by Rebecca Levy Anitra Blayton’s journal is not like mine. Hers is bigger. Really big.
Life-size, stacked-up, wouldn’t-fit-on-my-desk-or even-in-my-office big.
Journaling is usually a private experience – and indeed Blayton’s work can be
quite intimate – but this is a woman whose purpose is to share her point of
view. Six mixed media constructions make up the exhibition called
Journal which fills Women and Their Work’s new gallery space at 17th and
Lavaca. Each work is based on the artist’s journal entries, notes on life as
she has observed it. They are autobiographical, yet tell the story of someone
who watches everyone and everything, someone who is listening in and responding
to the world around her.
The resulting objects are powerful and articulate, although they speak with a
well-modulated voice. Blayton’s construction called “Fruit” is composed of an
oil painting of fruit hanging on the wall under a makeshift spotlight and over
a wooden mantle that holds old photographs. One is labeled “National Negro
Business League, August ’38.” It is a sepia-toned group photo of very serious
looking men in business suits. In another, two young black girls dressed in
old-fashioned white dresses pose primly for the camera. The mantle is suspended
on the wall perpendicular to a vertical board which continues to the floor.
Scattered on the floor underneath are radios and radio parts. One of them plays
a steady, wordless beat. The sound is very much present in your consciousness
as you walk by, but it is not too loud.
The full shape of this installation resembles that of a cross. The effect is
that of a family tree, with the older generation represented on top and the
younger generation below. The formality of the first gives way to the
grunge-casual arrangement of the other. Blayton uses familiar objects to spell
out her ideas. Her journals are not written with words, but constructed and
assembled with things most of us see and take for granted: furniture, Coca-Cola
bottles, radios, and rugs.
In the text etched on glass inside “Pie Save,” the artist’s mother tells her
daughter how she and her girlfriends got all dressed up, week after week, to
sit in the front row of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to impress a
certain young preacher. His name was Martin. Martin Luther King. It is a nice
story, well told (although a challenge to read the lower shelves). Daughters
love hearing stories about when their mothers were young and kittenish. Blayton
saves the words like precious objects on the shelves (literally) of a cabinet,
like china cups in a breakfront or freshly baked pies in a pie safe. The
oriental rug lying on top of the cabinet is still something of a mystery to me,
although it gives the sense that the cabinet and rug might be in transition,
about to be picked up and moved from one house to another with their memories
safe inside.
“Dream Book and Dream Pillow” seems less personal, more tedious. In the book
which rests on a red velvet pillow, newspaper clips speak to the question “What
is refuge?” The visitor is allowed to carefully flip through the pages. Each
story (most with highlighted passages) provides heavy-handed answers; they
describe what “refuge” is not. Certainly the contemporary art gallery is no
longer a refuge from the world. as evidenced by this particular installation.
I much preferred “Refuge,” a three-dimensional installation that looks like a
cross between Friday the 13th and Fantasia. A scalloped fence
encloses a tableau that we can just see over the top of the wood slats. Stairs
lead to the top of the fence, but we aren’t meant to use them. A chair and a
cabinet dance on a platform inside the fence. Then again, maybe their attitude
suggests they’ve been tossed about, the innocent “victims” of a family
argument. Finally the viewer begins to sense the pieces of furniture, standing
askew and beyond our reach, might be acting out the behavior of the family that
lives inside the fence. Furniture fantasy or family violence? Maybe both. Is
this cartoon furniture built to make us laugh or to make us think carefully?
Anitra Blayton wants us to think. She is a black woman, about 40 years old,
whose images are specific to her own experiences and yet inclusive rather than
exclusive. The artist, who now lives in Fort Worth after years in California,
wants the audience to understand her “journals,” and she goes the extra mile to
make this happen. Small, framed, typeset entries accompany each installation to
give the viewer a place to begin. And if that is not enough, she includes in
this exhibition, “Monument to the Common Audience.” This particular sculpture
is Blayton’s visual response to the comment of a particular art critic. He told
her that the artist shouldn’t worry about whether the “common audience” could
understand her work. The critic said the artist’s meaning would always be
hidden to them. Blayton disagrees. She is relying on us to figure things out
for ourselves. Inside the racks which hold 1,132 Coca-Cola bottles hangs a
partially draped artwork that we can’t quite make out. There are words written
on it, but they are hidden. The audience stands, common as coke bottles,
peering inside, but we can’t make out the words. This particular work, shaped
like a little house, parodies the critic’s point of view.
The staff at Women and Their Work is so certain of the accessibility of the
artist’s vision that they have scheduled several tours of the exhibition for
students. When I visited, they were preparing for 50 at-risk junior high school
students to visit the galleries. These students have been journaling themselves
in the classroom and exploring the use of metaphor and simile, symbols and
signs, in order to express their feelings. My guess is that even though
Blayton’s journals are certainly more polished than the student efforts, they
will be particularly evocative for them. The students will be asked not to turn
the pages of the “Dream Book” or to tinker with the radio parts, but they will
be free to pick up the telephones in the “Weeping Marys” installation, and they
can listen to the slow drip of blood-red droplets of water leaking from a pipe
in the wall that separates two sides of the work like the wall in a church
confessional. Unlike the critic that inspired “Monument,” I feel confident that
most will find a way into the artist’s work. I would like to see what they have
to say about it.
Next door to Women and Their Work, Lyons Matrix Gallery is hosting a fun
summer exhibition, a group show of gallery artists called Sofa Paintings and
Couch Potatoes. Holly Moe steals the show with a two ceramic pillows, and a
wooden chair with little “boobs” on the backrest. Her white painted shelf has
similar anatomical protrusions, white wooden spoon arms, and a wonderful
shapely form. A row of photo-spatulas leer at passersby from the front
window.
Sydney Yeager’s small, lush painting “Homage” (subtitle: “Ceci n’est pas un
sofa”) and Tre Arenz’s wall-mounted ceramic sculpture “Fountainhead” address
the couch potato with a literary bent, the one who is already curled up on the
sofa for a summer of reading under the air-conditioning vent. David Deming’s
canine “Coffee Table Potato” lolls about on – you guessed it – a table rather
than a couch. He is, as are all of Deming’s dogs, amazingly floppy-cuddly and
flexible for a metal construction.
Then there are series of actual sofa paintings. Not sofa-sized paintings, but
pictures of furniture. A lot of them are wonderful. A sofa for over your sofa?
See Jimmy Jalapeeno. If you’d like a woman reclining on a sofa, Susan Whyne has
a huge gaudy broad for you in “Flamenco and the Knick-Knacks.” Phillip Wade’s
painting in the window is smaller than Whyne’s, and the woman on the sofa more
elegant and reserved. Bob Wade, Bert Long, and Damian Priour also play with the
words and images of summer and sofas as do other gallery regulars. Claudia
Reese’s sculpture stands on its head to please. This is no summer to be a couch
potato if you’re part of the art crowd. There is plenty to look at in Austin,
and you can do a lot of that looking in the new art neighborhood between 16th
and 17th streets, Lavaca and Guadalupe.
Around the corner from Lyons Matrix and Women and Their Work, Galeria Sin
Fronteras presents a solo exhibition of recent works by San Antonio artist Andy
Villarreal which opens on Saturday June 17 with a reception for the artist from
6:30-8pm. Also opening downtown that evening at Flatbed Press by the railroad
tracks, is an exhibition of prints by Fort Worth artist David Conn. The
reception continues at Flatbed from 5-8pm. n
Journal, by Anitra Blayton, is on view through July 8 at Women &
Their Work Gallery. Sofa Paintings and Couch Potatoesis on view through
July 8 at Lyons Matrix Gallery.
This article appears in June 16 • 1995 and June 16 • 1995 (Cover).