one i at a time revisited
It has been three decades since Southern Methodist University installed in the Pollock Galleries of the Meadows School of Art a landmark survey of contemporary Texas art. Since the eight artists featured in that seminal exhibition displayed a wide range of interests as well as sundry ways of expressing themselves in their work, the exhibit was subtly billed one i at a time. Brilliantly curated by Douglas MacAgy, who as head of the short-lived but highly influential Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts from 1960 to 1963 had fostered the careers of many of the artists, the exhibit aimed to show that art of real, rather than regional, quality had finally emerged in Dallas—indeed was thriving there; or, as one critic described it, the show provided a glimpse of a cultural future for Dallas. In retrospect, the exhibition marked the passing of an era in which Picasso's art stirred social protest and a regionalist aesthetic prevailed, and the dawn of a period in which Dallas shed its cultural isolation and feelings of insecurity and became home to a constellation of nationally-acclaimed modernist and postmodernist painters and sculptors.
Not all of the eight artists invited to participate in one i at a time became household names, but in due course several of them did. Of the eight artists, four of them will be featured in exhibitions at Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art in the current year: Jim Love and David McManaway in January; Roger Winter in February; and Bill Komodore in December. Of the others in the show—Roy Fridge, Hal Pauley, Herb Rogalla, and Charles Williams—two have passed away and one stopped making art. Nevertheless, all of them have played critical roles in the history of Texas' development as a breeding ground of serious art, as well as contributed to the radical change that occurred in the cultural climate of the region beginning in the nineteen sixties. To the art shown in 1971 in one i at a time, Dallas—if not all of Texas—owes its current self-image as a bustling capital of culture and art as well as commerce.
Jim Love and David McManaway survive as the chief protagonists in this phenomenon—one in Dallas, and the other in Houston. Neither has adhered to any prevailing idea of what art should be, nor has compromised his art in any measure to gain quick fame or fortune. Both have hewn to an independent path: one of them (McManaway) finding new meaning in the discarded remnants of popular culture (miniature dolls, animal imagery, and toy soldiers, as well as Mickey Mouse in his many guises, Krazy Kat, and even the Pillsbury Doughboy); the other (Love) making discoveries in the detritus of an industrial society (junkyards, construction sites, and other places of refuse). Humor gently tinged with irony and lightly leavened with guile underlines the genius of both of them. In the words of MacAgy himself, each indulges in the put-on, favoring "a transmogrified put-together of oddments in the round." It is the perfect answer to Duchamp's readymades, though glorifying less the found object than the way in which certain familiar objects take on new meaning when associated with an incongruous text or juxtaposed to well-known but totally unrelated images.
The spirit of Jim Love's poetic sculptures in steel as well as David McManaway's popular fetishes of assembled imagery is captured by the concept of the prankster who produces amulets or good luck charms to surprise or bring a laugh. In McManaway's case, his found objects preserve a precarious balance between their former life in our psyche and their new identity as art. As Jim Love himself has noted about his longtime friend and fellow artist, McManaway is "a finder [and what] he finds he alters, adds to or leaves be…. It is an example of poetic license on two feet." In Love's case, he focuses on things so ordinary that they seem beneath notice, his welded assemblages yielding an amazing array of recognizable forms, from animals to plants to human species. As his loyal patron Dominique de Menil noted, "Love's art confronts us with life and the absurdity of death….the underlying mystery of all things, the absolute needs of man and beast for companionship, for tenderness, for hope." (Could there be a more apposite prescription for the value of art in these troubled times?)
David McManaway and Jim Love exemplify the indomitable spirit of art to shape the way we come to terms with the untidiness of the world in which we live and all the forces that impinge upon our existence. The enduring relevance and poetic charm of their unforgettable creations reside in a shared, almost devilish, love of anything out of the ordinary.
Edmund P. Pillsbury, Ph.D.
