BY KELLY KLAASMEYER
Houston Press
February 3, 2005
If you've driven Houston's highways, you've seen the plethora of "Support Our Troops" stickers out there. Interestingly, many of them are accompanied by a W'04 sticker and a Christian fish, all of it stuck on the back of a seven-miles-to-the-gallon behemoth SUV driven by a lone occupant who seems patently unaware of the irony. But it hasn't escaped Randy Twaddle.
Current politics, the Iraq war and their attendant catchphrases are fodder for Twaddle in his exhibition "Randy Twaddle: A.M. in America" at Moody Gallery. There are a lot of politically angry artists out there. A few of them are finding ways to channel it into their art; fewer still are doing it successfully. Twaddle manages to pull off something really tough: He's making art that's as politically charged as it is aesthetically satisfying.
Twaddle's charcoal drawings depict slightly crumpled fortune cookielike strips of paper with text that rearranges the order of words in common phrases. The snippets of paper appear to float in space. In Support Our Troops (2004), the words "country and god" and "gas and oil" run down opposite sides of a piece of paper. It's bent in the middle like those yellow or red-white-and-blue "ribbon" bumper stickers. Twaddle pointedly places "country" before "god" and pairs it with "gas" and "oil." In doing so, he juxtaposes justification for the war (country and god) with underlying motivation (gas and oil).
In Twaddle's charcoal drawing Mission Accomplished (2004), the words "bones and skull blood and flesh minds and hearts awe and shock" are discernable on a curving banner. The smeary, dusty-black charcoal evokes smoke and gunpowder residue. Pale lines behind dark clouds create the feeling of an explosion -- or poignant rays of sunlight streaming through its aftermath. In Mission Accomplished, Twaddle has produced a succinct critique, grimly evoking secretive elitist machinations, carnage, manipulation and destruction.
Not All That Unusual (2004) juxtaposes the phrases "talented and lovely" and "unusual and cruel." It's a pairing that could easily apply to our Abu Ghraib cognitive dissonance: People across America have told themselves that surely our government and our good, wholesome American kids could not be responsible for atrocities.
Twaddle continues his series with a group of small works executed in dark, chalky gouache and watercolor. In Grand, Old, Parties (2004), the deep black of the paint creates a dark, velvety contrast with the paper. It lacks the expressiveness of his charcoal drawings, but it has more dramatic punch. Some of the charcoal works could stand stronger contrast.
Twaddle has solid work and good ideas, but experimenting with different media and playing with formal issues could make it even stronger. Of course, in the best of all worlds, it would be wonderful if he ran out of new material for the series. Twaddle himself would certainly agree.
Randy Twaddle
art US
Issue 8, June 2005
BY JOHN DEVINE
Randy Twaddle's latest drawings are a further development of the work he presented two years ago in exhibitions in Houston and Austin. "A.M. in America" follows the same modus operandi of large drawings of strips of paper that might have come from fortune cookies, inscribed with phrases that are difficult to decipher around the twisting arrangement of the strips. Twaddle draws from life; he collects these phrases (mostly clichés and pop song lyrics), reverses them in an attempt to unpack alternative meanings, prints them onto the paper strips, and then carefully pins them into their respective configurations. Letters are obscured by the folds of the paper and by shadows, and that, coupled with their reversal, can make it a challenge to recognize the phrases. If you were stumped last time around, you could check the title. But Twaddle didn't make it so easy this time. Also, last time around a political attitude could be intuited from the drawings. This time, the artist took his gloves off.
Consider Mission Accomplished (all works 2004). Against a backdrop of dark, rich charcoal smudges and radial lines ("an annunciation trope," according to the artist's statement) emanating from a point well off the left margin of the five-by-three-and-a-half-foot paper, the scroll forms a half loop and appears to rise toward the viewer as it ends its recitation: "bones and skull/blood and flesh/minds and hearts/awe and shock." Between the title and text, it's impossible not to read a sardonic commentary on the politics of the past several years. But with this work, Twaddle is taking no chances; on the checklist, he editorializes: "A summation of George W. Bush's career path." In the eponymous drawing, the twisted scroll, racing at us from the source of this drawing's radial lines, the heart of a black hole at the center of the seven-by-five-foot paper, reads: "shine and rise/ moan and piss/ shave, shower and shit/ bear it and grin." Twaddle's comment? "Mornings begin with the soft reality of low expectations" - in contrast to the de rigueur optimism of all political theater and its motifs.
All of this might be too clever - and didactic - by half if Twaddle were less of a draftsman. Twaddle works charcoal the way de Kooning worked oil, and his facility well serves his design. One must borrow a term from painting, chiaroscuro, to convey the play of light and shadow in his drawings. In Support Our Troops, the strip hangs like a prayer shawl, the apex of the half loop centered over a patch of dark from which those omnipresent radial lines flow. The text - "country and god/ gas and oil" - rises out of an irregular expanse of darkness that encroaches from the bottom of the paper, so that the dark mass only allows us to make out "-ntry" of the first word; as the scroll loops back toward the dark mass, now it appears to float on it surface. A blank section between the phrases, whose almost blinding whiteness at the top of the drawing balances the enveloping darkness below, makes the expressions parallel, and the terms of the artist's syllogism become roughly synonymous: "country" with "oil," "god" with "gas."
Randy Twaddle was born (in 1957) and raised in Missouri (Elmo, pop. 199), earned a BFA from Northwest Missouri State University in 1980, and an MFA from the University of Houston in 1996. In his statement, Twaddle equated the title of this exhibit with one of Ronal Reagan's favorite figures of speech, and suggested a pun on the word "mourning," a state he confesses to being in "depending on how much I think about America, being an American, and the prospect of raising my two-and-a-half-year-old son in America." One could easily feel his pain.