The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 69, No. 29, Ed. 1 Friday, April 16, 1982 Page: 7 of 16
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Thresher/Fine Arts
Castaway scraps of tin are all Berlant needs for art
Tony Berlant: Recent Work
Contemporary Arts Museum
Perspectives Gallery
Through May 2
Tony Berlant will take you back
to the days of your childhood.
That is, if you like him. If you don't
like him, you'll think that he's just
being childish.
Berlant's work is physically
composed mostly of "found" tin-
scraps of tin that he finds from
cast-off signs, trays, frames, and
miscellaneous containers. He
hammers these pieces of tin onto
wood, and sometimes incorporates
other materials into his art—like
19th century oil paintings,
seashells, or wooden sewing
bobbins. Often the frames he picks
to put around his tin collages are
much more interesting than the
collages themselves.
The bizarre frames he uses are
also "found" items, and their
peculiar shapes influence what he
puts inside of them. One of these
frames is made of wooden sewing
bobbins, laquered and glued
together, and the tin picture inside
is a loose portrait of a woman
sewing. The work is called French
Seamstress. Other frames he uses
range from baroque to art deco to
handmade heavy wooden frames
to rococo. Whether the frames
enhance the picture inside,
complement it, or blatantly
contradict it, they are an important
part of Berlant's total concept.
Berlant's concern in his work is not
just with balance, form and style
(as is any artist's concern), but also
with the chance quality of art.
What he can make is a result less of
his own creativity than of what
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Canal Street Cat (1980), a collage of
materials he can find. Thus the
element of luck becomes highly
important in all his works, and
even the uglier of his frames and
scraps of tin are endowed with a
certain charm.
The latest work of Berlant's in
the show is a series of unsigned,
nineteenth century oil paintings
(all very romantic and rather
sombre), which he surrounds with
^ound' tin, nails, and plywood.
elaborate, layered tin frames, often
three or four times as big as the
painting themselves. These frames
seem to have very little to do with
the subjects of the paintings. One,
The Muse (1982), is a dark picture
of a sadly pensive girl, and the tin
frame is a brightly cheerful
distortion of the spectrum across
four layers of frame.
Another, The Unknown Painter
(1982), is a turn-of-the-century oil
of a girl with a pitcher. Here, the
bottom part of the frame seems to
continue the design of the painting,
but the top part of the frame un-
ravels and distorts the subject of
the oil.
Berlant's older work in the show
displays a greater sense of
continuity between picture and
frame, even to such an extent that
to make a distinction between
'frame' and 'picture' is useless. One
work, French Water (1979), is
scraps of tin surrounded by a
French rococo frame overlaid
with tin. The way Berlant has
physically tied the frame and the
picture together is repeated in his
colors and the movement of the
forms from inside to outside.
Somehow, the whole thing—
composed as it is of scraps of tin,
nails, and a cast-off frame—looks
like a Monet. Another piece
(Sunhonnet, 1980) combines a
blocky, slanted wooden frame and
a brightly colored geometric
painting to make a kachina face.
Kachinas, miraculous personifica-
tions of holy spirits for some
Southwest Indian tribes, bridge
the cultural gap between children's
easy belief in unseen powers and
adult's need to believe in the same,
but their inability to do so. These
kochinas, like all of Berlant's
work, suggest an order that
combines childish delight with a
more mature core for details.
In addition to these paintings,
the CAM show contains dozens of
Berlant's tin cubes, sitting on the
floor around the exhibit. These
cubes are collages of pictures and
colors, but whatever order unites
each collage must be clear only to
Berlant. They remind me of a set of
building blocks from Switzerland 1
once had. They had beautiful,
intricately miniature pictures, with
all the captions written in an
unknown language.
In addition to the cubes, the
show contains two sets of doors
(and doorways) in a mosaic
pattern — magnificent portals
leading to nowhere—and a series
of five miniature, one-room
houses. Like the doors that lead
nowhere, these houses have
nothing in them but thickly
painted seashells.
Berlant's art is peculiar both
strange and uniquely his own. His
work hangs on chance and luck
and a different view of the
underlying powers and orders that
hold things together. His work is
interesting and amusing, but
whether it means anything....
—Deborah Knaff
Opera
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HGO & A spectacular Showboat
Showboat
Houston Grand Opera
June 10-20
HGO's production of Showboat
premieres June 10 with 11
performances running through
June 20. The show will then go on
tour to Los Angeles, San
Francisco, San Diego, Seattle,
Denver, Chicago, Washington,
and Boston.
Showboat was written by
Jerome Kern and Oscar
Hammerstein II in 1927 and since
then many modifications have
been made. The HGO production
is an attempt to restore the orginal
version as closely as possible
according to HGO General
Director David Gockley and
Music Director John DeMain.
The production will be directed
by Michael Kahn and will star
Donald O'Connor as Cap'n Andy.
Assistant Director and choreo-
grapher will be Dorothy Frank
Danner, and Herbert Senn and
Helen Pond will design the sets.
The production is sponsored by
Citibank/Citicorp which has
donated a $150,000 grant for the
project, one of the largest special
project grants ever given to a
Houston performing arts group
by any non-Houston headquar-
tered national corporation.
—Joan Hope
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The Rice Thresher, April 16. 1982, page 7
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Grob, Jay. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 69, No. 29, Ed. 1 Friday, April 16, 1982, newspaper, April 16, 1982; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245501/m1/7/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.