Featured Artist
The Angry Cloud
October 3, 2018
A few weeks ago I went to an artist's talk at DORF, a gallery space that sprouted last Spring in the garage of Austin-based artists and married couple Sara Vanderbeek and Eric Manche in a quiet, south Austin neighborhood. The second show in the space featured a local street artist known as The Angry Cloud.
Before I get too far into this, I'm going to come clean and confess that street art has not always been my personal cup of tea. It's an art form that I want to be more disruptive than it often is. It's insinuating itself into people's spaces uninvited, into my space uninvited. There should be a reason for that. It should have something to say. It should make me think, but there is an awful lot that just feels gratuitous or overly feel-goody. Maybe in an era of extreme polarization and frothing anger, feel-good messages actually are disruptive, and I've been on a rampage of tossing "should" into the garbage across the board in my life lately anyhow. So, I'm just going to eat a bit of crow here. Bear with me.
In 2015 removable stickers with the City of Austin logo and the text "exclusively for white people" and "maximum of 5 colored customers/colored BOH staff accepted" were placed on the windows of a handful of east Austin businesses, and it's not exaggerating to say that the city exploded. People came unglued across the spectrum of skin color. Some people took them literally. Many of the white business owners and a large chunk of Austin's liberal, white population took offense at the suggestion that they were racists or even that they were participating unwittingly in institutionalized racism. Facebook arguments exploded. Newspaper articles were written. Finally, the identity of the person behind the stickers was revealed, as was their intent to call attention to the problem of gentrification in east Austin. I'm still a little confused as to why that had to be spelled out, considering Austin is the least diverse city in Texas and all it takes is looking around to see the truth of gentrification (full disclosure: I'm white and live in east Austin, so do with that what you will). Only a year earlier a PR firm run by white women that specialized in the restaurant industry was involved in a controversy due to their very unfortunate and oblivious name, "Strange Fruit." Coincidentally, they just so happened to represent some of the white-owned businesses that were targeted in the sticker campaign. The conversation was not a new one, but in a city known for its "alright alright alright" attitude, the stickers were exactly the kind of disruptive message that in my mind makes for compelling street art (despite the fact that the person responsible isn't a practicing artist of any sort). It was meaty, controversial, and simply well-played. And you know what? It started a dialogue. (Seriously, kudos.)
Fast forward a few years, and I was back in my mode of viewing our street art as mostly wallpaper. Then I started noticing these angry-faced, cartoony clouds here and there. They stood out. I was attracted to the painterly style using materials that were both ramshackle and planned. This was someone with drawing and painting skills, and that caught my eye. But the efficiency of the character just seemed to fit snugly into the times we're living in. We are all angry, no matter where we fall on the ideological spectrum. This is a time of spit fire and rage, and though we are all dealing with it in different ways it is very much like a literal cloud hanging over each of our heads. An angry cloud.
The clouds caught the attention of Vanderbeek and Manche as well, so much that they ended up grabbing one of them off of a pole to take home and add to their art collection. Feeling guilty about having taken the art, they reached out to The Angry Cloud on social media and offered to pay for it. One agreement to pitch in for supplies later, and a connection began that eventually led to the show at DORF.
The show, titled, "Return of the Litvak," was based on a recent family heritage trip to Lithuania taken by The Angry Cloud. Struck by what felt like the magic of an old growth forest, the artist later learned about darker events that occurred within those woods during WWII. Literature for the show explained the term Litvak for the uninitiated as "a non-pejorative term for Jews from the region." Between 1941 and 1944, 206,000 out of 250,000 Jews in the area were murdered, mostly in those woods and mostly by Lithuanian collaborators who previously had been their friends, neighbors, coworkers, and so on. It's a chilling story among many chilling stories from that era, and it's enough to haunt any person of good conscience.
Entering the show though the garage, the viewer was met with contextual pieces. There was a large placard with a brief artist statement and a portrait of the Lithuanian tour guide who introduced The Angry Cloud to that dark history of the forest and was herself haunted by it. The first cloud encountered was painted half-black and half-white (see above photo), a reference to an original Star Trek episode called "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," in which two individuals from the same species—each with a half-black, half-white face, but on opposite sides—were undergoing an elborate manhunt across the galaxy with a singular hatred of each other due to what they viewed as an obvious and unacceptable physical difference. Only a year before, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot. The episode was clearly drawing from the us versus them mentality that permeated American culture in the 1960s, and the artist is clearly drawing lines between what occurred during the Holocaust in Europe, our nation's long history of persecuting minority groups, and now.
The show spilled out of the garage-turned-gallery into a long, narrow outdoor space. Stepping through the door, a view through two tall trees revealed a cloud with the word "carnage" across its face, reminding us of the grim events that occurred in that forest less than 100 years ago and effectively allowing the audience to imagine themselves in that forest in a more literal sense. More clouds hung ominously from trees along the corridor, which led to the backyard where a quote from Donald Trump had been scrawled with spray paint onto the side of a barn-like shed, "Just remember what you are seeing and what you are reading It's not what's happening [sic]" beside a cartoony pig in reference to Animal Farm. Drawing from pop culture and literature that broke conventions, the artist places the work in a long history or art forms both high and low and in-between that have responded to the social and political issues of their day through metaphor and story-telling.
Meanwhile in South Texas, thousands of children have been separated from their families, reminiscent of Japanese internment camps. The list of parallels between what is occurring in the United States today and what has occurred in past in periods leading up to events like murdering 206,000 people in the woods in Lithuania is too long to recite. It's extremely concerning, and the relevancy of The Angry Cloud's work is unquestionable.
The show wasn't at all grim despondency, however. A portrait of Dan Rather, who has become a widely-followed voice of reason in the Trump era, was included based on his quote, "Being skeptical of government is very much in the great American tradition, but being cynical about government is a different thing. Skepticism is largely healthy. Cynicism is to be avoided." Artist as activist took on a very explicit form with the show, with fundraising events for Texas Democratic Senator candidate Beto O'Rourke and voter registration drives. If there was any take-away, it was get angry but then channel that anger into something positive and proactive.
The show is no longer on display at DORF, but if you're in Austin, keep your eyes open for angry clouds floating around the city.
Follow Angry Cloud & DORF to keep tabs on the latest:
The Angry Cloud: Instagram & Facebook
All content is created as an extension of my practice and artistic influences. Opinions are my own.
. . .
More Featured Artists:
Featured Artist: Scott Winterrowd Expanding this blog to include artwork other than my own has been a goal all along, and now that it's out of the first year of its existence, the time is right. It seemed only natural that the first artist to feature would be Scott Winterrowd... See More
Featured artist: Tammie Rubin A few delicate tendrils tip a porcelain cone askew, creating an underneath place, unreachable and mysterious... See More