Seeing Buster Graybill's installation at the newly combined AMOA - Arthouse's Laguna Gloria site, I was reminded of a practical joke my friend played on someone visiting her Houston home, a studio in the backyard of a well-regarded civic artist. When entertaining a guest, my friend pointed to the grittily functional metal compost cage full of dead leaves and said, “That's a Donald Judd piece.” Her guest immediately assumed the awe-filled stance we consider appropriate in the presence of name-recognition art, in part because the structure bore some resemblance to Judd's minimal geometry and in part because, given its presence in an artist's backyard, having a Judd sitting around didn't seem so impossible. I would have considerably less luck, for example, trying to convince a visitor to my home that the pile of spent propane canisters in my backyard were the work of Andy Warhol.

Graybill’s Progeny of Tush Hog presents a similar opportunity for confusion, but a permeable notion of when art is art rather than a functional object seems central to its intentions. It’s less joke and more a context for examining the ways in which the Texas landscape can absorb both valences of an object. In making geometrical hog feeders and documenting their interactions with wild animals, Graybill draws out the dualities already present in a landscape flush with extremes.

Buster Graybill, installation view of Progeny of Tush Hog at Laguna Gloria's lower grounds; photographed by Erica Nix; image courtesy the artist.

The sculpture and video exhibit is split in two parts, one displayed inside the smaller house gallery and the other installed in Laguna Gloria's impressive grounds. Each staging focuses on Graybill’s dodecahedral feeding structures, which, thanks to their diamond-inscribed steel fabrication, look like a cross between a truck bed utility box and some kind of alien craft. Holes allow feed corn to scatter when the animals nose the objects around (hogs, certainly, but also rams and other Texas beasts). The indoor installation includes surveillance footage of animals interacting with the structures, as well as still images bearing a time stamp, barometric readings and temperatures. A deer blind cross-referencing Mondrian's linear aesthetic and the camo crosshatchings of ordinary deer blinds overlooks the outdoor site.

While the subjects of Progeny of Tush Hog are certainly worthy and limned well by the exhibition notes, the decisions made here sometimes offer an imprecise explication. For example, Graybill situates the structures as a means of examining the dichotomies—urban and rural, practical and fanciful, man-made and natural—already present in the landscape, but their functionality is based on a domesticated notion of animal feeding: the method reminds me of a friend who trains his dog by putting food in a water bottle and letting the dog play and eat at the same time, with the hope that his dog will get some exercise instead of merely hoovering up his food. The idea that animals should feed themselves by playing arises not from the landscape but from an assumed domesticity, and while the installation could address this through its means of documenting animals' interactions with the sculptures, it instead presents an almost journalistic account. While there are affecting and visually exciting moments in the footage accompanying the indoors installation, these are the exception rather than the rule. The gallery card for the exhibition includes a color photo of the structures, providing a more aesthetically enlivened view of the contrasts presented by the work, and I wonder why Graybill focused exclusively on black-and-white nighttime footage in the gallery. The color provides refreshing contrast between the manmade, seemingly alien-made sculptures and the washed-out (yet still lovely) landscape.

These questions are less obtrusive in the outdoor installation, perhaps because it invites a greater degree of interaction with the sculptures. Inside, staged with a smattering of feed corn skirting their edges, the hog feeders seemed like a contrivance developed to foreground some hazy idea of environmental flux, but outdoors, they're more approachable, capable of prompting genuine thought about how we approach our landscape, particularly when something inexplicable appears in its midst.

I watched a group of schoolchildren on a field trip encounter them. Without hesitation, they began jostling the structures in the same manner as the javelina documented elsewhere in the work; I wished only that the exhibition had not left this stacked moment to chance but had instead guided it through more deliberate decision-making.

Progeny of Tush Hog is on view at AMOA - Arthouse's Laguna Gloria site from November 19, 2011 until February 19, 2012.