The Nasher Sculpture Center recently launched a new exhibition called Revelation featuring, for the first time at the Nasher, the work of a living regional artist, and chances are you’ve never heard of him. His name is James Magee, a man who in the course of a lifetime has worn the hats of a New York City cabbie, an off-Broadway set designer, a lawyer and a vagabond, among other things, but who has been working as an artist of little renown in El Paso for the last forty years. Magee’s work here, which takes up the lower level galleries, consists largely of wall-mounted sculptures that recall Joseph Cornell’s boxes; though, unlike Cornell’s, Magee’s boxes are anything but precious. These are hulking assemblages. Each well-crafted box is made of riveted steel and filled with quantities of anything from mattress foam and sea shells, to lead and car parts, and lots of broken glass. Sometimes a piece can feel like a contained artifact, something soft and memory-full: the backside of a rotted wall. But more often than not they feel like something ripped from some industrial gadgetry in a Terry Gilliam movie, rendering a mood that’s full of clank and hissing steam.

James Magee, Mine Shaft c. 1995-98; Steel, shatterproof glass, rubber, staples, salt, and rust water, 48 x 64 x 6 ½ in. Courtesy of the artist

Given that, Magee’s work most readily recalls for me that of Lee Bontecou, whose relief sculptures of the 1950s and 60s hinted at resonant fears of war, its aftermath and its ever-present potentiality, and pointed somberly at some mangled and insidious future. Magee seems to be tangled in these same ideas, and most certainly his work here, most of it made within the last decade, smacks of a kind of nostalgia for a low-tech, less faceted social web that thrived on memories of heroism and imagined a future fall-out.  Magee is not deviating very far in these recent works from those ideas that were rattling around in the art world thirty to fifty years ago, and formally, there is little to testify to decades of art waves and ideas having passed. His arsenal of tarnished metal, wire, lead, glass and fabric is utilized to the same visual effect as artists like Bontecou, but also Antonio Tapies and Joseph Beuys, who married their materials to a pervading spiritual sense of shift and woundedness.  But while James Magee’s work makes so many ready references to artists’ work of the mid to late twentieth century, it doesn’t breach any current art modes. It is work decidedly uninfluenced by contemporary culture. 

While I don’t find very much new in Magee’s approach to the dated aesthetic he employs, I do find his efforts honest. There is something primal in these works that points to a sensitivity about nature, industry and humanity, with a pure inclination toward material, in a way that transcends any artistic zeitgeist.  Perhaps that is why curator Jed Morse has chosen to highlight Magee’s work at the Nasher, as opposed to other, more credentialed artists in the region – precisely because Magee’s work is so unspoiled. 

As further evidence of this, viewers to the exhibition may watch a slideshow with pictures of the installation called The Hill that Magee has been building in the desert east of El Paso for over the last three decades, which consists of four stone and metal box structures set atop a built stone hill. The interiors of the structures are spare, though each contains an artwork construction, many of them resembling medieval altarpieces. The place looks like it feels like a desert mini-monastery, replete with ponderous iconographies to meditate on for infinities. But The Hill isn’t scheduled for completion for another fifteen years, and visitors to the site are rare, say both Jed Morse and the co-author of the monograph about The Hill, University of Texas at Dallas aesthetics professor Richard Brettell.  It seems both Morse and Brettell are keen on increasing the hermetic (and hermeneutic) mystique surrounding James Magee, while at the same time heralding his talents in a major art institution. “Indeed, anyone who has visited the Hill – and by the time this book is published, the number will be in the hundreds – divides her or his life into two new parts, Before and After the Hill,” Brettell writes in the show’s monograph.

So can we expect flocks of pilgrims to Magee’s Hill in the near future? Is the show Revelation an open invitation to the Hill? I’m not sure, but at least now we know it’s there.

Image: James Magee, “A Row of Summer Maples,” c. 2003-07. Terracotta (clay, Elmer’s glue, and pigment), broken glass, rubber, Goop, poured lead. 70 x 109 x 8 ½ in. (closed); 70 x 132 ½ x 8 ½ + in. (open). Courtesy of the artist