San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
S.A. artist takes his work on a test drive
A few weeks ago, Buster Graybill road-tested one of his works of art.
The “R.MUTT: Renegade Modernist Utility Travel Trailer” is a functional piece designed to be a temporary living space and art studio. He and his wife recently took it on a three-day camping trip on the Llano River to test it out.
“It was awesome,” Graybill said. “It was really good to finally get outside our house.”
The trip — and the “R.MUTT” itself — has been in the works for about seven years.
San Antonians had their first chance to see the work in the spring, when it was shown at the McNay Art Museum as part of the CAM Perennial, one of the big exhibits for Contemporary Art Month each year. Curator Lee Hallman asked the McNay staff if it could be parked on the grounds, and they agreed.
“It’s a monumental object,” Graybill said. “It’s 24 feet long — it’s a beast. It’s not an elegant, high-formalist public artwork.”
As detailed as the trailer is
—it’s outfitted with all sorts of tools, a water filtration system, a bed and an outdoor shower, as well as some contemporary art books and a whiskey bottle stashed in a fire blanket cabinet — it also is a work-in-progress. Graybill intended to continue working on it from time to time on the McNay grounds, giving visitors a look at his process and the chance to talk to him about it. Because the trailer wouldn’t be open all the time, a video about it was installed in the exhibition gallery.
And that’s all that remains of the “R.MUTT” in the show.
The exhibit opened in February, just as worries about the coronavirus were starting to gather steam. Graybill remembers that at the reception, he reached out to shake someone’s hand, and the person shook his head, offering an elbow instead. He also remembers that he and his wife were hungry but didn’t eat anything at the event because of their own uneasiness about the virus.
About a month later, Graybill became concerned that the museum might have to close, and he thought he would feel better if he had the “R.MUTT” at home.
“They were very gracious and said, ‘Absolutely. You called at the perfect time, because we’re literally closing our doors this afternoon,’ ” he said. “And so I raced after work down to the McNay, hooked it up and brought it home.”
The museum reopened in June. The Perennial had been slated to close May 17 but was extended through Sept. 13. Graybill had planned to spend the summer working on the “R.MUTT,” so it did not return to the museum.
“That was the hard part,” he said. “I want it to be at the McNay, and if we weren’t dealing with this weird situation, I would just go up there and have my tools and be tweaking out on it, having a lot of people come and ask questions, but in this current time, I just don’t feel comfortable with that.”
It’s particularly disappointing because he liked how McNay patrons reacted to the work.
“I liked the contrast of it being parked right in front of the museum, and as people come in, there’s this question of, ‘Is this supposed to be here?,’ ” he said, laughing. “And I don’t mind that. For me, I like giving the viewer what they don’t expect.
“And I know that there are people who are outside of contemporary and modern art — they’re not familiar with it, they often don’t feel like there’s an entry point for them. I kind of feel like that person, who might go to the museum and walk away disappointed — ‘I’m never going to look at art again’ —might look at this and be like, ‘This is art? Oh, well I guess art’s not that bad!’ ”
“R.MUTT” was inspired in part by the doomsday prepper movement, in which people stock up on food and other supplies to be prepared for cataclysms, as well as by the prevalence of post-apocalyptic themes and settings in popular culture. There was an escapist element and some humor to it when he first started thinking about it all those years ago.
“And now, I had to go move the survival trailer from the museum. And that’s a weird feeling,” he said. “I was thinking of a different kind of survival when I initially was making this thing. I would see these survival shows where you’re going to go out and you have a pocket knife and a ball of string to survive, and I was like, ‘You know what? I think I need a trailer full of stuff!’ ”
He thought about the project for a long time, not entirely sure he’d ever be able to pull together the funds to build it. A grant from the Artist Foundation gave him the money to get started in 2013, and he threw himself into the project, working 15 to 16 hours a day, much of that time spent welding aluminum. The work came to a screeching halt when he went blind in his left eye. It took doctors a while to diagnose him with optic neuropathy, an inflammation of the optic nerve.
His vision started to come back six months later, but it was years before he returned to the “R.MUTT,” partly because he had lost momentum and partly because it’s a costly enterprise.
“I thought I would never get back to it, because I needed more financial resources,” he said.
That’s where curator SaraJayne Parsons comes in. Parsons, director of the art galleries at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, had been following Graybill’s work since he was a student at the University of North Texas, where he received his bachelor of fine arts degree in 2001.
“He was always on my radar,” Parsons said. “He is one of the best artists working in Texas right now.”
Parsons came to visit his studio in the summer of 2018 with an eye toward an exhibit. She saw the trailer, which he described as a long-term project, and started asking him about it. One of the questions she had is how much money he would need to finish it.
“The more we talked about it, I got really excited, in terms of being able to support an artist, which is really important, but also thinking about how to bring something really unique to our students at TCU,” Parsons said. “And I have a lot of trust in him. It was a big project, really ambitious. I had come to know him and his work ethic, and the way he was talking about the project,
I thought it was something we could help him with in terms of project management and budget.”
The funding allowed Graybill to resume work on the piece. Gregory Elliott, chairman of the art department at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he teaches, allowed him to use the college’s facilities. He was even able to hire a grad student to help.
“And, of course, I was still cramming too much work into a short time period,” he said. “So I now realize this will probably be a project that never ends.”
The “R.MUTT” debuted last fall on the TCU campus as part of an exhibit of Graybill’s work titled “Abstract Utility.” It was parked outside the gallery and drew attention right away, with people knocking on the door, eager to see what was inside, Parsons said.
She was impressed with the aesthetics of the piece, as well as by the tremendous thought throughout it.
“I was surprised by the scale of it,” she said. “When I got inside, I was really knocked out by the level of detail. Everything had a function and a purpose.”
The work that Graybill is doing on the piece now is aimed at getting it ready for a mobile arts residency he is planning in Colorado next summer. The trailer will serve as a base camp, as well as a way to engage folks he encounters along the way. He recently got a research grant through UTSA to put in a solar energy system.
“So I’ll have a fairly large and capable battery bank and solar power, solar panels,” he said. “So it can actually function off grid.”
Part of the reason he wanted to take “R.MUTT” out to the Llano River was to see just how doable it was to live in it shortterm. He had occasionally used it as an office, but that was about it.
“I never even had time to try it out as an actual functional object — it had just been an artwork.
But part of the concept had been that it would function as both,” he said. “And ideally, I wanted it to be both a public art work, but also a mobile studio, so that I can travel, do kind of my own selfguided art residencies and do installation-type work and stuff like that.”
He also had envisioned the piece as a way to spark discussion with people outside of art galleries.
The trip demonstrated that it works on both counts. They camped in a fairly remote area, and there were just a few other campers out. Folks did come over to ask about it, but not many.
“So it was great to get to use it, and it was nice to kind of be quasi-incognito for the first time — being able to use it on our own and not have to be in public in the way that it has been on exhibition,” he said. “In the future, I’m hoping when I’m camping and doing things like that, that it will open conversations. It’s just that, for that first one, we were so mentally fatigued by everything — we just wanted to look at the river.”