California has had an art biennial, on and off and in various guises, since the 1980s. “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1’s quinquennial survey of the local talent pool, debuted in 2000. Both have become institutions in their own rights, hotly debated glimpses of the (allegedly) most compelling output from the thousands of artists among those regions’ 38 and 23 million inhabitants, respectively. The under-the-radar Texas Biennial, which has been taking an increasingly broad view of that 26-million-person state’s art scene since 2005, is now in its fifth edition, and yet in a recent panel at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston titled “Why a Texas Biennial?,” its continued existence was very earnestly called into question.
Should the open call exhibition’s submission fee be waived? Should local collectors have input? Should more established artists’ participation be solicited in what has been, since its inception, an exhibition driven by emerging artists? Is it too heavily dominated by artists from Austin, where it began? Does it disproportionately feature artists from East Texas? Should it be smaller? Bigger? Scrapped entirely?
This year’s Texas Biennial exhibition, filling every inch of available wall space (and an annex) at San Antonio’s Blue Star art center through November 9 — with related programming peppered across the state — makes a convincing case for the show’s continuation. With 69 Texas-based artists and collectives, most represented by a single work, the selection — whittled down from more than 1,000 submissions by a team of 14 curators — is necessarily uneven. Fortunately, a slew of strong works make this more than a Lone Star affair.
Every medium is represented, from performance and photography to installation and painting, but the Biennial’s strongest set of works are its videos. The standout, Abinadi Meza’s “Melencolia” (2013), features looped footage of the doomed 1986 Challenger shuttle launch, though the anticipated explosion never happens. Instead, the piece, whose title alludes to Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 engraving “Melancholia,” consists of a diptych showing randomized mainstream media clips of the rising rocket and the audience watching from below. The blue-hued footage and a simple, ominous score of a few notes paired with a recurring low rumble conjure and sustain an incredible level of tension and dread. The result teases our familiarity with the devastating footage, illustrating our present-day Baudrillardian situation, in which historical events only survive as their representations in mass media. At times, “Melencolia” even begins to resemble a revisionist fantasy in which Challenger launched successfully.
Another anxiety-inducing video, Austin-based duo Robert Melton and Robert Boland’s “Three-Way Call” (2012), takes a more Lynchian route. In exquisitely composed, film noir-like close-up shots, two callers urge a third to “push the button,” his eventual compliance coming in the two-minute short’s final moment. Though less ambitious and thematically potent than Meza’s contribution, Melton and Boland’s piece handily achieves the intended sense of unease.
The Texas Biennial isn’t all doom and gloom, though. Witness Houston artist Seth Mittag’s “Hurricane Allen” (2012), a stop-motion video of a weather report that plays on a tiny sculpture of a vintage, faux-wood paneled television. After two Claymation newscasters report on an incoming hurricane and disastrous tornado, they cut to a mock bank ad starring a dancing man in a chicken suit whose promises of affordable mortgages seem targeted at Spanish-speaking viewers. Couched in satire and nostalgia, the video installation slyly alludes to the effects of global warming, the housing market crisis, and the tenuous place occupied by recent immigrants in the Texan economy. Mittag’s contribution is one of surprisingly few works in this year’s Biennial exhibition with any kind of political edge.
Among the show’s more strictly formal experiments, none is quite so strange and memorable as McKinney-based Cassandra Emswiler’s “Views of the Lake” (2012), an installation of her trademark photo-printed tiles displayed on custom-made, brightly painted wooden shelves. Each square tile features white, geometric forms and a curious, seemingly abstract pattern that, on closer inspection, turns out to be made up of mirrored and refracted photographs of a lake. By collapsing domestic materials and landscape photography manipulated to the point of abstraction, Emswiler notches one of the Biennial’s most original presentations.
Several other artists make promising appearances that will leave visitors wanting more. Chief among them are San Antonio artist Kelly O’Connor, whose pair of collage-filled glass vitrines evoke early Fred Tomaselli, and Dallas-based duo Rachel Crist and Daedalus Hoffman’s “Spitting Image” (2013), a video of a grotesque, Kate Gilmore-esque performance in which Crist chomps and spits her way through large quantities of chewing tobacco until she nearly vomits. Last but not least, Romania-born, Conroe-based artist Adela Andea’s installation of neon foam and LEDs in Blue Star’s rear passageway is undeniably fun.
Finally, what sets the Texas Biennial apart from similar geographically determined endeavors in California and New York, or the big dances at the Whitney, the Giardini, and elsewhere, is not a recurring aesthetic, political stance, or institutional affiliation, but, as participants in the MFAH panel concluded, a certain “scrappiness,” both formal and organizational. From its reliance on a state-spanning network of alternative and artist-run spaces, to participants who are recontextualizing found footage and images, and reimagining overlooked materials, it offers a much-needed platform for a vibrant and vast community of artists.
For a state that prides itself on bigness, Texas’s biennial remains relevant precisely because it has resisted the urge to go big, a common quandary handily illustrated by looking to any of the more formalized and staid semi-annual survey shows now found in every corner of the globe. The Texas Biennial may still have its share of kinks to straighten out, as some of the panelists in Houston suggested, but those quirks are also a evidence of its dynamism.
To see works from the 2013 Texas Biennial exhibition at Blue Star, click the slideshow.
The 2013 Texas Biennial exhibition continues at Blue Star Contemporary through November 9.