Art Versus Texas

Lillian Davies makes the case in Glasstire against Turner Prize–winner Jeremy Deller:

Another much-discussed manifestation of Texas in London was this December’s Turner Prize for the best contemporary exhibition by a UK-based artist, which was awarded to yet another ArtPace alum, Jeremy Deller. Deller beat out Kutlug Ataman, Langlands & Bell, and Yinka Shonibare for the big award with his piece Memory Bucket, a work involving found objects and a film, which he put together during his residency last year in San Antonio. Deller’s hackneyed presentation of the Texas ethos was greeted locally with tepid praise and even derision, but it was obviously a big hit elsewhere, where the Texas stereotype still has some life left in it. One bright spot in his film involves sublime footage of a colony of bats leaving a Central Texas cave at sunset (indeed, anyone who’s watched this majestic phenomenon from one of the bridges over Austin’s Town Lake can but hardly be moved by it).

I was under the impression that the latter image was more characteristic of Memory Bucket, but I'm pretty sure that the clips I saw online weren't the complete work. Regardless, I have to sympathize with Deller—there's probably no place on Earth in which an honest attempt at bricolage can lead to a more seamless portrait of a stereotype. To wit: My parents recently moved from suburban Dallas to a place a ways outside the exurbs. My first drive around town (I use the term loosely), I saw a classic movie theater that had been converted into a church (completed by the reformatting of the attendant marquis); a Christian bookstore (slash Internet cafe!) with a story-high sign featuring a cartoon penitent pilgrim; and a structure that I could only describe as a bunker, which was in fact a diner—inside which hung a POW-MIA flag, a self-styled Don't Tread on Me flag, and a neon decorative thingee juxtaposing the outline of the USA and a cross. The diner, obviously enough, offered several variations on the chili-cheeseburger.

I'm as fascinated as those voyeur Brits by this stuff, but because I lived in Texas for years, I know that an accurate pictorial presentation would involve a lot of pictures of Staples, Chile's, Walmarts and what have you, suburban housing subdivisions, cacti and mesquite. Pretty dull. For the kind of quasi-photojournalistic art Deller practices, the urge to take exciting photographs of interesting stuff competes with a certain obligation to accurately describe what is primarily homogenous and boring. (I think so, anyway, though let me admit that I'm not well versed on the ethics of photography.)

In so many words Davies accuses Deller of either a Stockholm syndrome enchantment with or brute condescension toward our great state. But it's hard to see how it could turn out otherwise, because definitionally a photographic survey promotes favored images to the exclusion of equally viable alternatives. Discrimination is the process and the point; it should speak about Deller, not Texas.

UPDATE: Other good Glasstire material to check out: Heather Mathews on Laurence Miller's arts-related program activities in Austin; Christopher French on the Beuys retrospective at the Menil. (Did anybody out there see that show? Sounded fun.)

Posted by Kriston at January 9, 2005 4:46 PM