“Over + Over: Passion for Process”
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, through Aug. 6
When was the last time you looked in your kitchen drawers and found art waiting there to be discovered? And for that matter, when was the last time you looked in your garage, your pantry, or even the drawers where your most secret obsessions are kept? The Krannert Art Museum, in a show currently hosted by our own AMOA, has put together 13 artists who have each seemingly done just this type of scrounging and collecting. From pencil stubs and marker caps to wire bits and old tire parts, “Over + Over” is a look at the craft of making art in the repetition of everyday objects.
Upon entering the gallery, Tom Friedman’s Loop (1993-1995) prefigures the show’s overall theme: taking a 1-lb. box of spaghetti and transforming its contents into a single line of twisting and twirling pasta so that this familiar material has been wound into something humorous, something energetic, and something that must take painstaking patience and near obsession to accomplish. Nearby, Nina Katchadourian has meticulously cut out all of Austria’s roadways and New York’s subways from flat maps and reconfigured them in a mass that might be something closer to a real-time experience of transportation and travel. In keeping with the linear grids of Friedman and Katchadourian, Rachel Perry Welty has created a booklike, wall-sized text of twist ties that run like paragraphs in the story of each vegetable formerly held by these industrial objects and the relationships that brought the pieces of Welty’s collection to completion.
While each artist in “Over + Over” works with common materials, Judith Hoos Fox, one of the original curators of “Over + Over,” points out that the return to the every day in an ever more technological society is not a new phenomenon. More than 100 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution was under way, the Arts and Crafts Movement brought about a similar return to the common and familiar in art and its making. Moving forward in history, the pieces on display in “Over + Over” also recall the Process Art of the 1960s. Still, while the exhibition offers an investigation of repetition in each of the participating artist’s works, the show is not a repetition of things past. Working from a grid that continually references contemporary digital and organizational schemata, the works in “Over + Over” are marked by a focus on “hyper-process” and are driven beyond mere concerns with making and materials to obsessions with these processes. Each piece is the familiar taken to its max: in Chakaia Booker’s fabulously textured and expansive work with bits of tire; in Lisa Hoke’s breathtaking collage of paper, plastic, and painted cups; and in Jennifer Maestre’s pencil projects that leave the viewer to question the distinction between the organic and nonorganic in life and art. Tom Fruin’s works with branded heroin bags and a uniquely collected deck of 52 cards cap and crown the exhibit. Taking on the subject of obsessions while obsessing over the form and process of collecting comes to a head in his work: The result is a quilt of one person’s, if not many peoples’, struggles with addiction and a deck of cards, collected one card at a time over three years in a gamely process that rivals gambling for its compulsions.
While “Over + Over” is richly textured and deeply engaging, it is also so truly Austin. We are a city that relishes beauty that rises out of the ordinary and funk that delights in mass. Don’t miss “Over + Over”; it is the perfect opportunity to treat yourself to a show full of eye candy, inspiration, and great ideas for what to do with all that stuff you were ready to throw out during spring cleaning.
This article appears in May 26 • 2006.