Design & writing by Ben Judson
[ essays & reviews portfolio ]
Here are some essays, reviews, and interviews I have published over the last few years. Some have appeared in art magazines such as Art Lies (where I am a Corresponding Editor), Glasstire, ...might be good, and NeoAztlan, while others were written for the San Antonio Current and Emvergeoning, a group arts blog based in San Antonio. Since I launched Emvergeoning in 2006, I have contributed over 500 posts.
In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum mounted an exhibit called The Art of the Motorcycle, which was met with a mixed critical reception and accusations of pandering to either BMW (who sponsored the show) or to the unwashed masses (who visited in numbers that would inspire envy in even the most popular painters). The show was conceived by Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, and the extensive catalog was edited by a curator at the museum named Matthew Drutt. At the time, the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim was closed for renovation, so the venerable art institution was sorely lacking in art objects without internal-combustion engines. In response to this odd state of affairs, an assistant curator named Jens Hoffmann organized an exhibit of contemporary art in his office called The Show Must Go On. Hoffmann was promptly pushed out the door by Guggenheim management (“although they laughed about it, it was, ‘you’ve crossed the line and we’re really sorry, but you can’t do that,’” Hoffmann later recalled in an interview with Frieze magazine). Read more at San Antonio Current »
Publication: San Antonio Current June 16 (2010)
In mid-April, Nameless Sound reached beyond Houston’s city limits to present saxophonists John Butcher and Joe McPhee in what has be one of the most inconvenient venues ever used: an art complex called The Hill, which sits in the middle of the West Texas desert, more than 60 miles from El Paso. Painstakingly built over the last three decades by enigmatic artist Jim Magee (and with two more decades till its completion), The Hill consists of four buildings constructed with cut stone from the area, joined together by a cruciform walkway made of the same stone.... Butcher and McPhee had never shared a stage before their performance at The Hill, which ended up being a tentative collaboration, alternating solo performances throughout most of the show. The first part of the event saw the two musicians divided into the two buildings on the north and south. The doors facing into the center of the complex, which extent 17 feet from floor to ceiling, were left open. Thus, each audience member sat only a few feet away from either Butcher or McPhee, but could also faintly hear the other musician playing about 200 feet away. [Read the full article in Signal to Noise #58]
Publication: Signal to Noise #58 (2010)
David Shelton opened his eponymous Stone Oak gallery a year ago, but has yet to mount a solo show (although next month he’ll break this streak with Alejandro Diaz’s Just in Queso). He seems to delight in bringing together unusual groupings of artists, and Good and Well, currently on view, is a prime example. Mimi Kato’s digital compositions, steeped in Japanese culture, play alongside kitschy sculptural assemblages by Leslee Fraser and abstract paintings by Aaron Hans Forland. But somehow, the installation feels natural as the three very distinct formal and conceptual approaches play off of, and enhance, one another. Read more at San Antonio Current »
Publication: San Antonio Current June 2 (2010)
May’s Cafe is the only business in Cornudas, TX, a city with a population under ten. When you pull up, there’s a sign that proudly announces that their Cornudas Burger is the best in town. It’s served on Texas toast and features a big slab of roasted green chile. Inside, a biker gang fills every table in the restaurant. After a while, they start to wander out the door and the out-of-towners stroll in, asking about a concert set to take place at 3 pm in the surrounding desert. Organized by Nameless Sound, a Houston non-profit dedicated to promoting improvised music, the concert boasts two luminaries of the free improv world: New York-based horn player Joe McPhee and British saxophone virtuoso John Butcher. To the right set of ears, the pairing is quite enticing. Read more at Glasstire »
Publication: Glasstire April 30 (2010)
Barbara Ras has been recognized as an American poet of the first rank: her first volume of poetry won the Walt Whitman Award given by the Academy of American Poets, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, and her work has been published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Orion, and TriQuarterly. She moved to San Antonio in 2002 to revive Trinity University Press, which had been defunct for 13 years. Her third book of poems, The Last Skin, was published in March by Penguin. Read more at San Antonio Current »
Publication: San Antonio Current April 28 (2010)
When Artpace San Antonio unveils its International Artist-in-Residence (IAIR) exhibits every four months, there are always attempts to conceptually and formally connect the three individual projects on view. Viewers, reviewers and even the curator try to figure out how the projects fit together, how they act on and lean against one another. Often this exercise falls flat, as the three artists — selected by the same curator and working in adjoining spaces — take their projects in entirely different directions. The IAIR work currently on view, however, demonstrates how well the confluence of the projects can sometimes shed light on each individual artist?s approach to a singular concern. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #65 (2010)
Emily Morrison recently left Artpace San Antonio after serving as Assistant Curator for nearly three years. After traveling across the United States for several months, and briefly working for an organic farm in Pennsylvania, she landed in New Orleans where she is in the process of developing a new art space. Trouser House aims to combine the kind of DIY gallery space common in San Antonio with small-scale organic farming. Although the gallery is in its infancy, and the full curatorial program will not begin until later this year, we contacted Morrison to talk about her unique gallery/garden fusion. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #65 (2010)
In the fall of 2008, Art Lies devoted an issue to reevaluating the role of the curator, urging a freer reading of curatorial practice. Issue No. 59, entitled “Death of the Curator,” included a review of The Old, Weird America penned by Hills Snyder. Snyder, also an artist, gallery director and curator, was enthusiastic about the show despite admitting that his deep commitment to its subject — an exploration of American identity through the lens of folk music traditions — threatened to raise his expectations higher than any exhibit could reach. Now it’s 2009. The silver foot has been superseded by a golden tongue, and yet the same ideologies — narratives that form our national identity — continue to haunt us, while being adapted, refined and abused. Amidst these wrinkles in American mythologizing, Snyder curated what he calls a “state of the union tableau” at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center. The work on view, by a group of four San Antonio-based artists, is framed by a conceptual Bermuda Triangle of Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard and Kirk Douglas channeling Edward Abbey. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #63 (2009)
At first glance, Rudolf de Crignis’ paintings at Lawrence Markey look like monochrome fields, shades of pure blue and gray applied with minimalist austerity. But of course minimalists by and large hate the term (Philip Glass once exclaimed in an interview “I think that word should be stamped out!”), and these paintings go a long way toward demonstrating the source of that distaste. This isn’t the minimalism of Ad Reinhardt or Yves Klein (although one painting comes strikingly close to his signature blue). Dozens of layers of color, pain-stakingly applied by brush in a crosshatched pattern, vibrate intensely across a shifting field. Read more at Glasstire »
Publication: Glasstire (2009)
Totemism, the study of totemic forms, dates back to the nineteenth century. At that time, the field was dominated by anthropologists seeking a clear delineation between so-called primitive and civilized man. It was not until after Sigmund Freud published Totem and Taboo, which used spurious theories of totemism to support his own sexual theories, that totemism as a singular, primitive practice was rejected by anthropologists. By this time, the Surrealists had already latched onto the idea of primitive art as a unique gateway into the id, and before long, the symbolic prowess of the mythical primitive man became an obsession of the avant-garde. What began as a demonstration of modern man’s moral and spiritual superiority became an idealization of the primitive, which continues to this day. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #62 (2009)
When I was working on my first art review back in 2006, I saw a version of Edgar Arceneaux’s video “Old Man Hill” at the Artpace potluck that launched his residency there. The residency project (which later wound up in the Whitney Biennial) wasn’t as impressive as this simple homage to a man he never met: his father’s father. Arceneaux spelled out the only thing he ever knew about this man — that he was called “Old Man Hill” — in silver balloons, which hovered over the war-torn hills of Sarajevo. One by one the balloons released and twisted toward the sky. The cameras followed the balloons wistfully, clinging to these insubstantial forms seeking oblivion. Occasionally the cameras cut to people going about their lives in the city below, people looking away from these hills with their burned out buildings and piles of rubble. Read more at Emvergeoning »
Publication: Emvergeoning (2009)
Six Years Later presents two separate shows by Matt Hanner and Stephen Lapthisophon. The artists had previously collaborated on a one-night-only installation at Unit B Gallery when it was still in Chicago. This time around, their work is in separate rooms, but the artists still play off of each other conceptually by using their contrasting approaches to art making to explore symbolic communication. Hanner created three sculptures that reference a caret mark (^), a symbol he deems a representation of “positive thoughts and wishes for happiness.” The severe economy of the sculptures’ central form is offset by a loosely elegant compositional sensibility. In the other room, Lapthisophon has strewn potatoes, salt, bricks, lumber and leaves about the gallery in a playfully poetic installation, which includes a video of potatoes doing what potatoes do (sitting around while nothing of particular interest happens to them). Read more at Glasstire »
Publication: Glasstire (2009)
Edward Winkleman posted a short essay on Saturday, which, in short, claims that the future of the art world is in fact the present of the art world. Citing Barack Obama, Winkleman ties the conventional wisdom about the impact of the internet on contemporary society to the current diaspora of the art world. While the underlying premise is not particularly new or insightful, it was a point that needed to be made: art world observers still looking for “the next big thing” need to take a deep breath and accept that fragmentation is here to stay; and this is, in fact, “the next big thing.” Read more at Emvergeoning »
Publication: Emvergeoning (2009)
In the age of Banksy and Swoon, a young, ambitious street artist has many paths to the art museum. The question is not so much whether an artist coming from a graffiti background can gain acceptance in the institution, but how such an artist navigates the range of contexts in which viewers may encounter their work. Sign Language, a dual-location exhibition curated by Kimberly Aubuchon at Aubuchon’s Unit B Gallery and the University of Texas at San Antonio, offers some insight into the ways artists deal with the shifting terrain of street and gallery contexts. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #60 (2008)
Oliver Lutz’ installation at Artpace San Antonio rests on what at first blush seems a simple gimmick: realistic paintings of a NASCAR event coated with a layer of paint so that they appear completely black to the viewer. The paintings are revealed through infrared reflectography, appearing in a separate room on closed-circuit video monitors. As an added bonus, you get to snicker at fellow gallerygoers sincerely contemplating the blacked-out paintings in the adjacent room. Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #59 (2008)
Every once in a while a work pops up out of the depths of the art world and sweeps through mass-media channels, shocking and mystifying a general public unaware of the arcane value system possessed by artists. In 1971, Chris Burden had an assistant shoot him in the arm in a gallery space. In 1989 Andres Serrano provoked a wave of controversy with his photograph “Piss Christ.” And, this year, Yale undergrad Aliza Shvarts incited condemnation for a performance in which she repeatedly impregnated herself and took abortifacients to end the pregnancies each month over a period of nine months. Read more at San Antonio Current »
Publication: San Antonio Current July 2 (2008)
In 1948, John Cage staged a play at Black Mountain College. The production, The Ruse of Medusa, was an early bit of surrealism written by Erik Satie in 1913. Buckminster Fuller was enlisted to play the lead, Willem and Elaine de Kooning designed the sets and Merce Cunningham served as choreographer (and also played the part of a monkey, with a tail designed by Richard Lippold). This one-act play was part of a larger festival of Satie’s work that Cage organized while teaching at Black Mountain. During the festival he also gave a lecture, later published under the title “Defense of Satie,” in which he criticized the compositional approach of Beethoven and his followers: Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #58 (2008)
“I went out to buy the human blood in the morning, and then I began the walk. It probably lasted about 45 minutes: that walk on pavement that did not burn.” Thus Regina José Galindo begins to describe her 2003 protest in the streets of Guatemala City to an interviewer for Bomb magazine. She continues: “I suppose my mind fell completely silent during that time. I was focused on the image of dipping my feet and leaving my footprints at every step along the way. But when I got to the Palacio Nacional and saw the line of police officers guarding it, I ignited. I walked more firmly, I reached the main doors, I saw the eyes looking back at me, and I left two final footprints side by side. I left the basin holding the blood there, too. Nobody followed me, nobody said anything.” Read more at San Antonio Current »
Publication: San Antonio Current April 16 (2008)
In 1975, Laurie Anderson released the song “Walking & Falling,” explaining that when we walk, we are actually simultaneously falling: “With each step, you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling. Over and over, you’re falling. And then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.” What Anderson leaves implicit, of course, is that sometimes you don’t — or can’t — always catch yourself. This system of movement — of negotiating the world — allows us to support ourselves but also threatens to pull us down, restricting our freedom of movement. With a similar sentiment, the curators of Standing on one foot, Patrick Charpenel and Cynthia Gutiérrez, set about organizing the most ambitious (and successful) exhibition to date at tps (formerly the Triangle Project Space). Read more at Art Lies »
Publication: Art Lies #57 (2008)
Alan Licht digs deep. In underground music circles he is known not only for his often challenging solo recordings, including Rabbi Sky, The Evan Dando of Noise?, and Plays Well, but also his collaborations with avant-blues guitarist Loren Connors, free jazz drummer Rashied Ali, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. Although Licht’s solo recordings have mostly dealt with minimalist themes, he is able to explore these themes from a fresh perspective on virtually every record, weaving in noise experiments, samples of popular disco songs, and blues riffs. Read more at NeoAztlan »
Publication: NeoAztlan #6 (2007)
I’ve long considered tattoo flash sheets to be fascinating art objects. With their repetition of similar or related images, they often riff on visual themes in a quite poetic way. These dragons by E. C. Kidd (dated 1912), for instance, chart a conceptually nebulous course between the serpent and the bird. For the artist, the various permutations of the dragon flesh out the significance of the image as a psychic construct. As each drawing (potentially) expands the concept, the mind is able to approach the problems posed by the image from new angles. Read more at Emvergeoning »
Publication: Emvergeoning (2007)
I went to see Edward Hirsch’s lecture at Trinity the other day, and found him to be a thought-provoking and entertaining speaker. The main thrust of his talk was encapsulated in a single image: the message in a bottle adrift at sea. Hirsch sees the poem as this message, launched into the turbulence of the world with the hope that one day, on a distant shore, someone might be able to give this message life through the reciprocal act: the act of reading. The thought that the reader is required to give life to the poem is a nice thought, and is a good complement to the book series he is editing for Trinity University Press (Writers On Writing). The readers in the audience (presumably a large number of those attending the lecture) got to feel that they do in fact have an essential role to play in the process of writing. I do think it’s important for readers to understand that they are directly involved in a creative process — the act of reading is not purely receptive, but involves interpretation, feeling, and growth. Read more at Emvergeoning »
Publication: Emvergeoning (2007)
Edgar Arceneaux’s new work at Artpace, Alchemy of Comedy... Stupid, attempts to string together narratives that span thousands of years, beginning with Moses and culminating with the centerpiece of the show, videos of the comedy routines of David Alan Grier. Medieval alchemy forms an expansive bridge between these two unlikely characters. The transformative role of the comedian, analogous to the role of the alchemist, seems to be the crux of the work. Read more at ...might be good »
Publication: ...might be good #67 (2006)
Those words will just drag you down. Down below the horizon where you built your city of chones. That’s not a city you want to show on the first date. That’s not a city you want to be buried in. But that’s where those words will take you. Down below to the city of pipes and wires. You’d like to think this is about your ego, but it’s about something else. Something between your skin and your pants. Between your beliefs and your politics. You could never clean out that space; but who cares? That space is invisible, right, even at the edge of the world. Even when the wind is blowing and the false names of the gods carry your hat away. But there’s a problem. The chones may be invisible, but they can still be discovered, because you wear your pants too tight. And once they see your pantyline, they can almost make out the edges of your politics. The death of your beliefs can’t be too far behind. Those words will just drag you down. Down below the belt where you built your city of sand, and where the names of the false gods push innocently up the shore.
Publication: Wall text for Alberto Mijangos exhibit at Blue Star Contemporary Art Space (2006)
Christa Mares has developed a visual language from human anatomy and cultural signifiers that is whimsically suggestive. In her new sculptural ceramic exhibit at Cactus Bra, Mares spins a web of imagery connecting social mores to a visceral understanding of the body and its relationship with pottery and the home. By forming several of her vessels to resemble internal organs, Mares invites the viewer to draw associations between the human body and ceramic utensils. Read more »
Publication: Unpublished