The Texas Observer

Today’s papers delivered the sad news that artistic innovator Robert Rauschenberg died Monday night of heart failure at his home on Captiva Island, Florida. Rauschenberg was 82. The New York Times‘ take is here.

Rauschenberg was best known as a hybridizer of artistic forms, working at different points in modes as varied as choreography, set design, and musical composition. Even making his name as a visual artist in the 1950s, he often blurred the lines between painting and sculpture. Critics considered him a link between abstract expressionists and the pop artists that followed. His work, however, regularly obliterated such boundaries.

Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Authur, an unlikely crucible of Texas talent that also spawned Janis Joplin (born 1943). Neighboring Beaumont produced painter John Alexander (born 1945), currently enjoying a career retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Rauschenberg briefly studied pharmacology at the University of Texas before being drafted into WWII. Stationed in San Diego, he saw his first paintings at a gallery there and began to consider becoming an artist. He subsequently went to Paris on the G.I. Bill and began an artistic journey encompassing stints at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, travel with Cy Twombly, and loft-sharing with Jasper Johns.

Rauschenberg’ work is viewable in his home state. It can be seen most prominently at Houston’s Menil Collection, which houses many early Rauschenberg works, and where the artist’s drawings are on display as part of the Menil’s “How Artists Draw: Toward the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, a show coming to the end of its run May 18, so hurry. The Dallas Museum of Art owns more than 50 Rauschenberg works, and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts also owns major works by the artist.

I strongly urge anyone who is in Austin and cares about human rights or Latin America or documentary photography to get thee to the Harry Ransom Center at UT. There you will find an exhibit titled “Inside El Salvador.” It features more than 100 photographs concerning that nation’s 12-year civil war and its aftermath. The exhibit is based in part on a collection of photographs called Learn to See, El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers.

The exhibit brings back a tumultuous time when a country the size of Massachusetts became a focal point in the Cold War and a proving ground for US-imported counterinsurgency. Here are images from all the low-points: the massacre at El Mozote, the killing of the three U.S. nuns and a lay worker, the murder of six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers, and the body dump for the disappeared at El Playon. The latter was taken by photographer John Hoagland, one of six photographers in the exhibition who lost their lives while working in El Salvador.The surviving photographers, rather than accept money for the exhibition, had the Ransom Center pay to install a similar exhibit in El Salvador at El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.

The exhibit at UT kicked off today with a two-day conference titled Image, Memory, and the Paradox of Peace. The speakers tonight included former ambassador to El Salvador Robert White, journalism professor Mark Danner, and two extraordinary photographers who helped create the collection, Susan Meiselas and Harry Mattison. Day two of the conference will feature numerous panels on war and peace and the effects of violence. The day will end with a session on martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Many of these photos are familiar to those who have followed El Salvador. Yet to see them together, along with the mountains of commentary and context put together by the Ransom Center, is very moving. Meiselas ended her remarks by saying that they had hoped to “enrich two worlds with their photographs.” And indeed they did. The humanity these photographers captured and the struggles of those times speak truths that continue to be relevant today.

There’s no shortage of bait on the hook for film buffs this weekend in Austin, where the 11th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival takes over half a dozen screens for 9 days with a world-class selection of new releases, narrative features, documentaries and shorts. The programming starts tonight, Wednesday, April 16, with an 8 p.m. screening of Spaniard Carles Bosch’s documentary Septiembres at the Paramount Theater.

Other festival highlights include the films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos, a collection the Film Society of Lincoln Center has called “the most important body of work in the history of Brazilian and, arguably, Latin American cinema.”

Full festival scheduling is available at www.cinelasamericas.org.

And if you’re already making plans for next month, make a note that May 1 marks the opening of the very first Marfa Film Festival — a significant milestone in a town with a deep and current history in American cinema (Giant, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men all filmed in the neighborhood) but no movie screen of its own (films will be projected on an inflatable screen courtesy of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow).

Highlights out west include a special local screening of There Will Be Blood, a potential appearance by director Paul Thomas Anderson, Austinite David Modigliani’s Crawford (read the Observer’s review here), a late-show dance-party showing of David Byrne’s True Stories, and the promised appearance of Giant’s Dennis Hopper, who’s bringing his long-lost western The Last Movie to town.

See the Marfa festival’s site for the full week’s schedule.

Anyone interested in journalism — can we get a show of hands, please? — ought to make a point of taking in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the mad genius/incorrigible iconoclast who most famously offed the American Dream with the literary shotgun blast of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and later killed himself (in 2005) with a single bullet to the head.

(Even if journalism isn’t your thing, you should still check Gonzo out, if only to remind yourself that this most apologetic of contemporary professions once played in the big leagues of American star-culture, right alongside politics and rock and roll.)

Thompson’s full bibliography and influence are too rich to repeat here, but director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; The Trials of Henry Kissinger) has gained access to never-before-seen archival film of Thompson at work and at play, and it’s revelatory, though it leaves unanswered the most enduring of HST trivia questions: How could a grown man who lived in snow country (Aspen-area Colorado) spend so much of his life wearing shorts?

With the addition of a few unfortunate but brief dramatic reenactments, Gibney has assembled a reasonably full biography and a monument to Thompson’s best years that doesn’t ignore the fact that they were relatively few. Or that having stared down Hells Angels and Richard Nixon alike with his twin senses of humor and rage intact, it was ultimately an enemy as insubstantial as fame that robbed the writer of his mojo.

Remembrances by running-buddies including Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Margaritaville tycoon Jimmy Buffett, illustrator/collaborator Ralph Steadman and likable xenophobe Pat Buchanan polish the already well-worn legend. Son Juan and two wives add painful human perspective to the apparently more-or-less true mythology of an uncomfortable but irrepressible cartoon character (HST is the model for Doonesbury’s Raoul Duke, of course).

The wealth of firsthand footage is a treat for fans, of whom there was no shortage Saturday night at the Alamo Draft House for the documentary’s SXSW regional premiere. The film shows one more time during the festival, at the same venue, at 10 p.m. on Thursday night, March 13th. If you don’t want to get stuck in a folding chair in the aisle, we recommend you arrive on the early side.

Special if potentially depressing treat for political junkies, of which Thompson was emphatically one: The film’s recollection of the 1972 presidential race, in which an exceedingly Bush-like Nixon beats ascendant out-of-Vietnam-now candidate George McGovern like a bad dog in the general election, is a tart and timely reminder of just how much hope and idealism can be squandered — even in the face of a compellingly evil alternative — by a few stupid mistakes. The contemporary parallels are unavoidable. And, one can hope, imprecise.

Word just reached us that local songwriter/artist Daniel Johnston has canceled his opening weekend performance at SXSW due to illness, but as usual with all things Johnston, there’s a silver lining, and it’s this: Johnston is suddenly scheduled to make a post-show appearance at tonight’s March 7 performance of Speeding Motorcycle, peripatetic director Jason Nodler’s rock opera based on Johnston’s sweetly unrefined music and self-mythologized life, currently running at Austin’s Zach Scott Theater. To be clear, Johnston isn’t in the play (though longtime cohort Kathy McCarty, of Glass Eye fame, takes a notable star turn), but he’s scheduled for a brief after-show performance with the rockin’ post-show band at 9:30 pm.

There are plenty of reasons (fantastic songs, well sung, and a comically heartbreaking storyline) to grab a ticket to any of the remaining performances in Speeding Motorcycle’s run (the play opened Valentine’s day and is up through April 13), but if you’re looking for a hometown event of international cult-epic proportions, you’ll want to be at the Zach tonight.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

Artists taking offense to the proposed 70-mile border wall in South Texas have come together in an exhibit appropriately titled “Art Against the Wall.” Rachel Brown, the exhibit organizer and arts instructor from South Texas College, says the project stemmed from an urge to speak out before it’s too late.

“I firmly believe artists are usually the first people to suffer when you have any kind of political regime that’s trying to oppress people,” she said, “because we are the ones trying to speak freely and free speech is usually one of the first things to go.”

Brown shared some of the pieces from the exhibit, currently at UT-Brownsville, with the Observer.

-”Mariposas” by Alma Casso (McAllen)

-”International Friendship” by Monica Ramirez (McAllen)

-”Build Bridges Not Walls” by Chris Van Dyck (McAllen)

-”Walls Kill Migrants” by Guadalupe Victoria (Monterrey, Mexico)

If built, the border wall itself - like the Berlin Wall and the Israeli security fence that Palestinians call an “apartheid wall” - will undoubtedly become a canvas for expression. Even the humorless Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr has urged Iraqis to paint “magnificent tableaux” on concrete barriers the U.S. has erected in Baghdad to protest the occupation. Brown and the other artists hope that day will never come.