Darryl Lauster's Vessels of History

Robert Boyd


Darryl Lauster, The Inaccessibility of Various Things, 2014, cast paper, steel, period Victor Victrola, Tommy Dorsey music and electronic components, 47 x 31 x 19 inches

A plane circles an antique Victrola as a big band plays. One might remember at that moment that something like 50% of British air crews died in World War II. Dead airmen is one theme in Ought Not No One by Darryl Lauster, on view through December 20 at Devin Borden Gallery. He writes letters to pilots who died in Vietnam.


Darryl Lauster, The Newburgh Papers (letter to Sgt. Carter), 2013m ink on handmade paper, 22 x 15 each

Six are displayed, including this one to Sergeant Carter. "Thank you for giving your life in service to our country." Why is he doing this? The end of the letter, which is chatty and refers to his grandfather's own military service, explains: "A favorite poet of mine talks about writing letters to the dead. I guess I write you as a way of asking questions about myself. If only you could share the knowledge you have gained with me, I'd have more answers."

Writing these letters and displaying them publicly feels somewhat calculated. It seems that they should be private. The Darryl Lauster who wrote them comes of as a character invented by the real Darryl Lauster. Except he writes about crying as he writes them. There is a tension here between sincerity and artifice. The work won't let me decide how I feel about it.


Darryl Lauster, Self-Portrait as a Loadmaster, 2014, digital media on archival paper, 78 1/2 x 36 inches

Lauster poses in a flight suit that belonged to his grandfather, who served in World War II and Vietnam. On his website, Lauster writes, "This self-portrait is an attempt on my part to bear witness to his service, knowing that, in the same way I cannot quite fit into his uniform, I cannot quite live up to his legacy." What stuck in my head after seeing this image the first time was Lauster's resplendent mullet. I had seen a similarly leonine nape drape recently.


Eugene Porter from The Walking Dead

At the risk of spoilers, Eugene Porter (played by actor Jack McDermitt) is a character from The Walking Dead television series who pretends to be a scientist with a cure to the zombie plague in order to get protection from fellow survivors. He needs this protection because he is such a wimp that he is to afraid to fight the zombies himself. It's coincidental (I assume) that Lauster and Porter so resemble one another. In addition to their two magnificent Tennessee top hats, they are both faking it--putting on the costume of a person they know they can't live up to. The difference is that Lauster never pretends otherwise.


Darryl Lauster, Spar and Compliant Tower, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches each

I saw a work related to Spar and Compliant in a group show at Devin Borden in 2012. Lauster's sculptures of off-shore oil-producing platforms are simplified forms--they don't depict these structures in detail. He is recalling the classic ship in a bottle model with these two pieces. For model makers, the ship in a bottle is a kind of bravura stunt, a "how'd he do it?" But with these wide-necked custom-made bottles that Lauster uses, there is no such mystery.


Darryl Lauster, Compliant Tower, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

One can think of relatively recent artworks that are similar, like Mike Kelley's Kandors (Kandor is a city from Superman's home planet of Krypton that has been reduced and placed in a bottle by Braniac) or the delicate sculptures made of human bone under bell jars by Charles LeDray. But by placing his bottles in a horizontal position, Lauster is not recalling a bell jar (which suggests a scientific display) but the ship-in-a-bottle model, which is more sentimental and decorative.


Darryl Lauster, Compliant Tower, (detail), 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches


Darryl Lauster, Spar, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

When I see these, I wonder who they are for. Are they destined to decorate the offices of executives from Transocean or Nabors? After all, they are works of art but they are also merchandise for sale. But it's tricky--if you visit the offices of companies that do offshore work of any kind, you often will see elaborate scale models of the ships or platforms they operate. They are a kind of corporate marketing, something to show the clients. Are they art? Would a client be able to distinguish between one of those models and Lauster's versions? If Spar and one of these corporate lobby models were in the same room, is one art and the other not art?


Darryl Lauster, Spar (detail), 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

I don't pretend to have an easy answer for that. And it's something I think about all the time. (I have some weird obsessions, I know.) 


Darryl Lauster, In Case of Fire, 2013, neon, wood/iron, 16 x 23 x 15 inches

Lauster writes about this piece, too: "In Case of Fire is a reflection on our nation’s various legacies, and the ways in which changes often come about only through great trial and hardship.  More significantly, we are be reminded of how easily those changes can be eradicated if we do not remain vigilant." I like that Lauster writes in clear English, but it seems he is being a little vague on purpose. The legacy that's in danger here is the legacy of FDR--Social Security, vast government built and operated infrastructure, government work programs for the unemployed, etc. The neon is bright but fragile, and there is a giant hammer right next to it. He did this piece in 2013, several years after George W. Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security went down in flames. But this most recent election renews that danger. While the works discussed above were marked by sadness or even nostalgia, In Case of Fire marks a turn towards an angry political stance.


Darryl Lauster, Draft, 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

That stance is amplified in the next two works, which seem freakishly appropriate to our current political moment. Draft and Vessel are bitter works. Draft in particular seems particularly angry. Lauster writes, "This collaged text-based work, titled Draft, is a disjunctive narrative of four protagonists that is excerpted from a novel in progress.  It is meant to conjure individual struggles with bigotry, identity, isolation and psychological disorders.  The character’s voices are bitter, resolute and very familiar." 


Darryl Lauster, Draft (detail), 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

The displacement and genocide of native populations of America are mentioned. These are forceful voices.


Darryl Lauster, Draft (detail), 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

The characters are faced with the choice of violence and self-annihilation through inebriation. This was powerful when I read it last week, but now as the news juxtaposes the art world's orgy of consumerism in Miami on one hand and the riots in the streets over the no-billing of police officers who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the choice seems all the more stark and relevant.


Darryl Lauster, Vessel, 2014, Antebellum Proslavery text, paper, plaster, steel and reconfigurable wood base, 54 x 41 x 9 inches

Vessel deals with more historical horror and crime. It's another model, a boat made of papier-mâché. There are no sales, but it appears to be the hull of a sailing ship. There are also no decks. It's a crudely made hull on a metal stand.


Darryl Lauster, Vessel (detail), 2014, Antebellum Proslavery text, paper, plaster, steel and reconfigurable wood base, 54 x 41 x 9 inches

And the paper from which Vessel is constructed is from an Antebellum pro-slavery text. It's vile and sickening, and it tells you what kind of ship you are looking at, and the wretched cargo of human beings it carried. The work in this show reels you in--the Tommy Dorsey music, the jocose photo of Lauster in the tight flight suit with his outrageous hockey hair, the cute little oil platforms in bottles--and then submerges you in war, slavery and death. Maybe this tactic is what it takes to convince us, passengers on a Ship of Fools, to face uncomfortable truths.

Tchotchkes, Knickknacks and Scale Models at Devin Borden

by Robert Boyd

You don't see a lot of sculpture in galleries. Work tend to be "wall art"--paintings, photos, drawings, collages, reliefs, etc. The reason is obvious--sculpture is hard to own and display. For a collector, sculpture displaces furniture. It renders some amount of floor space unusable. It's just not as convenient to collect as wall art. So that means sculpture is not something you see very often in art galleries. And that's too bad.

But Devin Borden got around the inconvenience factor with his show Table Top by showing mostly very small sculptures--the kind that can fit on a bookshelf or in a china cabinet. The funny thing is that when I think of pieces like that, I think of ceramic tchotchkes. Things your grandmother might have cluttering up her parlor. Or to be more modern about it, the toys and action figures that hipsters and comics nerds collect--you can buy stuff like that at Domy or Bedrock City.

And in a way, the work in this group show is a variation of that. Matt Messinger's pieces seem to be a direct riff on that theme of grandmother-friendly ceramic tchotchke.



Matt Messinger small sculpture installation



Matt Messinger, Untitled (Cat), 2011, found ceramic, buttons, resin

When I see stacks of buttons like that, I think of Tara Donovan, but her use of them is clearly different. She uses identical buttons to create a texture. Her buttons tend to have neutral, unassuming colors. Messinger is going for color with his stacks.



Matt Messinger, Untitled (Owl and Teacup), 2012, found ceramic, buttons, resin

So unlike Donovan, I think Messinger is all about these little ceramic things and the buttons for what they signify--I kind of domesticity that reminds one of  of a particular place and time. You are a child and you visit your aunt or grandmother and you see these things, and you nose around, looking in drawers (because you're bored) and you find old buttons. The three twisting stacks of buttons in untitled (Owl and Teacup) reminded me of DNA. And this kind of stuff is in our DNA. It's a part of our collective culture.



more Matt Messinger in the back room

Awww, cute!



Sharon Engelstein, Cat Mount, 2008, plaster and cyanoacrylate adhesive 3-D print

Also verging on cute is Cat Mount by Sharon Engelstein. But it's also kind of mysterious. Because the image is small, when I saw it I saw it as a scale model for something bigger. With the jagged rock-like form and the steps on the right, you could see it as the top of a rock outcropping, or the very summit of a mountain. And on top of this mountain is a strange piece of cartoon-cat-shaped equipment. It has two pipes, implying liquid or gas moving through it. It could almost be a piece of gas pipeline equipment. Except that it's cat-shaped. I imagine that someone has taken a long stairway up the side of a mountain--not a high mountain (no snow), but still it took some effort to get to the top. And then you behold this mysterious piece of equipment. To me, that would be like discovering that magic is real. It's a hike up a mountain worth taking. Needless to say, I love this little sculpture.



Sharon Engelstein, Bumbry, 2002, plaster and cyanoacrylate adhesive 3-D print

This earlier piece, Bumbry, feels like a model for one of her large forced-air pieces, but I have never seen this particular arrangement of bulbous partial spheres in any of those larger pieces. But like the inflatable pieces, it is playful and biomorphic.


Nicholas Kersulis, Objects for a Table (Rocks: Taos: Rumsfeld), 2010, black gesso on found rocks/studio table with Cornforth White paint

These rocks by Nicholas Kersulis are not cute at all. Kersulis was a Core fellow a few years ago. I've seen similar pieces to this where he used white gesso. I don't know how he makes the gesso so thick, except that maybe he paints on layer after layer. Gesso is naturally white because it's made out of gypsum and chalk, but it can have pigment mixed in, which is presumably the case here.



Nicholas Kersulis, Objects for a Table (Rocks: Taos: Rumsfeld) detail, 2010, black gesso on found rocks/studio table with Cornforth White paint

The way the gesso part of each rock is kind of swirly makes it look a bit like obsidian (although less glassy than obsidian). Its utter blackness reminds one of coal or asphalt. The fact that the rocks are bisected in a way--the bottom half natural rock, the top half black thick gesso, make me think of rock strata. And the display on the table looks like a collection. With a glass top to turn it into a vitrine, it could be a display in a natural history museum. But one can't get around the fact that the gesso portion of each "rock" looks weird and unnatural. And ironically, that's what is so appealing about them.



Kaneem Smith, Untitled (White), 2010, cloth, cotton balls, wax; and Wring Out, 2012, burlap, cotton, wax

Kaneem Smith's work goes a bit off message--Untitled (White) is a wall hanging instead of a table-top sculpture. But the scale is the thing, really. Even though Smith is working on table-top scale, she has produced work that is the opposite of cute (like Kersulis). These pieces are not going into auntie's china cabinet. The work is grungy. The use of burlap and cotton perhaps are meant to recall the importance of cotton in Houston (and the South generally), and the grungy quality of the work, as well as the "wrung out" aspect of Wring Out may be a reference to the back-breaking labor, performed first by black slaves and later by black sharecroppers in appalling conditions.

 
Darryl Lauster, Diarama, 2011, found toys, electric motor, wooden table

Darryl Lauster takes U.S. history and the American scene as the subject of his often quite amusing artwork. Diarama [sic] takes on the revolutionary war. The motor keeps the seesaw element rocking back and forth--sometimes the British are up, sometimes the revolutionary soldier is up.



Darryl Lauster, The New World, 2012, acrylic, electric aquarium pump, steel, brass, water, cement and silicone

The New World seems especially appropriate for Houston. In fact, I'm always puzzled by the relative lack of art that relates to oil and gas production. It was in 1863 that Charles Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life" instructed artists to look around and depict the modern world in which they lived in their art. And yet, oil production remains under-explored as an artistic subject. This witty piece, like The New World, has a kinetic element--bubbles pumped from the bottom that make the octopus clinging to the side of the platform move. Folks in the oil industry will recognize that this is a fairly archaic form of drilling platform.

Thematically, there is little to link these artists. Lauster and Smith both touch on industries that are associated with Houston historically. (Kersulis rocks, if you see the black gesso as symbolic of oil-bearing rock, could also be read as relating to oil production.) Messinger explores cuteness and nostalgia, and cuteness is touched on by both Engelstein and Lauster. But mainly what we have here is a heterogeneous collection of small sculptures, each with its own virtues.