Sometimes a retail store is more social institution than Mecca of mammon. In the case of Dallas, there exists a causal relationship: the more mammon in the Mecca, the greater the social institution. Here retail provides ballast for the community in the most abstract ways, by giving it a sense…
The sculptor David Smith once declared that “the truly creative artist deals with vulgarity.” In that statement of heroic debasement, one hears Smith’s booming, stentorian voice summoning forth a new age of epic abstract form at midcentury. His words were spoken on the defensive and fired at a Massachusetts audience…
Tom Sale strikes an air somewhere between prince and court jester–he is at once a head-honcho healer and dandy snake-oil salesman. Transforming old suitcases and book covers into looking-glass extravaganzas of macabre and mayhem, he breathes new life and perversity into the old tradition of the cabinet of curiosity. A…
Americans have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Some believe it’s the best thing since nylon pantyhose, big-screen TVs and Ziploc baggies. That you can find all three products under one large, sprawling flat roof not only signals one-stop shopping but also the megastore’s generosity. As an institution, it is a…
Frank Stella’s boisterously painted sculpture from the 1980s is phenomenal in a muffled way. It operates something like the Doppler Effect, heard in the ever-quieter acoustic waves that trail behind the siren of a passing ambulance. Like those receding sounds, these bright and mangled heaps of aluminum and fiberglass follow…
Taking two steps into the space of an installation by Daniel Roth is more like leaping several miles into the fathomless realm of the imagination. His conceptualist installations invert and explode space, expanding the hemmed-in much in the way the legendary wardrobe did for the children in C.S. Lewis’ The…
With all the rhetoric of globalization, any public discussion of localism in the arts would seem to be déclassé. Somehow localism appears to run in direct opposition to the forward march of progress supposedly borne by the forces of globalization. In our area of the world, however, localism in the…
To bastardize something is not usually a good thing. Bastardization–or crossbreeding, as one might have it–signals the trivializing or making hackneyed of an idea or object once thought awesome, taken seriously or held in esteem. To bastardize is to make something impure–to contaminate or pollute that which is otherwise pristine…
We have been dealt a blow–an insult to our collective intellect, psyche and social well-being. Yet so many feel nothing, numbed by a happy and willful oblivion. We gleefully assume our position in the herd, eyes glazed over and lips alternating between the upward turn of a smile, the slack…
The death of art is a well-worn idea. Once the anti-aesthetic rallying cry of so many pious avant-gardists, declaring that art has met the grim reaper is another way of saying “where’s the price tag?” In a rather cynical turn of events, it would seem that the avant-garde has revealed…
New York City is the materialization of order out of chaos. Boisterous crowds of pedestrian and vehicular traffic elegantly course through its veins on a minute-by-minute basis. Its manmade mountains, what Walt Whitman called “solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars,” mark the upward thrust of an endless hustle and…
For those of you who secretly find comfort in alien postures–who find yourself always the observer rather than the participant, forever the wallflower and never the butterfly–you’ll be happy to know that evidence shows this to be normal. We are alien by nature. Our collective provenance as humans may not…
A little bit of Argentina has come to Texas–a taste of Buenos Aires is livening up the fair but jaunty mix of Dallas. Yet in the photographs of Argentinean artist Esteban Pastorino Diaz, now showing at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, visual piquancy is the result of a much more…
What is Dallas afraid of? What is the source of this potentially cosmopolitan city’s pronounced dread? Why does it so willfully participate in the worldview of paranoia that threatens to undermine what has been since the nation’s inception a foundation at once steadfast yet supple, almighty yet benevolent, superpowerful yet…
New York–It’s not unusual that most of us find great comfort maneuvering in the vernacular. Whether spoken or architectural, the vernacular is familiar, easy, efficient and, at its base, local. It’s the slang that gets your order across to the waiter. It’s the back road that gets you fastest from…
For the last 40 years, cultural pundits have focused their attention on the ever-expanding dominion of the mass media. Whether broadcast through television or the Internet, its shimmering blue-light tendrils meander and creep kudzu-like into every aspect of our life. Yet if the play of the news and advertising extends…
In the secular world, the space of the art gallery constitutes hallowed ground. Its white walls beckon those willfully wayward members of the flock who by habit choose to while away their Sundays at the mall rather than before the pulpit. On Friday night you’ll find them at the opening…
Behind frenzied and diligent art collecting one usually finds eccentric and extraordinary art collectors. Such idiosyncrasy and the museum go hand in hand as the labyrinthine spaces of yesterday’s collectors often become the public treasuries of today’s moneyed idlers and wandering intelligentsia. One need only look to the John Soane…
If Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) sounded an early salvo of the feminist movement, the photographs of Jin-Ya Huang dance a worldly jig of the feminine in-between. The masterful blur of Huang’s images give form to the shuffle and swing of a woman-girl acting in between East and West,…
Old MacDonald’s farm has fallen through the looking glass, and farming has never been so fun. No, there are no giant clefts in the ground, there have been no earthquakes and Mother Earth has not swallowed up the old Scotsman’s livelihood. Rather, Old Mac’s farm has been rethought and kindled…
The poet Ezra Pound once said, “Good art can not be immoral.” But can art be amoral–can it exist without any moral claims whatsoever? Is art lacking when it doesn’t teach us a lesson, when it doesn’t give us ballast and orientation in the proverbial sea of abandon in which…
In the unconscious abyss of sleep and repose lies an arena of possibility. There are the dreamscapes where one enacts the impossible, from the mundane to the amazing, from talking to the president at a barbecue to flying fleet-bodied through urban vistas yet unknown. Beneath the eyes of a resting…
