Lance Letscher Collage
This first full-length monograph of the local collagist's work is pure pleasure
Reviewed by Cindy Widner, Fri., April 24, 2009
Lance Letscher Collage
artwork by Lance Letscher, introduction by Charles Dee Mitchell, essay by Brooke Davis AndersonUniversity of Texas Press, 213 pp., $50
Nothing can replicate the complicated rush one feels upon viewing collagist supreme Lance Letscher's work in all its dimensions; still, Lance Letscher Collage – the first full-length monograph of his work – manages to tap into the thrill of its unabashed beauty, energy, and layers of possibility, the combination of which can come close to inducing a giddy nausea. That's perhaps because, in this case, those qualities are irrepressible, but UT Press has taken care to convey the collages' vibrant, 3-D immediacy – the faded scrawls of pencil; the glossy, medieval-looking books; the pinwheels of perfect, bewildering color – in a way that capitalizes on the visceral. Opening essays by Charles Dee Mitchell and Brooke Davis Anderson delve into the motivations and inspirations that drive an artist who has been characterized as taciturn and workmanlike, though thoughtful and theoretically inclined, as well (since Letscher holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts, both from UT, it seems unlikely that he could be otherwise). Art in America's Mitchell renders vividly Letscher's work habits (disciplined and nearly constant), source collection and criteria (the thrift shopping and Dumpster-diving required to amass the amount of weathered printed material he so surgically deploys), and the trajectory of his development. The critic does much to articulate what so many find unsayable about Letscher's work, but it's American Folk Art Museum curator/director Anderson who throws down the lightning bolt here. Spelling out the nature of the artist's deep ties to outsider art, she makes specific connections to the works of James Castle, Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, and the quilters of Gee's Bend and, in the process, illuminates much about not only the sources of the works' emotional immediacy but of Letscher's meticulous methodology and identification as an outsider, both artistically and regionally, right down to his decision to remain in Austin rather than move to a more traditional art hub. That Letscher's work has been reproduced and bound into the kind of material that could have also served as fodder for one of his collages is both ironic and apt; the resulting object is also, paradoxically, a kind of finery. To be able to sit with a collection of his works, with their perfect titles and illuminating backstory, is pure pleasure.