Distinguished Visiting Artist James Surls Catalog Preview

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

555 Elm Avenue Norman, Oklahoma 73019-3003

James Surls: A Universe Apart

www.ou.edu/fjjma

90000>

9 780692 521236

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art • University of Oklahoma

ISBN 978-0-692-52123-6

A Universe Apart

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White Raw Wall Flower, 2014 (detail, see page 11)

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A Universe Apart

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A Universe Apart The Jerome M. Westheimer, Sr. & Wanda Otey Westheimer Distinguished Visiting Artist Chair

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art Her Universe Apart, 2014 (detail, see page 74)

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University of Oklahoma

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Contents

xi Preface and Acknowledgments

vii

MARK ANDREW WHITE

1 Chapter One I and Eye: The Visual Language of James Surls R O B E R T BA I L E Y

33 Chapter Two An Interview with James Surls MARK ANDREW WHITE

79 Publication Notes 80 About the Venue 81 Contributors

Walking Through the Thorn Vine, 2014 Bronze and stainless steel 135 x 133 x 64 in.

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Preface and Acknowledgments Mark Andrew White

Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director and Eugene B. Adkins Curator

N BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF VISITORS OF THE FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART

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and the University of Oklahoma Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, I would like to express our utmost appreciation to Mrs. Wanda Otey Westheimer and her family for their continued support of the Jerome M. Westheimer, Sr. and Wanda Otey Westheimer Distinguished Visiting Artist Chair program. This program provides the opportunity for the museum to exhibit the work of an artist of significant merit and for the students of the OU School of Art and Art History to gain professional insights. This year, we are extremely pleased to host James Surls as the fifth guest artist.

Surls has earned a national and international reputation for an intriguing body of

work that spans over four decades. Born in East Texas in 1943, he drew inspiration from the woods of his boyhood home, not only in his choice of materials, but also in his imaginative interpretation of nature. Following the award of his Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968, he began to develop evocative, hybrid forms in wood, and later in steel and bronze, inspired by flowers, the human body, and rock formations. These fantastical sculptures, when considered together with his whimsical, sometimes cryptic titles, have led numerous critics to associate Surls with Surrealism, yet he expresses some discomfort with the suggestion. Although he often eschews logic and reason in favor of paradox, like many of the Surrealists, Surls disclaims any direct influence and prefers to see his project as the creation of new and sometimes contradictory realities with overt metaphysical implications. Author Joseph Chilton Pearce, who Surls considers among his primary inspirations, argued in his seminal book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality that, “Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of the nature of those notions.” By altering those preconceptions, the individual may arrive at a new perception of reality and, as a result, “imagination can escape the mundane shell and create a new shell.”1 Surls’s drawings and sculptures, in their imaginative exploration of the

natural world, represent the artist’s escape through that crack. In recent years, his altered

perception has led him to perceive everything as fundamentally interconnected, and he has drawn formal associations between the seemingly disparate structures of neurons, molecules, and plants as evidence of this interrelation. Both this catalogue and the accompanying exhibition stand as testament to Surls’s reality.

Three and Ten Flowers, 2014 (detail, see page 32)

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We would like to thank James Surls for his tremendous generosity in the realization of

both the catalogue and exhibition, and his work with students and faculty of the School of Art and Art History will have a lasting impact. The invaluable assistance of Charmaine Locke, Eva Surls, Linda Clarke, and Tai Pomara was also essential to this project.

The unwavering support of President David L. Boren and First Lady Molly Shi Boren con-

tinues to be of enormous benefit to the both the museum and the university, and the museum greatly appreciates their support of this exhibition.

Finally, any successful exhibition or publication is the result of significant time and effort

on the part of a number of individuals. I would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Robert Bailey of the School of Art and Art History for his insightful essay. The museum staff has also been exceptional in their realization of this project, and I would like to thank, in particular, Michael Bendure, Director of Communication; Tracy Bidwell, Chief Registrar; Tanya Denton, Administrative Assistant; Jessica Farling, Director of Public Engagement; Brad Stevens, Chief Preparator and Exhibition Designer; and Becky Trumble, Director of Finance and Administration.

It is a pleasure to host James Surls as the fifth Jerome M. Westheimer, Sr. and Wanda

Otey Westheimer Distinguished Visiting Artist Chair, and we hope you enjoy both the exhibition and James Surls: A Universe Apart.

Endnote 1

Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality

(New York: Julian Press, 1971), xiv.

Me and Ascot Ash, 2010 (detail, see page 50)

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I and Eye: The Visual Language of James Surls Robert Bailey

HAT IS IT LIKE TO BE BETWEEN THE “I” THAT MAKES A WORK OF ART AND the

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“eye” that sees it? What is it like, in other words, to be an artwork? The philosopher Thomas Nagel posed a similar question with the title of his paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”1 He does not ask, “What is it to be a bat?” but “What is it like to be a bat?” The “like” in Nagel’s question requires us to think about representation, for as humans, we cannot know exactly what it is to be a bat nor what it is to be an artwork.

We can only know what it is like to be one or the other. Still, bats and artworks are very different sorts of things. The former is a creature possessed of some kind of consciousness, while the latter is not, and Nagel’s question is, properly speaking, about the consciousness of organisms—about the states of mind a bat holds as it encounters the world around it. However, we often ascribe organismic and conscious properties to entities that do not, properly speaking, possess them—to Hamlet, for instance—so why not, in the form of a thought experiment, do the same to works of art? Insofar as we are talking about representation and about being “like,” it ought to be entirely acceptable to ask this same question about artworks, for art is caught up with representation and association in a very deep way. Here, the recent work of James Surls provides precisely the sort of artworks with which we might address the question of what it is like to be an artwork.

Those who are familiar with Surls’s work know of its repeated use of natural forms

suggestive of plants, animals, and the cells that comprise them. His organismic sculptures are often bodily in their sheer physical presence, and his drawings often register as states of mind depicted. The critic Susie Kalil, for instance, recognizes this when she notes the extent to

Miter, Miter, 2010 (detail, see page 16)

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which, “Surls valorizes the body as our primary means of experiencing the world.”2 Moreover, she suggests that each of his recent drawings “serves to locate or ‘place’ us, however shakily or provisionally, within the visual equivalent of an internal state.”3 In such elemental materials as steel, bronze, wood, stone, graphite, and paper, semblances of life appear. And the creative processes by which things come alive and live in relation to their surroundings—that here could be called “worlding”—assumes a vital role within Surls’s work. We encounter his works as things in the world that can, if we attune ourselves in the right way, tell us more about what it is like to be in the world—what it is like for Surls, for us, and for the works themselves.

To think further about this quality of James Surls’s work, the German word Umwelt will

be of much help. “Umwelt” literally means “environment,” but the biologist Jacob von Uexküll developed it into a technical term for the subfield of biosemiotics, the science of signs in living systems, which he helped to pioneer in the early twentieth century.4 According to Uexküll, Umwelt is a name given to the world that an organism discloses to itself. Given that different organisms communicate with their surroundings in different ways, relying on different senses (think of sonar in bats) and different sorts of information derived from them, Umwelten (“environments”) may differ radically from one another, even to the point of mutual incomprehension. Extending the possession of Umwelten to artworks involves redoubling Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s claim that Uexküll’s work is predicated upon “the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature.”5 We will have to abandon every biocentric perspective and radically debiologize our image of worlds if we are to ask our initial question, which we can now restate: What is an artwork’s Umwelt?

Three Worlds Seven Rings, 2014 Stainless steel 131 x 137 x 117 in.

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But why would we even ask a question like this in the first place? My best answer is a

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series of further questions that I imagine overlapping like the forms in Surls’s sculpture Seven Rings Five Worlds (2006). With a flurry of curvilinear lines and conjoining spheres, the work gives outline to an infinitely complex interaction between different spaces, directions, vectors, and more. Here are the kinds of questions that I envision overlapping in these rings and worlds: What is it for things to be recognizably discrete entities, yet inextricably entangled in congress with other entities through practices of representation?

What is it for this entanglement to be driven in large part by communicative directives and obstacles to communication?

How, despite their separation, do things relate to one another without possessing a shared language with which to comprehend one another?

How are meanings recognized in a continuum populated by mutually incomprehensible and uncomprehending speakers and listeners?

How, even within a single language, do the diverse letters of an alphabet (or another grapheme, phoneme, or similarly basic semantic component) work together to form words that form statements that communicate meanings?

Finally, what is motivating the efforts of various entities to communicate with one another in the first place?

These are big questions about the world we inhabit, worlds we do not inhabit, and how they relate. They are impossible to answer with any firm surety, and I will not purport to have anything like the answers to them. Rather, I want to see what light Surls’s recent work might shed on the questions themselves, which are, I think, obviously of enough importance to require no further justification.

Seven Rings Steel 39½ x 46½ x 45 in.

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Molecular Flower Garden, 2014 (detail, see page 13)

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An Interview with James Surls

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ONDUCTED BY MARK ANDREW WHITE, JULY 6, 2015, AT THE HOME OF JAMES SURLS Mark White: I would like to begin with a discussion of place and its impact on your work. You were born and spent much of your life in East Texas and now live in western Colorado. You have discussed the impact of both Texas and Colorado in previous interviews, but I wonder if you see a relationship between your work and the region? In other words, does the American West or the American South inform your creative processes, or are you in any way apprehensive of any regional connotations that viewers may perceive in your work?

James Surls: Oh no, I think unless they are blind they will absolutely see a regional influence; they will absolutely see a sense of place. But let me add that I think that’s true regardless of where an artist lives. That place comes out, if they were born there, and grew up there, and lived there and sorta cut their teeth on the world there, that then becomes a part of you. You know, that is traceable and the South absolutely influenced me. I really, really grew up more in the South than I did in the West. The West came, I developed a sense of the West, but the South and East Texas . . . that was home. That is where I grew up, in the woods, so I conjured my childhood. I played in the woods, I played by meandering creeks, I played in the pastures, and I played with all things that kind of had to do with the rural route of the 1940s in Texas. It was a great place to grow up, you know?

Ironically, now if I go look through a parks and recreation book it will be riddled with advertisements for playground material, playground things; those things are made from the artificial world. I grew up in the real one; all my playthings were sticks, and water, and dirt. My tools were a hatchet from my dad’s toolbox or a hammer, or a brace and bit, or a knife. I just grew up learning how to use those hand-oriented tools, so now I do it as an adult. It makes total sense.

Three and Ten Flowers, 2014 Bronze and stainless steel 134 x 138 x 66 in.

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MW: So the issue of place in your work is not necessarily restricted to landscape—that is, this idea of the forest, the woods, streams, valleys, hills—but also a kind of culture that emerged from that landscape?

JS: Well, there is a culture that emerges from that landscape, there just inherently is, and I’ll give you an example of something: If you live in a contained space, you have to look through branches just to see what is ten feet away from you, or twenty feet away, or a clearing might be a hundred feet, so a house in a clearing in the woods still has shade. I think that you get more concentrated inward. When Charmaine [Locke] and I first lived in the woods together, in a one-room house, it was a very introverted way of thinking. Because you are contained. The past phrase of that era for me was trying to venture through “the crack in the cosmic egg.” I was contained physically but my mind was moving out

In West Texas, which I started going to as a young adult in high school and right after

high school, I hitchhiked across Texas and across the West, to San Diego, four or five times, so I would move back and forth across. Then as a little bit more mature young adult in college, and then certainly when I got out of Cranbrook [Academy of Art], I started going west. I started going to Taos. I started going to New Mexico. I actually made art in the Kit Carson National Forest. I would go there in the summer. I didn’t like to deal with the winters in the mountains but the summers in the mountains were heaven. I would, I did, make a three-foot-square concrete slab in the middle of what I would call the West, right out of Taos, on the side of a hill. I used that as the center of my studio so I could say, “Hey, I have the biggest studio in the world and this is the center of it.” So, I would make things that would stand on that center, and that’s how I would level them, make them stand upright. It’s how I would give them direction and see them in a landscape.

The landscape there in the West . . . you can see a lightning storm, a whole entire light-

ning storm, off on the horizon. Sometimes you can see two lighting storms, thunderstorms, something that’s twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles across because you can see a hundred miles in some cases, but you can always see distance. You can see behind me here a mountain that’s forty miles away. It’s like it’s right there in front of you. You know, having that kind of openness visually is a hundred and eighty degrees from not having that openness visually, from being in the woods. The difference in the East Texas big thicket and the West, it’s two different terrains, two different head sets, so to speak. I live very comfortably in both of them because I grew up

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Head and Hoof, 2006 Steel, poplar, and pine 111½ x 42 x 52 in.

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in one and I matured in the other, so both of them are a part of my being, part of my thinking.

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I am a Texan first, it is just a fact, because that is where I was born, that is where I grew up.

That’s where I learned how to be who I am. I go back to Texas all the time; we still own property there, we are buying more property there. But, man I love the West! I love all the West, you know, the whole idea of the vista, the expanse and the space. It’s intellectually cleansing.

MW: There is a great story about Edward Hopper visiting Santa Fe for the first time. He really disliked it because he was used to the very confined environment of the urban East. So he goes out West where you have those expanses, those vistas, and he can’t cope. So he paints a few paintings and gets on the train and goes back. There are some artists who can’t really cope with it and then there are those of you who really embrace it.

JS: I think that artists have an inherent size that they like to work with. Some artists like to work this big, some artists like to work this big, some like to work bigger than life. There are sensibilities that come to bear; some people, some artists, just can’t really stand the iridescence of color so they use a very different palette. There was a difference in the Houston palette, for instance, and the Dallas palette. The palette in Dallas was much more on the pastel side of life, whereas the palette in Houston was bright, serious orange, some really bright reds, and there were artists that embraced that. I think that had to do with the Mexicans; I think it had to do with the Spanish influence, the Hispanic influence, the fact that there was an [José Clemente] Orozco, a [Diego] Rivera. All those really great Mexican artists that most of the artists in Houston inherently knew. But the artists in Dallas were much more attuned with a more subdued, pastel kind of palette. Now maybe I’m wrong about that, but that was my perception.

When She Speaks with the Blue Angel, 2010 Graphite on 4-ply paper 20 x 16 in.

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Round Tipped Black Raw Wall Flower, 2013 (detail, see page 8)

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Publication Notes

Copyright Š 2015 The University of Oklahoma.

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

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The University of Oklahoma This catalogue has been published in con-

555 Elm Avenue

junction with the exhibition James Surls: The

Norman, Oklahoma 73019-3003

Jerome M. Westheimer, Sr. & Wanda Otey Wes-

Phone: 405.325.3272; fax: 405.325.7696

theimer Distinguished Visiting Artist Chair at

www.ou.edu/fjjma

the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, October 2, 2015 – January 3, 2016.

Library of Congress control number: 2015951062

No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form without the written

ISBN: 978-0-692-52123-6

consent of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. Front Cover: Catalogue authors: Mark Andrew White and

Prism, Bird, Boats, Molecules and Wooden

Robert Bailey

Shapes, 2012

Catalogue design: Eric H. Anderson

White oak, ponderosa pine, and steel

Editor: Jo Ann Reece

130 x 92 x 60 in.

Copy editor: Michael Bendure Back Cover: James Surls (left) and Tai Pomara Photography: Robert Millman

(right) in front of Walking Through the Thorn Vine, 2014 (see page vi)

Without, Within, 2005 Graphite on 4-ply paper 32 x 40 in.

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma, Norman; Gift of Mark Landrum, 2013

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About the Venue

Photograph by Eric H. Anderson

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Unversity of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr.

American painting and sculpture, traditional

Museum of Art is one of the finest university

and contemporary Native American art, art

art museums in the United States. Strengths

of the Southwest, ceramics, photography,

of the nearly 17,000-object permanent

contemporary art, Asian art, and graphics

collection (including the approximately

from the sixteenth century to the present.

3,300-object Eugene B. Adkins Collection and the more than 3,500-object James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection) are French Impressionism, twentieth-century

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Contributors

Mark Andrew White

Robert Bailey

Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director of the

Assistant Professor of Art History at the

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

University of Oklahoma

Mark Andrew White is the Wylodean and Bill

Robert Bailey is Assistant Professor of

Saxon Director and Eugene B. Adkins Curator

Art History at the University of Oklahoma

at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University

with affiliate faculty status in Film and

of Oklahoma. He specializes in American and

Media Studies. He received his Ph.D. in

Native American art of the twentieth century

the History of Art and Architecture from

with a particular focus on the Southwest.

the University of Pittsburgh, where he

His recent publications include A World

also studied philosophy. Bailey researches

Unconquered: The Art of Oscar Brousse

the history of world art since 1945 as well

Jacobson (2015), Macrocosm/Microcosm:

as the historiography of art history. Two

Abstract Expressionism in the American

of his books are forthcoming from Duke

Southwest (2014), Art Interrupted: Advancing

University Press in 2016: Art & Language

American Art and the Politics of Cultural

International: Conceptual Art Between Art

Diplomacy (2012), The James T. Bialac Native

Worlds, a monographic study of the Art &

American Art Collection: Selected Works

Language collective, and One and Five Ideas:

(2012), and The Eugene B. Adkins Collection:

On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, a

Selected Works (2011).

collection of Terry Smith’s writings that

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Bailey edited and introduced.

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Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

555 Elm Avenue Norman, Oklahoma 73019-3003

James Surls: A Universe Apart

www.ou.edu/fjjma

90000>

9 780692 521236

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art • University of Oklahoma

ISBN 978-0-692-52123-6

A Universe Apart