Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999 Page: 42
60 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Bill Davenport
ANGSTROM GALLERY
DALLAS
by Charles Dee MitchellThose of us who like art tend to like things.
Whatever our interest in art theory or art
history, the spiritual dimension of the work of
art or its potential as social critique, we tend to
like looking at and if possible handling things,
whether they are paintings on the wall or an
objects in a room. Bill Davenport makes art for
people who like things.
Part of me, and not just the lazy part, is
inclined to end this review with that first para-
graph. It states my position pretty well and has
about it the same elliptical concision of a
Davenport object. At least I'd like to think it
does. And there is a danger that one might
over-talk, if not over-think this work. A
Davenport object, whether it is a piece of scrap
lumber painted blue and studded with nails
(Hazard) or two painted cans topped with
shredded plastic snow (Snow Cans, 1999),
holds up well under extended contemplation.
My pleasure in the work, in both its physical
presence and where it leads me mentally, grows
with prolonged contact. When I talk aboutin-jokes for his art savvy audience. The work is
often very funny, but their jokiness, or what
there is of it, is not their crucial aspect.
Maruizio Cattelan is an artist for whose work
jokes are crucial. Cattelan, an Italian artist on
the international circuit, once took his stipend
for a museum exhibition, flew to Florida for
the week and sent the museum a rack of post-
cards featuring himself on the beach and
captioned "How to have a paid vacation." For
one exhibition he had his French dealer, known
for his womanizing, dress up like a giant pink
rabbit. At Site Santa Fe he created an oversized
Georgia O'Keeffe puppet that wandered the
galleries of the biennial exhibition. These are
elegantly brought off jokes that subvert the
situation they are placed in. In what I think is
Freud's phrase, they allow the release of
repressed psychic content.
Davenport does not concern himself with
undermining the gallery environment, in fact
his work flourishes in clean well-lighted spaces.
When he gets a laugh from a viewer, it tends tobe a chuckle of shared appreciation in
response to his apt handling of materials, not
an explosion of repressed anything. I suppose
this makes Davenport's work witty rather than
jokey, congenial rather than subversive.
In this exhibition there was an orange
ceramic sculpture, maybe a foot high, piled
into three or so sloppy cone-like shapes.
Pitifully inept by any established rules of
ceramic practice, it looked like a project the
elementary school art teacher fired in the kiln
to be supportive of even the most untalented
student. But Davenport has a true fondness
for the perfectly badly made thing, and with
the title Mandarin Peak (1997) he redeems
this abject thing by accurately evoking both
the color of those little canned oranges and
the backgrounds of Chinese ink paintings. On
the other hand, when I wanted Hazard, the
blue, nail-studded board, to somehow evoke
African nail fetishes, it adamantly refused to
be anything other than a blue, nail studded
board-and a fine example of its type, at that.
Davenport has also developed a fondness for
golf imagery, and two works in this exhibition
would have made bizarrely perfect Father's
Day gifts for a golfer dad. Silly as they are,
both works capture what suspense and excite-
ment there is in the game. In Bummer (1999),
a golf ball pauses eternally on the edge a
"hole" painted onto the top of a can. In Golf
Sculpture, the ball is atop an improbably tall
and slightly flexible tee, a position bringing
home the fact that this is a thing about to get
the hell knocked out of it.
Davenport is committed to the making
of things. The essence of this work lies in the
quality of attention, technical ability, and I
would say fondness that the artist brings to his
materials. He is one of those artists who passes
through life observing and thinking about the
world he sees, bringing to bear on it his
unique and admittedly peculiar sensibility,
and a heterogeneous combination of objects
that are most unmistakably art results. Othem, or God forbid attempt to explain them,
especially to some one not particularly recep-
tive, I find that I get tangled up in all kinds of
art talk I prefer to avoid.
What I perceive as a common mispercep-
tion about Davenport's work, and one that I
leap at the chance of correcting, is that his
objects are parodies of art objects, that they are
42 I ARTLIES SUMMER 1999Bill Davenport
Won't Fit In, 1998
Plex, wood found object, 6" x 14" x 3.5"
Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
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Lightman, Victoria H. Art Lies, Volume 23, Summer 1999, periodical, 1999; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228053/m1/44/?q=%22Bryant%2C+John%22: accessed May 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .