The Brooklyn Rail

Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art arrived at the Contemporary Austin in mid-September, a traveling exhibition of exhibitionism and correspondence and queer expression. Hundreds of works on paper, ceramics, and performance art photography fill the gallery spaces; the sheer volume of the archive inundates the viewer with Teddy Sandoval’s prolific and exposing tendencies.

In the exhibition’s first gallery, black cardboard Chili Chaps (1978), dotted with ceramic chili peppers and dried beans and illustrated scenes of a Sonoran desert, are mounted and framed on a wall of photo booth film strips. Works on paper hold details that delight: tiny pottery, sandy surfaces, and a textured paper-turned-beach-towel (Juanita [1980] and Granada Beach; Long Beach, Calif. [1976]). The last stop before the show spills into the central galleries, Sandoval’s Cholo Muy Macho (1977) features an archetypal Chicano homeboy assuredly and casually touching himself. The Butch Gardens School is not here to ease you in.

Sandoval’s work, created from the 1970s until his passing from AIDS-related complications in 1995, engages with cultural aesthetics of the late twentieth century, grounding his audience in a shared zeitgeist. But the diverse body of work is most successfully tied together through self-referential trademarks. These are especially prominent in the mail art that defined a large part of Sandoval’s career. A wall of sixty-eight postcards reminiscent of Los Angeles magazine stalls anchors the exhibition, where the pervasive motifs of mustaches, assless chaps, and faceless muses are at a critical mass.

Sandoval’s contoured style and inclination for mixed media (marker, crayon, ink, watercolor) brings erotic subject matter into a realm that is imbued with humor. A chili pepper print appears on speedo-ed butts and fringe chaps; these chaps appear again and again, detached from a fully-realized human form—but now their fabrics are a collaged mountainside, or a bevy of dicks writhing to break free, or something more classic like speckled rhinestones (Untitled [Chaps] [ca. late 1970s]). Featureless men, many with mustaches, some just a shadow, make several appearances. The looming presence yet lack of identity of this recurring figure speaks to the heart of Sandoval’s work in the exhibition, which seems to live at the hingepoint of biographical and universal. The Butch Gardens School—a conceptual art collective created by Sandoval—also functions in this way, serving as an evocative framework to hold an artistic practice without any tangible existence. Sandoval imagined it into being, and so it is.

The instinct to revisit and warp is present in Sandoval’s performance-based pieces, specifically his ¡Alarma! project. The Mexican tabloid was known for graphic images of crime scenes and accidents, as well as photo spreads of queer and trans individuals. Sandoval reimagines problematic issues of ¡Alarma! by collaging photos of his family, of himself in drag, of the Virgin Mary, of soapy scenes of sexual tension and exposed groins. Joey Terrill and Jack Vargas, fellow artists in Sandoval’s circle, appear as characters.

The impulse for collective engagement is present throughout Sandoval’s projects. In La Historia de Frida Kahlo (1978), a performance hosted by Butch Gardens School of Art represented here by documentary photographs, Sandoval embodies the persona of Frida Kahlo, with Gronk (a contemporary and collaborator) serving as his Diego Rivera. A toddler cast as “La niña Rivera Kahlo” affixed with dramatized eyebrows strolls “en el patio de la casa de Hollywood-Coyoacan” while “Frida” and “Diego” pose in a nondescript basement, void of set. It is the performance of make believe, needing little but the imagined transportation into the identity of another. The performance was shot after hours at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), with haphazard props and melodramatics. These images were used in exhibitions and across Sandoval’s projects, including his extensive mail art network.

Sandoval’s artistic instincts seemed to reject restraint and preciousness. Is there an interest? An urge? In the Butch Gardens School, it is acted upon. The role of exhibitionism in Sandoval’s work sees the body in costume and the body as costume. The body is clothed, disrobed, and clothing is disembodied. The exposed member becomes less risqué, and perhaps gradually less sexualized, as it is repeatedly offered to us throughout the exhibition: the penis in contour, on film, as a chili pepper.

Sandoval had personas, side hustles, and erotic pottery nodding to ancient Grecian vases. He was not only an entire arts collective, but also Rosa de la Montaña, illustrated as a faceless woman with vulvas hypnotically floating behind her (Rosa [1976]). He provided illustrations and graphic design for pornography and marketing campaigns and literary magazines. He depicted himself as a femme and as macho; neither exploration feels like a final form in the galleries of the Contemporary Austin. In these galleries, themes of queer identity, pleasure, and community possess a tone of unseriousness that is almost primal: human existence, in whatever mode, whatever identity, is play.

We could talk about other contexts for this body of work, beyond play: this state, this Texas Legislature yards away from the Contemporary Austin, where over a hundred bills were proposed this year targeting LGBTQ+ citizens; while only eight were approved by lawmakers, bathrooms and books and healthcare and identification are now more limited. We could talk about why we want to limit one another. We could talk about pornography and desire and commercialized art. We could talk about the body in motion and on display in lust and in sport. We could talk about AIDS. We could talk about survival.

But let’s talk about being human and our play. Our commitment to building selfhood and community simultaneously, and the ethological ways in which we are so silly and boundless. Walk through Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art once, twice, three times. Take in the ceramic tight-whitey wind chime (Untitled [1521] [1977]), phallic chili peppers (when are they not?), and an angelic boxer staring you down, gloves at the ready, an artist’s final work before departure (Angel Baby [1995]).

Walk down Congress Avenue and around Austin’s expanding sprawl, holding desperately to a promise to keep itself weird. We are weird animals, who write each other letters, make wind chimes, put on little plays. Go elsewhere, look elsewhere. We are wearing pants and going to work and telling people our names, and then our nicknames. We are shitting in porcelain pottery and flushing it away to god knows where and making good art and bad art and wearing coats to stay warm but also to tell everyone else: this is who I am, this is what I belong to.

Teddy Sandoval was prolific in his expression of human play. The inevitability of our inheritance of this human play is made clearer through the interweaving of other artists’ work throughout the exhibition, revealing how across time, subject and style and tone can align. See Martin Wong’s Untitled (Two Boxers) (ca. 1985), Ever Astudillo’s Sábado (1988), Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s Julius Bootleg (We are here; still seeking Lowry) (1978/2007/2023), Alex Vallauri’s Untitled (Legs) (late 1970s–80s), Adolfo Patiño’s series “La Tierra prohibida de Terry Holiday” (1979), and so many others. The curators bombard us with this truth. This is not a designer boutique with a sparse collection of pieces to consider. It is a posthumous thrift store of Sandoval, mined from his archives and, finally, left for us to parse. Have fun.