in time toward superposition’s between the traveler culture and the visited one culture in a form created imaginative palimpsestual images of cultures less real than created by the temporality of the film itself.

   Without images of culture and without actors as in film, but focused only on natural landscapes, his work remembers something of that kind of relation between reality and fiction, 

   Ariel Masson a Mexican American artist living in Houston even if she can be related with cristina and Surpik in the sense of certain attention within her painting on issues of intimacy or ways to relate issues from her single sensibility to femininity her paintings fars to it since instead it remember something of the impetus of the transavantgard like for example the paintings of Cuban artist living in Florida Ana Albertina Delgado ex-member of the so-called pure group of the eighties, while Masson paintings are more subtly on the way to femininity and more focused in colour and the states of animus of the subject 

      Another artist of interest to be discussed regarding Texas culture through the arts can be the puertorican –American Ibsen Espada, stablished in Texas since several decades his work of painting is an amazing way to afford the imageries and the subjectivities of the streets in a form unique. The idea of vocabularies or graphic forms of street visual speech and sometimes alphabetical exuberant words, well known in the visual culture of graffiti can be perceived as vestiges or as echoes at Ibsen paintings but as an attitude in the gestures readable through the manner of painting or in how subjectivity is affording the canvas and the frame, while without any direct reference and or use of such specific kind of visual repertories, without writing words and without direct references to graffiti iconographies and sual symbols, by getting something of the street style of painting as if speaking when the visual transform by clues in the as if of speech acts and by asumming a certain often visually recognized attitude regarding a certain transavangard form to assume the canvas Ibsen creates recreated organic universes which are abstract in form but an abstraction shows to be nearly related with the body and with habitat instead of abstraction conceived as way to exit the body sensoriality, such a way to relate abstraction with habitat can be in fact recognized as a general characteristic of Texas art at least in Houston, overall in Terrell James, while less in Virgil or Hicks, abstraction is mostly seen and assumed as something very related with and near with the abstractions of the sensorial body memory toward its surrounding, instead of representational reflections on the environment, Terrell and Ibsen they have both explored, each one in a different form, organic abstract forms directly evoques and suggest the multisensorial universes of the semantique body completely defined by the inmediacy of habitat and environmental issues, but when Terrell attention of the issue seems to move toward an spiritual sublime around it, Ibsen paintings explore the opposite sort of move not so much the feelings of a fine sensibility addressed to the purity of soul as in Terrell, but instead trying to capture something on how the habitat surplus or overcome thigs from the social world and the streets but to later be transformed again at Ibsen outcomes in organic forms something as if such an abstract form impregnated by subtly clues or echoes of the social streets returned to the sensorial body of the inmediacy habitat    

Nota

  Este texto en un primer esfuerzo por complexionar acuerdos y compromisos que definí y arregle en Houston con los distintos artistas que discuto, en 1998 se había publicado mi ensayo Cultural Bodies sobre la muestra del mismo título de Maria cristina jadick en Sicardi gallery como parte del catálogo, en aquella ocasión yo había estado en su studio varios meses de modo que conocía el proceso de preparación de la muestra, pero adicionalmente a ello hay dos muestras posteriores de cristina cuyo proceso de preparación conocí en su estudio y en cuyas presentaciones había estado presente sobre las cuales no habría escrito, el ensayo conjuga el trabajo de escribir sobre esas dos muestras una en Texas art suply en Houston en 1999 y la otra en Foley fotofest en 1998 con otras visualizaciones que hice en esos mismos años, 

   desde 1998 hasta por lo menos 2002 estuve encontrándome con Terrell james en su studio para visualizar y discutir su arte, asi como en mi propios apartamentos en holly hall y en timmons lave, richmont a donde ella me visito o durante salidas que hacíamos por la ciudad de houston, 

   en 1998 Ariel masson me invito a su studio para visualizar sus pinturas y que escribiera y otro tanto también Ibsen espada estuve dos veces en su studio con la misma finalidad, en cuanto a Donald Caledare desde 1997 hasta por lo menos fines de 1998 nos veíamos en su studio en commerce Street para visualizar y discutir sus pinturas, 

Bibliography

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Cultural Bodies, essay published in the catalogue of Christina Jadic exhibit Cultural Bodies, High quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, also published at https://www.mariacristinajadick.com

Houston, Texas, usa, 1998