Art editor commentary

Art Editor Commentary

By Terrell James

Edited by abdel Hernández San Juan

The authors I has selected for this issue of Gulf Coast are engaged in the transformative activity in art. Process drives discovery. Image is evoked rather than described. The viewer is offered a direct experience of subjectivity, finding an emphasis on the openness of interpretation and beyond, exploring alternative empathetic-relationships. In exploring subjectivity, memory, time, mapping, the body and text merge as research. Implied is the invitation to “complexion” by the Viewer. In Walter Hopp’s light drawings, apparent accident and incidental mark create an inevitable form. The delicate tracing that result literally are drawn with light on photographic paper as particular and unrepeatable as the immediate gesture that caused it, recording time and the body’s movement. We may name images: twig, cell, cloud, but these things are felt, intuited, not represented. The Light drawings are contained in a slender box Hoops constructed (see image checklist page for detail), from discarded television cue cards, found in an alley in Los Angeles, around 1955. Words once making full sentences are truncated, invoking interpretation, suggesting narrative, but again, hold back objective or know meaning. We are Thwarted in our effort to read the text, but still we try to invent the narrative.
Virgil Grotfeld’s works often involve accident, careful drawings, and preexisten text elements. In the Hearling Plants series, Grotfeldt manipulates coal dust on top of ledger sheets from another time. Plants are used in healing early pieces in the series toward specific botanical studies. Images are asolated on the page, first as the whole plant, then by its parts: seeds, roots, petals, fruit, . Later ones, sush as the one included here, become looser in form, less scientific in their reference. The drawings for the Twenty-First Century and those. Who cannot see are manipulations of coal dust on Braille text. The sighted ca see or read the image, but not the Braile text. The blind on “read” the prexisting messages in Braile but not the forms on top. Then the works are exhibited with glass on top or in reproduction, flattened by the mere fact on photographic reproduction. Grotfeld says “Now the blind cannot read it”. The second part of the title, Those who can not see, refers to all of us, not only the blind. Virgil’s says, Who know what is it?, What it means?. It’s more than an understanding.
Next we see details from Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fernando Calzadilla’s installation the Market from Here. The piece is an environmental recreation of the everyday life of Venezuela evoking imaginary people and activity in the market place. The Installation crosses genres of theatre and art dealing aesthetically with ethnography. Here visual art becomes process, a lab and a workshop. From room to room within the walls of the installation, objects are transformed as the spectator’s moves between a stage set and memory. Plastic envelops veils, traps, the objects assembled. Transparency exists in daylight, opacity at night, as artificial light reflects and shields objects behind plastic. As Light plays throughout the day, the scene changes. Within the Market, transparency and light become writing and erasing, and time is an active agent for change.
As a place to experience stories, memories, new identities, Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Calzadilla Market Place invites our engagement in the environment created, thus unfurling a process of the spectator’s reflection. This is not an imposed narrated definition and even interpretation about meaning. It is, rather, the effort to evoke something, “These are stories you can never complete, traces, evocative clues, invoking human situations. The artist as a contemporary ethnographer channels expression, communication and language, here invoking a philosophical dissolution between art and everyday life.
Tracy Hick’s works on the cover and within the art section transform books themselves. They are bound books, turned into sealed and cylindrical objects resembling candles, suggesting light. Hick’s installation work often examines what, as a culture, we tend to collect and preserve. In an recent conversation about the bound books, Hicks spoke of the connection between light and enlightenment. “Books are a way to Enlightenment. They represent the continuing process of going on of expanding your way of seeing. Extending the search. These books are the symbol of that sense of extending, in a very physical sense, rolling then into candles, turning then into light”. The works assembled here bring to the physical realm that which is usually intangible. Each is involved with a sort of immediacy, the immediacy of perception, questions of community, primal material: what it mean to be a person.

Pp145-146

Abdel Hernandez, independent writer and critic of Cuban origin. He is currently living in Houston. He is Research Associated in the Anthropology Department at Rice University and artistic director of transart foundation and has lectured at many universities and museums here in the United States and Internationally, Pp, 285
 Gulf Coast, The XX Century Anniversary Issue, Volume VIII, Houston Endowment for the Art, Texas Commition for the Art, The University of Houston Faculty of English, Houston, Texas, EUA, 2000, Transcribed Literally by Abdel Hernandez San Juan from the Gulf Coast Publication Journal of Literature and Fine Art, The University of Houston, Houston, Texas, EUA, 2000