Art on the strip - various artists, various venues, Las Vegas, Nevada

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Alisa Tager

In the movie part of the museum, Troy Swain set up his Modern Man Action Figures in a diorama containing Barbie-sized replicas of Indiana Jones, the dinosaur heroes of Jurassic Park and Superman stepping into a phone booth. Swain made similar-scale figures of his own heroes -- among them Karl Mary, Michel Foucault and Andy Warhol. Perched on a hilly landscape, they all blended together, so that the philosophical notables were difficult to distinguish from the Hollywood fictions.

Many of these artists are graduates of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV) masters of fine arts program. A relatively new program with 10 to 15 graduates a year, the school has become something of a feeder for an increasingly vibrant pool of local talent. The art critic Dave Hickey has been a full-time member of the UNLV faculty since 1992 and has been a major draw for students from a broad spectrum of backgrounds. Hickey says that one of the benefits of going to school in Las Vegas is that the city is self-selecting: the tough circumstances deter those unwilling to pay their dues. UNLV students must come to terms with the indigenous pop culture and then decide what art really is.

Many of the UNLV students do not leave the city upon graduation. They get out of school and fend for themselves, and they have built a stable little art community. The city itself provides a variety of work opportunities: if one has commercial graphic or design skills, it is possible to make a good livelihood by working for the casinos. One ex-student who stayed on, painting murals, said, "I'm doing the same thing Michelangelo did. In fact, I'm doing it for the same Italians."

The city's growing group of young artists is wildly eclectic. There is no regional style in Las Vegas. Hickey describes it as "a permissive environment where there's nothing you can't do." Perhaps the most "Las Vegas" of the artists is the Reverend Ethan Acres, who remains steadastly idiosyncmtic. In 1995, Acres received a doctorate of divinity from a group on the Internet. The stepson of a "hellfire and damnation preacher" and the grandson of a snake handler, the Alabama native makes art which is infused with religion, and his religion is colored by his art. Working with sculpture, painting, computer technology and installations, Acres uses a wide range of religious images which are optimistic and respectful and devoid of the customary art-world irony and skepticism. In one series of works, he inserts an image of himself, wearing his trademark baby-blue tuxedo, into Norman Rockwell-type Christian posters that variously depict Christ at Golgotha, a cemetery where people ascend towards heaven, and a family's Bible-study session. Creator of The Highway Chapel, a place of worship in a converted trailer which he has anointed the "first mobile chapel in the United States," Acres plans to take a cross-country trip, preaching along the way and exhibiting his own works and his collection of relics left by parishioners. Acres is his own best creation@ he is a performance artist, but his twist is his use of religion, which tends to make art-world people uneasy. Is he sincere? He never lets you know, which keeps his project interesting.