David McGee
DiverseWorks
- John Devine -
David McGee, El Sonador Elegante, 2007; installation view Diverseworks, Houston
DiverseWorks, Houston’s premier alternative visual and performing arts space, commissioned local artist David McGee to mount an installation in its main galleries to kick off the institution’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and McGee, one of Houston’s most thoughtful and thought-provoking artists, delivered. The title, El Sońador Elegante, translates (for those whose Spanish is as deficient as mine) as The Elegant Dreamer—McGee invokes Cervantes’ consummate dreamer Don Quixote as the presiding spirit of his meditation on DiverseWorks’ mission and history.
The main space at DiverseWorks is divided into a small anteroom that leads into a larger gallery. (It should be noted that DW’s front gallery was given over to To 25!, a trip down memory lane through the center’s archive of posters, memoranda, letters, brochures, slides, etc., curated by DW administrative coordinator Patricia Hernandez and artist/board member Sasha Dela.) The anteroom served as a prologue introducing the characters and themes of McGee’s picaresque. Dominating the space is a digital photograph of DiverseWorks founder Charles Gallagher, slightly larger than life and identified as Alonso Quijano, Quixote’s given name. (Odd symbols are superimposed on the portrait, but we’ll come back to them.)
Opposite Don Alonso and framing the doorway to the larger gallery are two large watercolors: Valencia Dulcinea del Toboso and Reinaldo Arenas. To the right of Dulcinea and guarding the doorway to the anteroom is Sancho, a watercolor diptych comprised of acrobats separately identified as “Kafka” and “Borges.” Across the room from Sancho is the largest watercolor in the show, El Despertar (The Awakening).
Dominating the large gallery is a facsimile of a windmill, its base rising to about ten feet with the ends of three vanes secured to ceiling girders to complete the illusion (McGee is quick to credit another smart, young Houston artist, Mick Johnson, for the windmill’s fabrication). A bank of video monitors at the back of the gallery, playing a rapidly changing sequence of seemingly unrelated images, faces an opening in the windmill—here, a bench invites viewers inside to sit and view the monitors and listen to collaged audio.
One long wall is bannered with Rosinante, painted directly on the wall. On the opposite wall, hermetic symbols march along its length including: a cross with two adjacent black bars and two adjacent blue bars with a red dot at the center; four graphically similar numbers, such as 9, 6, 8 and 3; a series of spherical letter Cs, their open ends facing in different directions; and a large circular field of black dots. Flanking the doorway are a watercolor entitled El Moor and a sculpture, The Seventh Seal—seven long, wooden poles loosely lashed together and tipped with black boxing gloves.
David McGee, Valencia Dulcinea del Toboso, 2007; watercolor on paper;
52 x 50 inches
Sancho (detail), 2007; watercolor on paper; 52 x 50 inches; images courtesy the artist and Texas Gallery, Houston
As in any picaresque, a linear narrative is not the point. Like the book from which McGee draws inspiration, this installation is episodic in nature, with elements playing off one another in a kind of call and response. The windmill motif appears and reappears. Take those hermetic symbols: they are culled from testing regimens designed to diagnose such visual anomalies as color blindness, dyslexia and spatial recognition. They face, across the gallery, the name that Quixote gave to the spavined nag, which in his eyes was a fiery charger.
The cross with the adjacent black and blue bars both refers to and completes the vanes of the windmill at the center of the gallery, directly in line with Alonso Quijano’s gaze. The windmill also appears in the video display (source materials for the video include YouTube; the films ’Round Midnight, Citizen Kane, The Seventh Seal, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pollock and Wings of Desire; and DiverseWorks’ Performance Archive—Karen Sanders received co-credit for the video) and echoes in the configurations of the acrobats depicted in Sancho. Some of the vision/cognition tests turn out to be the odd symbols covering the Gallagher-as-Quijano portrait as well.
McGee is keenly aware of art history and literature, and his intelligence ranges over the whole of it. Dulcinea, for example, is a rendition of the Venus of Willendorf, and El Despertar and Reinaldo Arenas depict details of classical sculptures. The invocation of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban writer who died in 1990, is puzzling. Perhaps the fact that Arenas and Cervantes both wrote while in prison—examples of creativity trumping hardship—is one possible explanation for his inclusion. Around the corner from Reinaldo Arenas, El Moor, proximate to Rosinante, depicts a head-on view of a skeletal horse through whose rib cage plunges a sword that morphs into a pen and/or paintbrush as it emerges (one suspects the ambiguity is intentional).
There are, of course, more direct references to the institutional history being celebrated. Since its inception, DiverseWorks has had seven directors, and the seven poles (staffs? lances?) in The Seventh Seal are surrogates for each of them. But what of the boxing gloves? Aside from the obvious association with sparring and fighting, they also reference a painting by Rachel Hecker entitled Censorship, featuring a cartoonish, gloved fist brandished in the face of a white-collar corporate man—a symbol that DiverseWorks recently adopted as something of an insignia (printed on all DW business cards and promotional materials). Slyly, McGee included the fist symbol as a sort of badge on the right breast of his Dulcinea.
David McGee has a long history with DiverseWorks. In 1995 he collaborated with Houston artists Tierney Malone and Dave Darraugh on Ruins, still one of the most impressive installations I have ever seen (could some Texas institution re-commission this work and give it a permanent home and proper documentation?). In 2003–04, McGee presented Tetélestai: Notebooks from the Black Sea, a transitional exhibition that allowed him to try some different chops and riffs that are still swinging in his work. It stands to reason that DiverseWorks would turn to McGee to jumpstart their 25th anniversary season. And, boy, does he ever!
John Devine is a freelance critic based in Houston and a frequent contributor to Art Lies, Art Papers and artUS.