Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. 2

Dan Phillips, "Chateau," 2008. Courtesy Phoenix Commotion.

In my estimation, Phoenix Commotion’s ongoing project (founded around 1998 by Dan Phillips) does much more than simply supply a university town with a rich dose of local color. While Phillips and his crew are building upon traditions of southern vernacular art, which have made significant and often under-acknowledged contributions to the evolution of American art—perhaps most-recognizably through the work of Texas-native Robert Rauschenberg—their project simultaneously engages with issues enjoying currency in contemporary art discourse. Most notably, this involves the impetus to devote one’s art, including one’s artistic process and not just the finished project, to the goal of raising an ethical awareness of our interconnectedness to each other and to the natural world.

Phillips’s project, which decades ago may have simply been understood as an example of “outsider” art and the product of some “place apart” (psychologically, culturally, and geographically), is today implicated in an ongoing and evolving international debate. The members of the Commotion do not simply belong to a cultural group entirely removed from the reach of influences acting on other contemporary artists whose similarly-minded, if aesthetically-divergent projects, have received critical attention, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land Foundation (begun 1998), Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West and A-Z East (West begun 1999 and East begun 1994), or Tyree Guyton’s The Heidelberg Project (begun 1987). The Phoenix Commotion shares with these projects an exploration of eco-friendly, low-cost solutions to design problems, and the commitment of one’s art to transforming local social conditions. But while Phillips has and continues to spread the philosophy of the Phoenix Commotion near and far, and while his project resonates with these other contemporary examples, the end products of his creative labors remain rooted in his homes of Huntsville. The Commotion’s ideas and methods may circulate in regional, national, and international circuits, but their final artworks stay resolutely put in a place that, in the end, is somewhat removed yet also intimately connected.

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Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. I

Dan Phillips, "Tree House," 2008. Courtesy of Phoenix Commotion.

As a northerner recently transplanted to the Greater Houston area, I admit to having reservations about all things Texan. I have found this a tough place to love at first sight. Yet, this particular region nurtures a unique host of fascinating figures and issues in contemporary art, along with sometimes frustrating contradictions and striking visual treats—including a wealth of handmade signs and arresting juxtapositions of natural beauty confronting the manmade. In this and subsequent posts as a guest blogger, I hope to sketch out some contributions to contemporary art made by the creators, institutions, and museum professionals who have chosen to either make their homes in and around Houston, or have come here to reflect upon the region in site-specific and installation projects. In the process, I will also reflect on some of the ethical issues in contemporary art that living removed from more established art centers has allowed me to better flesh out.

On my first trip to Huntsville, where I teach art history at Sam Houston State University, I was given a drive-by tour of several structures built by Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion team. Intrigued by what I saw, I visited his “tree house” (where my colleague Annie Strader is the current tenant), and last December I invited Phillips to speak to my Contemporary Art class about his project. For the past twelve years, Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials. Examples of Phillips’s sustainable building aesthetic include: a roof made from recycled license plates, floors made from wine corks, an artist’s studio ceiling lined with salvaged picture frame samples, and a range of other less-than-perfect or blemished building materials destined for the landfill that have been recovered and put into unexpected, unanticipated use.

Since 1996, the Phoenix Commotion, a for-profit rather than non-profit organization, has completed thirteen structures in Phillips’s hometown of Huntsville. In 2004, Phillips, with the cooperation of the city, established a warehouse where recyclable building materials are donated, stored, and then accessed by charitable groups and low-income housing projects. To achieve their aesthetic and ethical goal of increasing the availability of out of the ordinary, low-cost housing in Huntsville, Phillips and his crew are not only building, but have also created an alternative infrastructure that enables materials typically considered building “wastes” or “leftovers” to be creatively reused by the community.

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New guest blogger: Leanne Gilbertson

Thanks to Karthik Pandian for posting his Grand Canyon journals during his guest blogging stint. Fortunately, there is more to come in this series, so look out for a several more posts from him in the next few weeks.

Up next is Leanne Gilbertson. Leanne recently received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She teaches Modern and Contemporary Art, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Art at Sam Houston State University. She has held visiting teaching positions at Bowling Green State University and the University of Pittsburgh, and also served as Curatorial Assistant at the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her writing has appeared in *Art Journal* and *InVisible Culture.* Currently she is preparing a manuscript that explores the relationships between the emergence, in the 1960s, of both feminist and queer consciousnesses, and the intermedia artistic experimentation occurring at both Warhol’s Factory and Judson Memorial Church.

Grand Canyon Journal 2: Let’s Get Medievalist on that Crevasse

With the haunting mix of bodily certainty and existential confusion that characterizes a case of morning wood, the naked, supine torso of Ed Harris comes to sudden erection in a primeval forest, shooting up into the verdant frame like a rake that’s been stepped on. The shot is a crucial one in the opening sequence of George A. Romero’s Knightriders. The precipitousness of the montage conjures up both the identification of man and nature, as figured by Harris’s out-of-body “crow’s eye view” flight through the forest as well as his sudden awakening to the central conflict between the Rousseauist utopianism of the merry band of Medievalist motorcyclists he leads versus the alienating threat that modernity and capital pose to their way of life.

While this image may seem an unlikely entry point into the Grand Canyon, the proliferation of Arthurian place names in the Canyon (Excalibur Tower, Modred Abyss, Lancelot Point, Holy Grail, Gawain Abyss, Bedivere Point, The Dragon, Guinevere Castle, Merlin Abyss, Elaine Castle, and Galahad Point) speaks otherwise. Moreover, Ed Harris’s ontological sit-up echoes the axial leap of the horizontal geological striations that spatialize time along the canyon’s walls to the arbitrariness of the names (an arbitrariness that we will hungrily feast upon) that identify vertical rock formations and voids.

Geological section of the Grand Canyon covering roughly 1.5 billion years of sedimentation

Let us rewind for a moment to the Edenic state of nature envisaged before “the rise” of Ed, if you will. During the “crow-cam” sequence that opens Knightriders, we can now imagine Ed Harris lying down naked, out of frame, presumably asleep or dreaming on the forest floor. In this as-yet-unseen state, the Ed Harris-to-come is a kind of pure potential, a horizontal being that has yet to emerge from the plenitude of the forest. This avatar of Ed Harris finds his mirror image in the horizontal geological strata exposed on the walls of the Grand Canyon. Whereas Ed, in his latent form, is being as pure potential, the spatialization of time and temporalization of space that characterizes the geological stratum make it a crucible for the materialization of being as history in which space and time are co-extensive. In the layers of the Grand Canyon, space and time refine and compress one another. Being travels further and further away from pure potential until it almost sublimates into it; hence, the feeling of irreality that, like the veils of smog that descend into the chasm during peak season, tends to both intensify and obscure the experience of the Canyon.

What does it mean to point to time? Could we point to the Middle Ages on the geological calendar wall of the Grand Canyon? Does the tip of Excalibur Tower, which is said to look like King Arthur’s legendary sword, contain the moment when its namesake was thrust into a soon-to-be-slain dragon? Does Guinevere Castle house a temporal room in which the Queen scandalously gave herself to Lancelot? The answer is no, since even the uppermost strata of the Canyon are approximately 200 million years old. Kim Novak’s character from Vertigo would have to ethereally drive a few hundred miles away from that ringed redwood in order to ethereally point to a time that would approximate that temporal distance.

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Grand Canyon Journal 1: Fly-over

A few weeks ago, I was flying from St. Louis to Los Angeles on one of those clear, bright winter afternoons that makes America look like a Björk video. Since the entertainment option in the cabin consisted of watching Madagascar 2 from an angle so oblique that the form of a skull threatened to emerge, my face was mostly glued to the window, gazing down at the otherworldly panorama unspooling below me like an economy class version of Andrew Wyeth’s late career frequent flyer. Vast fields of white snow dotted with traces of civilization gave way to a stretch of Gabriel Orozco-esque center pivot irrigated parcels of land which slowly dissolved into a variegated expanse of desert before being swallowed up by the yawning chasm of…THE GRAND CANYON. Brief aside: granted it must be difficult to name massive land forms, but “The Grand Canyon” is a pretty uninspired piece of work. Unlike such visionary nomenclature as, ahem, The Grand Tetons in Wyoming, TGC falls into the patently less grand “Man with a Van” category of names: plucky with a dash of assonance. There’s a strange mix of hubris and embarrassment in this name that promises a glimpse of the sublime but delivers a Chevy Chase joke. And yet, the affectation of the name belies an anxiety that’s much clearer from 30,000 feet: as much as we love to name, we fear the fact that something so stupifyingly huge can look so incredibly small.

YouTube text comment posted in response to "David Copperfield - Floating Over the Grand Canyon"

Which brings me to David Copperfield. When I got back to LA, naturally, I searched YouTube to look for a video that resembled my aerial experience of TGC. Unfortunately, all the videos shot from commercial jets did just that – they resembled my experience. Peering through my browser window, I tasted little of the flavor of the dramatic shifts in scale, light, and color that I witnessed through my airplane window. I caught only a whiff of the uncanny multiplicity of speeds I experienced: the physical velocity of the plane hurtling through space, the slow pace of the landscape revealing itself like a tracking shot beneath me and the terror of erosion, that imperceptible force that thinks about the entire era of humankind the way we think about a “dog year.” It was then, in the “Related Videos” sidebar of my YouTube page, that I first encountered “David Copperfield – Floating Over the Grand Canyon.” This was a fly-over, nay, a float-over of an entirely different order.

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New guest blogger: Karthik Pandian

Thanks to Joel Holmberg for guest blogging this last fortnight. Up next is Karthik Pandian. Karthik is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is represented by Richard Telles Fine Art and has contributed essays to Bidoun and Motherwell. While his work may best be described as 16mm film installation, his practice follows in the footsteps of such diverse figures as Imhotep, Steve Wynn, Carmen Sandiego, Ole Worm, and Benjamin Franklin Gates. He is currently working on a solo exhibition slated to open at Midway Contemporary in Minneapolis in September 2010, but hopes one day to reopen the Musée de l’Homme on the Pacific Trash Vortex, where he will serve as Curator of Ruins and IMAX 3D projectionist.

Contemporary Relationships with the Landscape and Online Services: A Case Study

Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's Myspace profile

The exhibition history and creative output of the artist Anthony Burdin is intertwined with—and often overshadowed by his nomadic lifestyle. The 2006 Whitney Biennial participant identifies himself as a recording artist and is most known for his installations and video performances. In a 2005 review for artnet.com, Jerry Saltz described Burdin as a “sort of traveling magician-maniac-minstrel, [who] lives, makes art, and stages performances in his van.”

Up until a few years ago, Burdin recorded an astronomical amount of videotape that he captured while driving around Southern California. Like most people reading this blog, he spends a lot of time online (picking up unprotected wireless networks?). His band’s MySpace accounts (1, 2) show a shift from persistently documenting the physical landscape and his relationship with it to developing a relationship with online services and trolling social networks in search of a focused type of user to friend-request.

Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's MySpace profile

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Adolf Hilter (character) IMDB spreadsheet

When looking at the IMDB profile for Adolf Hilter (character), not Adolf Hitler (self), questions begin to emerge with regards to how one might infer a sense of the political climate of a certain time period based on whether the majority of portrayals of the Füher in popular culture are spoofs or dramatic snoozefests. Perhaps even more cultural subtext can be found in the absence of Hilter in TV or cinematic releases of a certain year (e.g. 1986, 1980).

While Hilter’s screen-time in movies and TV may ebb and flow, he is sure to remain a staple of discussion on the Internet for many years to come. (see Godwin’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law)

Adolf Hilter (character) IMDB spreadsheet, 1935 – 2009:
Each ’|' indicates where an actor has portrayed Adolf Hitler in either a motion picture or a TV appearance.

Understanding the Economy Photoshop Tutorial

Citing articles published in the Economist is always a good strategy for intelligent conversation, but you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who halts the dialogue in utter confusion and pantomiming of algebraic functions. While it might sound like a good idea to reference Greg Ip’s colorful description of the economic recovery, please stop yourself before the words “economy” and “reverse-square-root symbol” escape from your mouth.

I guess if you really want to take it there, you should be prepared to describe what a square root symbol looks like and be able to reverse it using Photoshop. First create a text field and copy and paste the Square-Root unicode character √ into the newly created text field. Make the font size big enough for you to see the symbol in details. I went with 200pt.

Next move your cursor up to the menubar and click the word “image,” select “Image Rotation” from the drop-down menu, and then choose “Flip Canvas Horizontal,”

Unfortunately, Greg Ip left us to guess what typeface to use. I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I can only hope it isn’t Lucida Handwriting.

New guest blogger: Joel Holmberg

Thanks to Nova Benway for her series of posts on artists employing earnestness in their work. Up next is Joel Holmberg. Joel (b. 1982, Maryland, USA) creates artwork with computers and online services, but also sometimes with his bare hands.