ART

Texas is one of the few places I can think of where artworld folks fret so over the definitions, status and acceptability of “high” and “low” culture. In Alaska or Kansas or Utah, the word culture means one thing: The officially-recognized pursuits – civic opera, metropolitan ballet and the community art center.

The problem has cropped up before, primarily in New York and California. But in each of those “cultural centers” it has resolved itself. In New York, despite the rah-rah and tinsel souvenirs marketed to tourists along 42nd Street, no one whose opinion “matters” seriously confuses – or considers confusing -that junk with Manhattan’s real cultural contributions. New York is the Culture Capital of the Western Hemisphere, and as such, the old “how-does-one-differentiate – mass – culture – from – the -real-thing” quandary simply isn’t toyed with.

In California, the problem settled itself quite differently. In the late Sixties, the world’s biggest parking lot discovered that the shiny fiberglass hoopla she was producing and nervously calling “trappings of tourism,” was elsewhere being touted as a legitimate expression of an important alternative culture. Thus, the birth and anointment of the Art Stars of California Pop.

Lately, the national tastemakers, always eager to audition new acts from the provinces, have focused the spotlight on Texas art. The attention has made the culture barons a bit nervous, since deep down they suspect what is most often the truth -that most of the native cultural artifacts around here are really junk. The amusing result has been that People Who Care About Texas’ National Image have emphasized the difference between “high” (read: Eastern) and “low” (read gen-u-wine Lone Star corncob) culture to avoid embarrassing confusion.

Which is fine to the extent that I don’t think any of us want Astrodome ashtrays and deer-hoof lamps with birch bark shades to be known as “our culture.” But somewhere in the middle of the high culture-low culture confusion -perhaps, as a result of it -there is some highly interesting, quality indigenous art being produced.

Now I can’t make a serious case that Texas artists possess extraordinarily sensitive olfactory glands, but two smells that any native son worth his spurs can recognize at a whiff are the odors of livestock and money. Because the former is unescapable and the latter so delectable, Texans have drawn upon both to devise a philosophy about making art on the plains that is rapidly gaining national recognition as uniquely Texan. It is based on two main tenets: 1) You cannot, indeed, make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and 2) if the public is in the market for purses, and you own a pig farm, you’d better convince it in a hurry that the hottest thing going is hog’s-head handbags.

The look has been described by art critic Jan Butterfield as “gutsy, tough, ingenuous, naive, funky, unsophisticated, rough, grotesque, nostalgic, unconcerned with finish, [and] involved in Texas history.” It is also fleshy, erotic, earthy, subliminal, and distinctly Texan in its no-holds-barred directness, its resistance to imported aesthetic guidelines and, in some cases, its sense of the contradiction between Texas’ fertile mythology and legend and her modern reality.

Two of the key artists in this “movement” are currently headquartered in Denton, where, of all places, a growing colony of artists, inspired by these two influential mentors, seems to be taking root. North Texas State University Professor Ken Havis’s art activities, in line with current macrocosm artworld thinking, are often more conceptual than concrete. His is an “art-as-life” universe, where he “creates” when he decorates his home, dons clothing, shops or talks about life.

It may seem odd for this sort of non-object oriented art to generate followers, but Havis’ has. Although he himself has recently begun to experiment with larger formats, most of the objects fashioned by Havis and his retinue are small, fetishistic pieces which combine a variety of “non-art” materials such as skin, fur, feathers, beads, buttons, ribbon and tactile fabrics. The stuff is abstract in nature, suggestive of body parts or states of mind. The ingredients come from indigenous area sources -Goodwill stores, trades-day fairs and the estate sales of longtime Texas residents.

The spell Havis has cast over the art department at North Texas can be detected most vividly at local exhibition openings -those popular art-world spectator sports where artists gather to snicker smugly at the establishment, and patrons and collectors congregate to gawk down their noses at the bohemians. Havis leads a caravan, spiritually, if not physically, down from Denton to such Dallas Museum of Fine Arts affairs, and you are always able to identify the NTSU crowd by the way its dress resembles the artwork it produces: denim jackets covered with embroidery, buttons, patches and studs; elaborate pre-war dresses encrusted with glass beads and baubles; a Fort Knoxian concentration of jewelry, with costume plastic mingled freely with $100 chunks of turquoise. It is a combination of funky – chic – San Francisco – North -Beach and Salvation Army-assembly-line-run-amuck. Through fashion, Havis meshes his attitude about the unity of art and life and an unspoken acknowledgement of the native Texan’s basic attachment to a tacky, faded, but not-too-distant past which you might describe as “seed catalog glamour.”

The work from Denton has increasingly earned recognition. Admiring it takes conditioning, and when Havis’ subconscious/surreal work began to catch on, I can’t help thinking it was helped along by the work of a group of artists a few years back in Commerce.

I am speaking of the infamous East Texas State University “Lizard Cult.” In the fall of 1972, I quite by chance was privileged to share in this extraordinary moment in native Texas art. The previous summer I had unsuspectingly wandered into the NorthPark Mall student art show. I recall being impressed by the quality of the drawing and craftsmanship of the entries from ETSU. I was also struck by the consistency of imagery: All the two-dimensional entries, it seemed, dealt with small, fantastical, surrealistic creatures with reptilian appendages. There were lizards with human countenances, tiny men and women with claws, and fabulous monsters grinning ear to ear at the viewer. At that moment, I impetuously dubbed the progenitors of this fascinating art the “Lizard Cult.” The name stuck.

The exploits of the Lizard Cult put ETSU on the map artistically, at least in Texas. Folks could recognize student work around the state as ETSU in origin. The prime force behind all of this was Lee Baxter Davis, a soft-spoken, low-key fellow, who had corralled a small band of talented followers into working with and developing his repertoire of images and graphic style.



I later asked Davis about this unusual convocation. He explained that a group of freshmen entered that school in 1969-70 who, for no obvious reasons, wanted to work with a figurative, narrative image. “When I came to East Texas State, here and all over the country, you were not seeing a lot of cognitive images, images that had certain narrative overtones, because it was kind of an ’out’ thing… I really cannot say with authority that people came to East Texas because they had heard that you could work this way, but I can say that once they got here, the ones that wanted to work like that moved into the graphics area. Relief people were discovering that one could do this kind of art work.”



As members of the graphics classes realized the unique nature of their group -which began to grow because an abnormally high ratio of the incoming students were both talented draftsmen and interested in this sort of fantasy/surrealism – they naturally began to associate together. They developed a camaraderie unusual in a field as crowded and competitive as art. The communication and rapport culminated in the fall of ’72, when the Lizard Cult formed a comic book class and produced drawings of their similar-in-execution, re-lated-in-imagery fantasies, which the chairman, Charles McGough, arranged to be published as “TOB magazine.”

Today, the Lizard Cult is basically a bygone phenomenon. Vestiges of it remain in the persons of Davis, Gary Panter, David Wallin, and a few others who still live and work in Commerce. But the glory days have passed, leaving only a few glowing embers which I think have been instrumental in igniting the current fires of acceptance for the NTSU look.

If Havis since 1967 has gained followers and friends as his style has matured, you have to recognize also the tremendous boost the “movement” received at North Texas when Robert Wade joined the faculty in 1973. (It can also be argued that were it not for the heightened sensitivity to this kind of work caused by Havis, the executive committee would not have looked as favorably on Wade’s job candidacy.)

A hybrid high priest/pawnshop keeper, Wade is a builder of altars at which homegrown-historian/junk-fe-tishist/Texana-collector types gather to worship. Artistically, he attempts to dissect the Lone Star State’s complicated mythology and reality.

In his gigantic environmental constructions, he mirrors the self-image most Texans have. He is aware that Texans have a dual self-concept: They see themselves in dime novels and on the silver screen -hard living, mean and tough, accepting the hand that life deals them and playing for high stakes, valuing a man’s word and a job well done, and through it all, remaining deadly serious. But Wade also knows that Texans are inclined to adopt such postures as much to fulfill other-culture-generated expectations, as to answer their own inner call of the wild. Dave Hickey, in a piece of consummate wit and insight on Texas, declared that “… the myth of Texas is … generated in New York, and while some New Yorkers participate in it, no Texans do without considerable irony.”

Growing up where the life of the West as portrayed on that ubiquitous mirror of American society, the movie screen, differs so profoundly from life in one’s own backyard creates unique options for the Texan. He is free to draw upon aspects of both versions for his psychic existence, and this intertwining of impressions is responsible for the problems of culture definition.

Wade, of course, is not the first to grasp the dichotomy. Many a Stetson-crowned businessman, with a grin and a flourish, treats his Yankee banker to a feast at the local sawdust-carpeted barbecue pit. The Pearl flows, the honoree gapes, and as the host ushers his stunned guest back to the hotel, he chuckles, realizing it has been a great evening in the exaggerated tradition of. Texas hospitality. But the host senses the self-parody as well; he knows he will be eating lunch at the same outlandish cafe the next day. It’s not all just a show for the out-of-towner.

The contradiction, the irony, the inherent self-parody of the Texas ethos -the essence of the high culture-low culture confusion -is the center of Wade’s work, and it is rapidly building him national recognition, a fact which many awaiting Texas’ cultural birth see as a good omen.

The work of Havis and his coterie highlights the dimunitive, the subtle, and the subliminal. Wade and his students, in contrast, tend to stress a larger, more literal analysis of the fabric of Texas, by including much actual endemic paraphernalia. Both artists, however, draw upon sensibilities that emphasize a homegrown earthiness, a subtle eroticism tinged with a behind-the-barn authenticity, and a humorous sarcasm which not only accepts, but elevates the basest forms of indigenous culture to dizzying heights.



The Denton look in art is closely akin to the Austin sound in music. Both alter a basically pure, establishment genre with a contemporary kick-in-the-rear defiance of “acceptable” style. Country and western meets rock; Twentieth Century abstraction fuses with an embrace of kitsch-and-country detritus that, in its enthusiastic incorporation of the fleamarket find, gives classic Assemblage the look of a well-mannered city slicker.



Wade and Havis and their disciplescombine the best of both worlds, andthey laugh at the discomfort felt bythose legions of white-gloved, well-intentioned, Daughters of the Confederacy-sanctioned guardians of culture who fuss over what this state iscoming to. “If the shoe fits, wear it”the saying advises, and the Dentonbunch are quite comfortable, thankyou, in their artboots whose hand-tooled, award-winning patent leatheruppers contrast piquantly withwhat’s on the soles.