Virginia Billeaud Anderson

Fernando Casas’ teaching schedule in which his current class on “Plato” follows one on the “Philosophy of Art” at Rice University brought a memory of an art historian in a snit because Casas was “teaching Velasquez,” a subject he obviously thought was out of Casas’ field. Knowing Casas to be a gifted lecturer who fills up a class room, it occurred to me that professional envy caused the territorial outburst.

More than Casas’ technical skill and art commercial success, more than his three upcoming simultaneous gallery exhibitions, the thing that inspired my recent studio visit is his reputation as a thinker.


Fernando Casas, The Mirror of Time - Rice University, 2013, Oil on Canvas and mirrors, 90 x 136

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: You have a Ph. D, in philosophy and art collectors that span the globe. The philosopher and artist seem easily reconciled in you. Comment on this.

Fernando Casas: Although I am primarily a visual artist, as you said, I studied philosophy and teach it regularly. philosophical ideas have influenced my art to a great extent. I think that a careful examination of the history of art shows that it is, at its very core, a philosophical endeavor, for it is a visual/auditory/etc. articulation of an understanding of who we are, of where we are, of why we are. Hence I do not make that much of a difference between art and philosophy – they are interwoven.

VBA: Should philosophy be defined as the search to understand who we are?

FC: There is no accepted definition of philosophy. One of the first things one learns in a philosophy class is that an important philosophical question much in dispute is the question what is philosophy? I surely don’t have a ready answer for it. Indeed, philosophy is an attempt to know who we are and where we are, but this is not a definition, and is true also of the sciences. This I don’t think is controversial. More controversial I think is my view that art is, likepPhilosophy and science, an endeavor to understand who we are. I hold the view that the great works of art of human history show us, every time anew, who we are, where we are, etc. For this and other reasons I do not make a sharp separation between philosophy and art. Let me explain. El Greco was a philosopher and you can easily read his Neo-Platonic philosophy in his paintings. You can also read Velazquez’s humanism and Rothko’s existential stance in their works. Do we have any doubt that Bacon’s view of human beings is different from, say, Botticelli? Goya’s view of humanity underwent a radical change: it moved from an optimistic Enlightenment inspired view of humanity to a profoundly pessimistic and dark view. This we can see in his paintings. I can go on and on.

VBA: The title of your upcoming show at Gremillion Gallery, The Perfection of Time, announces a primary area of artistic interest, time. The simple fact of three simultaneous gallery presentations exemplifies time, while your installations and related paintings and drawings more complexly bespeak time, some by interacting within and across galleries, so let’s discuss time.

FC: Time is a central notion of philosophy and of science and a most difficult concept to approach artistically, since it has no color, no pitch, no taste, no volume and no smell, and yet we experience it. How? It is the most familiar and yet the most obscure reality, as Augustine pointed out. Yet it is at the very center of who we are; at the very center of all reality. I wanted to bring out some of its puzzling reality and how essential it is in weaving the world that we live in.

VBA: Jesus Christ, Fernando, it took you five minutes to mention Augustine; if you veer into Aristotle you’ll be talking over my head.

FC: Aristotle influenced Augustine on the topic of time as you know.

VBA: Guilt-burdened Augustine, who tells us he “learned to love God late,” delayed his salvation so he could fornicate and otherwise gratify his corrupt nature. It makes me sad Augustine considered the scholarly pursuits he loved to be impious interruptions of prayers for forgiveness.

FC: Augustine was baffled by the notion of time, for surely our experience of time is problematic, in fact, disturbing. For science, time is static and doesn’t change or move. But we experience time as changing, as a Flow. This is undeniable, yet makes no sense at all!

Your reaction to my painting Holding Time - The Rothko Chapel delighted me because you said you saw no differences in the panels, which is precisely the point. Normally we would expect a sequence of images to change slightly like a movie reel, the changes representing the passing of time. But my images are the same. Why? Because I wanted to represent an experience of time closer to reality. How? By challenging your expectations that the images would differ, it helped you to realize there was no difference except that time has passed. The only difference was time and the only thing that changed was time. So you see I confront the viewer with the reality – or unreality – of time, this most perplexing part of all our experiences.

I will explain. The development of serialism in the 20th century opened up space for the representation of time, and the possibility of a viewer having an explicit experience of time. Working with series, I intend for the viewer to experience time itself, that ephemeral element present in every perception, which whenever we attempt to grasp it by any means, it becomes again, a “no-thing.” In a sequence of images, like a movie reel, or Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, spatial arrangements, objects, illumination etc. are the things that change. We don’t see time changing. This is inferred. You can’t logically conclude from my approach that each image represents a different time because of changes in the objects represented, so you realize that the only thing that changed was time itself, and you! That is, the time you took to look at one image, then another, then another. That’s why I have placed mirrors in many of my series.


Fernando Casas, Holding Time - The Rothko Chapel, 2012, Oil on wood and rope, 24 x 95”

VBA: Tiny mirrors in your installations and wall-mounted pieces make the viewer’s reflection an element in the artwork.

FC: I consider the role of those mirrors as the “stitching” of images. In my paintings of sequences of rooms, for example, the viewer sees her reflection in one room then again in the next identical room, the only difference between the two experiences is time has passed. As the viewer moves along those images she is, metaphorically speaking, “stitching” time.

VBA: What’s with the ropes?

FC: Ropes also “stitch” images of successive “moments of time” and symbolize reality emerging from coordinated interplay of many elements, for no single strand runs the length of the rope but all twisted together create a structure of indefinite extension. They are an imperfect allusion to the linear “flowing” of time.

I have more to say about mirrors. During many years of making art, I have created images of other people, i.e. portraits, group portraits, etc. But in this three-gallery exhibit there is not a single image of a person, except for myself. Why is this? Other people do not matter? Exactly the contrary; a viewer finds her image on the mirrors, the reflected images are, as you say, an essential part of the artworks. Now it can be terribly risky to make mirrors part of art because our natural inclination is to fixate on our appearance: How’s my hair? Is my tie crooked? Do I look old? If a viewer focuses only on her appearance, her reflection on the mirror, and ignores the complete work, then my work is dead. My intention is for the viewer to see herself as part of the image that surrounds the mirror, in other words, to see her mirror-image inside the work of art. When this happens, a profound and marvelous example of co-constitution occurs, it occurs because of my contribution and because of the viewer’s “correct” contribution, a new thing emerges and the work of art comes to life. To force correct viewing, and discourage fixation solely on appearance, I use small thin mirrors, sufficient to recognize ourselves, but too thin for a full image, which reflect only pieces of ourselves. So you see Virginia my art illustrates crucial cases of co-constitution, because art exists only when it is experienced. If nobody reads a poem, the poem doesn’t exist; it is just paper and ink. It is the same for the visual arts. Works of art are co-constituted by the artist and the person who experiences them.

VBA: It is stated specifically in your artist statement, co-constitution is the “organizing idea” for the three exhibitions.

FC: This is a wondrous phenomenon, that by virtue of the simultaneous interplay of various factors, a totally new reality emerges.

VBA: I’m feeling remorse over displacing those precious beasts. It’s clear your dogs were banished from indoors for my visit, and find this unacceptable.

FC: Gaia! Karma! Stop that! I can’t allow them to come inside, they would want your attention and it would be impossible to talk. And you’re a woman. You know both of those dogs were rescued from dangerous environments before they came to me. Gaia suffered a horrible accident when she was only months old, and was successfully operated on by the Austin Humane Society, but required a prolonged recuperation, and it was a woman, a foster mother, who took care of her during her recuperation. Since she’s been with me I’ve noticed her special affection for women, probably because of her foster mother.

VBA: Do they sleep with you?

FC: Yes.

VBA: Your elevated skill reveals academic training.

FC: I began young. My parents were lovely. They paid for private lessons, in Bolivia.


Fernando Casas, Dinosaurs’ Tracks, 2009, Oil on canvas with hinges, 64” x 114’

VBA: Say something about the repeated motif of the missing head.

FC: It represents the void in our visual field. The source of our perception is a visual blind spot. Consciousness cannot see itself. After years of mapping the visual world, to find that it is incomplete, was a startling and profound discovery. This is an important element in my art.

VBA: To illustrate the visual field must require rigorous observation.

FC: Years of observing and recording. My pictorial investigations of the visual field began in 1974 when I made a radical shift away from non-objective art because I decided there was much new to be found in representational art. In 1976 I began to artistically analyze the visual effects of binocular vision which helped me understand that our visual perception of the world comes from combined inputs from the left and right eyes, from which our mind “chooses” what we actually experience, selects certain things from the two inputs and organizes them into a unified visual experience. With a bit of effort it is possible to see what the mind normally forces us to ignore, such as the peripheral, to which we are unaccustomed to paying attention. My artworks capture these “hidden” visual realities. They suggest that the “linear perspective” window-like portion of the visual field is artificially narrow and ill conceived, and that by paying careful attention, the larger visual world can be perceived. By 1979 I had progressed to depicting the surrounding “spherical” visual field on a flat image with six equidistant vanishing points. It was then I realized it is possible to create an image of everything that visually surrounds us, except of course, of my own head. But it required several more years for me to accept that the visual world is irreparably incomplete.

VBA: Fernando, if the mind edits down to one visual experience two sets of optical input, does that mean it actually creates the reality we perceive?

FC: Yes, reality gets constructed in the mind. The world that we know is the result of the input that comes from “out there” and the peculiar way that our sense organs and our minds grasp and organize this input. Think, for example, of color, let’s say yellow. Vincent van Gogh had the experience of yellow when looking at sunflowers. I ask you, where is this yellow? Surely not in the sunflower itself! A colorblind person would not see the same flower as yellow. If you see the flower at nighttime, under moonlight, it would look gray. Colors only exist in the minds of the sentient beings that have those experiences; out there are only wavelengths of radiation. The mind plays the same kind of role in our understanding of the world as it does with our experiences of color, sounds, etc. Just as we “see” the world only from the human sensory perspective, we can only “understand” the world with our conceptual categories, with our scientific theories. That’s why I say that reality is constituted by the mind and in this sense also exists only in the mind. I intend for my art to shift the viewer beyond the narrow experience of reality to an extra-ordinary experience.

VBA: Not easily, I read some of your published works on the void in our visual field, and learned that the observer is in a paradoxical relationship to it.

FC: This is remarkable. Any attempt to produce a complete depiction of the visual world fails because visual information comes to an end at a place beyond which nothing can be seen, the void or blind spot, which is “the place” occupied by the presence of the mind that experiences that world, by the observer who in principle is not part of her own visual world, but is certainly a necessary condition for its existence. The visual world is necessarily incomplete because it depends for its very existence on the presence of an observer who does not belong to it. In other words we are conscious observers firmly located inside the visual/spatial world that we experience, and also altogether outside of it.

VBA: Is this some kind of new discovery?

FC: Emmanuel Kant, Satre and others formulated theories on the relationship of the self to perceptual experience and Ludwig Wittgenstein held the view that the metaphysical subject is the limit of the visual world. What is novel about my analysis is it rests on pictorial illustration that used an all-encompassing system of visual representation. My mapping the entire structure of surrounding visual space identified the blind spot, showed the visual world to be incomplete and discontinuous, the self to be by necessity a localized absence, both present in and absent from the visual world.

VBA: Quite amusing to see you sniff at convergent linear perspective. Your writings dismiss that faithful system of spatial representation as invalid. How insolent.

FC: It is a limited way of organizing three-dimensional pictorial space on a flat surface, because it fails to take into account a wealth of fascinating visual phenomena that a careful observer finds in the surrounding visual reality. I altered the system to expand its representational capacity, so it allows an observer to represent her entire visual world using a six point non-Euclidian spherical perspective system.


Fernando Casas, Duality: The Labyrinth of Self-Deception (detail), 2013, Graphite on paper, 76” x 42”

VBA: Pictorial investigations of the visual world got you written about in ARTnews. They called your art “hyper-intellectual.”

FC: They said my art teaches our eyes new ways of looking.

VBA: It’s some distance from Montrose, and the wild bamboo was unexpected, but your home is splendidly designed with living space that flows into multiple studios.

FC: I built it myself, with the help of a friend.

VBA: Everything, plumbing and electrical?

FC: I contracted out the septic tank.

VBA: The painting Dinosaurs’ Tracks seems to signal an additional artistic concern. We see the Fernando figure with the missing head to suggest the discontinuity of the visual field, a curved horizon to indicate the curvature of the visual world that we fail to notice, and certainly allusions to dinosaurs speak of time, but you also appear to be contemplating our ultimately mysterious existence.

FC: I place myself sitting on what probably was a muddy riverbed on which dinosaurs walked millions of years ago leaving a superb track of fossilized prints. Needless to say the painting is an invitation to compare us with the dinosaurs. But the comparison is at least on two levels, one obvious and the other not so. The obvious one is that we humans are also just an animal species, part of the evolutionary process and our life is as precarious as those of the dinosaurs. Cracks on the rocks, chasms, volcanic sediments, craters, etc., emphasize this. And all of these too signal the passage of time. The less obvious comparison and a problematic one is between the fossilized holes of the dinosaurs’ tracks and the “hole” that appears in the painting, in the place where my head is.

VBA: In my opinion the painting expresses precisely what you call the “exquisite finitude and fragility” of life. Dead animals and dark planetary gasses make a similar statement in Laocoon, another piece with a “missing head” Fernando figure. You are referencing another void, the existential one, in that before birth and beyond death there is a blank, about which we know nothing. Now you get to answer my favorite question for philosophers, except those overly Thomistic. How do you feel about the fact that we will never know why we exist?

FC: Yes, we do not know why we exist, have no idea where we come from or where we go after death, if anywhere. But the fact that we don’t know this doesn’t imply that we will never know. Perhaps we will. We don’t know that either. But I see here no reason for despair, life is, or at least it can be, fascinating and full of meaning.


Fernando Casas, Spring - God, 2003, Mixed media on wood, 96” x 40”

Fernando Casas (b. 1946) presents Co-Constitutions in Houston, Texas. The Perfection of Time opens at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art on Thursday January 30--opening reception 6-8 pm. The Limit of the Visual World opens at G Gallery on Saturday February 1--opening reception 6-9 pm. Duality opens at Redbud Gallery on Saturday February 1--opening reception 6-9 pm. All images Copyright B 2014 Fernando Casas – Artist, All rights reserved.

Betsy Huete

It was jarring to walk into Sicardi’s downstairs gallery and immediately make sense of the pairing of two seemingly disparate artists: Miguel Ángel Rojas and John Sparagana. Largely conceptual, Rojas often makes work that either consists of or references material of an historically underrepresented social class. Sparagana, on the other hand, while perhaps his process may be unconventional, tends to make work that falls within the realm of conventional painting. So what brings these two together? Surely Sicardi didn’t simply pick a couple of names out of a hat.


El Cuerpo Sutil, Installation view, from sicardi.com 

“El cuerpo sutil” translates in English to “the subtle body.” With that key bit of information the connections quickly start being made: both artists employ time-consuming and painstaking bodily energy to make their work, specifically with their hands. And since both seem to point to historical moments, the exhibition title probably also suggests the kind of body that constitutes a collective remembering. What happens when artists engage in that kind of tug-of-war, a murky battle of recalling, dismissing, and ultimately losing information that nevertheless remains engrained in our collective imagination? Laura Wellen in the brochure that accompanies the show suggests, at least in the case of these two artists, that a kind of empathy forms. “…Both propose a kind of empathy, something slightly unconscious, even physical.” What’s weird about this exhibit is that the artists’ treatment of the materials and even treatment of the subject matter is not only not subtle, it’s rather brutal and insensitive. So much so that it is enticing, although problematic because it is wholly unintentional. What is most offensive about El Cuerpo Sutil is that it isn’t intended to be offensive.


Miguel Ángel Rojas, Por Pan, 2003-2013, Silver thread, banana leaves, corn flour, looped video, Dimensions variable, from sicardi.com

It isn’t entirely clear what exactly Rojas’ installation Por Pan (2003-2013) actually comprises of. The gallery’s material list intimates that the giant rope he has spun was made from the very grass he discovered within the walls amidst the destruction of a Spanish colonial house. Wellen calls it a braided rope that Rojas eventually painted silver, and Rojas’ artist statement claims it to be silver thread. After spending an extended period of time with the work, it appears as though Rojas is probably right. Formally and materially it is spindly, matted, and beautiful: thick, twisting spirals shooting off errant lines, splotched with muted reddish clay. But this homage—a rope that should what? rescue? provide an exit? repurpose itself back into architecture? is instead pinned to the wall, a two-dimensional installation robbed of its conceptual potential. It includes a video on a small flat screen in the lower right corner of Rojas creating the rope, washing himself in reddish clay in an effort to dye his skin the color of the indigenous peoples he is paying homage to (does anyone else find this at least slightly racist?), as well as an offering of banana leaves and corn flour in the lower center. Again, these three elements pinned to the wall neuters its materiality, telegraphing to the viewer how it may show up in her house, screaming to be commodified. And this homage to a low, disenfranchised social caste can be yours for only $70,000! Not that there’s anything wrong with selling work and making money, but the price and presentation seems awfully disingenuous and incongruent with Rojas’ message.


Miguel Ángel Rojas, Por Pan detail, 2003-2013, Silver thread, banana leaves, corn flour, looped video, Dimensions variable, from sicardi.com

John Sparagana, on the other hand, makes work that ought to be flat. Most, if not all, his work for El Cuerpo Sutil comes from his Crowds & Powder series, where he generally took iconic images from magazines ranging anywhere from the Kennedys to protests in Cairo, rubbed them nearly incomprehensible with his fingers, enlarged and printed them several times, often painted over parts in oil color, cut them into tiny squares, and reassembled into large, hand-pixilated images. In the exhibition catalogue of said series, Benjamin Paul claims Sparagana’s intent reaches far beyond the traditional postmodernist notion of hand-pixilation. “…His method forms the basis of a subtle struggle with the dialectical role of images in mediating history” (Benjamin Paul. “Ghosts of History.” Crowds & Powder. Corbett vs. Dempsey. Chicago: 2013. p. 3).


John Sparagana, Crowds & Powder: The Street, 2013, Archival inkjet prints with oil stick, sliced and mixed, on paper, 68”x100,” from sicardi.com

That key word again: subtle. How exactly is any of this subtle? Sparagana’s work may be ghostly and entrancing, the revelation of his process and effort mind boggling, but it isn’t subtle. In fact, Sparagana wants us to know, quite loudly and blantantly, that this is his revisionist take of historical moments, and that we should pay attention to him—which runs counter to Paul’s claim. It seems that Sparagana is less interested is meditating on how images mediate history and more interested in simply mediating history himself. And this raises some pretty interesting questions: what role does the artist have in inserting his hand into, mediating, and generally fucking with our collective remembering? What right does he have? After all, these are our images, our histories, and our traumas.


John Sparagana, Crowds & Powder: The Street, 2013, Archival inkjet prints with oil stick, sliced and mixed, on paper, 68”x100”

A particularly traumatic event Sparagana has taken on is the bombing at the Boston marathon. Crowds & Powder: The Street (2013) depicts a snapshot of the scene—terrified runners and onlookers clamoring for a safe place. Enlarged and hand-pixilated, all the victims have been whited out, centrally revealing an ambulance in the background. While it is certainly lush and disturbing, it begs the question: what exactly is the viewer supposed to take away from this? What fed Sparagana’s impulse to—lovingly, patiently, methodically—chop, mutilate, cover up, erase, and ultimately reify this horrific national moment? It’s this confounding narcissism that makes the work tick, that keeps it interesting. Every other read renders the work slick and sterile.

El Cuerpo Sutil cleverly and somewhat poignantly touches upon the artist’s and even gallery’s role in mediating collective remembering and advocating for and giving voice to impoverished classes. Unfortunately, that poignancy seems completely unintentional.

El Cuerpo Sutil runs at Sicardi Gallery until February 22, 2014.

Robert Boyd

In the science fiction graphic novel Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, most of the world is covered with a highly toxic forest of bizarre gigantic fungi. The artist, Hayao Miyazaki, visualized this forest as a beautiful place with towering forms that look like microscopic fungi made enormous. The scenes set in the forest are the most stunning images in a manga full of arresting artwork.


Hiyao Miyazaki, Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind volume 1, page 6, bottom panel, 1982

I was reminded of these forest images when I sawGarden Objectby the team of Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo, who call their design studio El Ultimo Grito. The artists call Garden Object a combination between an English garden and The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. The colors of the installation were chosen from The Garden of Earthly Delights.


Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510, oil on wood panels

I can see the idea of a creating a bizarre environment or setting like the Bosch painting, but Garden Object differs in a fundamental way from its inspiration. El Ultimo Grito have created towering tree-like structures. Viewers find themselves in a forest-like environment, which is why I thought of Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind. But the first two panels of  The Garden of Earthy Delights is set on a lawn more than a forest. Garden Object encases the viewer from the top. It's not quite a forest canopy, but the structures do tower over the viewers.


El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014, mixed media


El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014, mixed media

The colorful patterns on each of the stalks were made with circular stickers, custom printed for this show. Each sticker has parallel bands of color. Despite the highly geometric pattern that is obviously mass-produced, when the stickers are affixed on an irregular surface overlapping one another, with random orientations, they start to look almost organic. The intense color mitigates this.


El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object stickers, 2014, mixed media

And the funny thing about the stickers is that while from a distance they create a semi-random pattern and seem like elements of pure color, when you look closely at them, each one contains a signature of sorts--a line of text that reads "EL ULTIMO GRITO @ RICE GALLERY 2014."

The use of stickers is interesting and ironic. Their work often involves working in public places. When I think of stickers in public places, I think of visual pollution as people ranging from street artists to marketers cover every flat surface capable of being stuck to with crap, while shop owners and municipal workers perpetually labor to scrape them off. El Ultimo Grito take what is a minor street nuisance and turn it into an integral part of their public artwork.

 
El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014, mixed media

Several of the stalks are topped with circular forms containing video screens. The images on the screens are hummingbirds, which gives this artificial garden a little movement.


El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014, mixed media

There is a room off the main gallery which is used for a small fountain.


El Ultimo Grito, Garden Object, 2014, mixed media

Earlier work along these lines has been sited in outdoor public spaces. These structures are, in essence, elaborate park benches. They are meant to be sat upon, not just looked at.


El Ultimo Grito, installation at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2007 (Mocoloco)


El Ultimo Grito, Mexico City installation, 2013 (FAD)

At the Rice Gallery opening, many of the viewers tried out this functional aspect of the work. But there is something fundamentally different about this work in a gallery and the same work if it had been placed, say, outside Brochstein Pavilion. In Rice Gallery, this is an art object only. The relationship it has with its viewers is more specific and controlled than the relationship it would have as a functional piece of public art. For one thing, most of the people who see it in the gallery are people who are seeking it out--who want to see art qua art. If it had been placed outside in a quad, the interactions would have been less controlled and aestheticized.

Consequently, it is puzzling to me that it is not very different from their genuinely public pieces, such as the very similar public installation they built in Mexico City recently. What they lose by bringing it into a gallery is the broad social engagement that a more public piece has. But what they gain, as installation artists, is the ability to fully use the gallery. But they passed on that. This seems like a lost opportunity. After all, they could have put their sticker patterns on the floor, the walls, the ceiling. I hate to say what an artist should have done because they're the artists, not me. But I will. To make this installation a true environment rather than a sculpture in a grey cube, they should have done something to the floor and walls. Think for example of Gunilla Klingberg's floor and window stickers for Wheel of Everyday Life. Or Wayne White's painted floor and walls for Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep. And there are many other examples of artists using the floors and walls in the history of this gallery.

Garden Object is beautiful and eye-catching, though. It seems ungenerous for me to fault it for not being exactly what I would have liked it to be. Despite my peevish complaints, it's worth going to see, and to sit on.

Robert Boyd



So this thing is happening tonight. The Artist Town Hall meeting at the El Dorado Ballroom. The hosts describe it thus:

The focus of this meeting is to collectively discuss the growing needs of artists living and working in the Houston area. Topics of discussion are open but could include issues such as artist stipends, public art and exhibition opportunities, affordable housing, studios and health insurance. The Town Hall format will be interactive, offering multiple opportunities for participants to offer input and ask questions.

The meeting will be facilitated by three respected Houston artists: Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, Carrie Schneider and Patrick Renner. Their role will be to help the audience identify some of the needs, questions and concerns that the Houston artist community is grappling with today and issues for the future. 

Don't go if you aren't an artist--for example, if you are just a critic.

This is an event facilitated by artists, for artists. If an artist works for a visual arts organization they are welcome to come as their artist self, but NOT as a representative of their organization. 

Bill Davenport offered some possible discussion topics over on Glasstire (as a critic who is also an artist, I think he would be welcome.)

I'm not going to suggest discussion topics, but I will suggest that a large room full of artists (or anyone) is not likely get much done except make a lot of noise. That's why the House of Representatives has all those committees and sub-committees. So that's what I suggest. Artists, figure out the issues that are important to you (and these may be the ones Davenport suggested), then create volunteer committees to investigate each one. Perhaps the goal can be for each committee to produce a slide presentation for their topic. Then in a subsequent meeting, the committees could present their slide presentations Pecha Kucha style.

As for me, I'll be home watching House of Cards. If any artist wants to talk about the meeting afterwards, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at robertboyd2020@yahoo.com .


An earlier gathering of artists: Front Row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian (1942)

Betsy Huete

In its press release, Anya Tish Gallery describes Steve Murphy’s work as “immediate and striking.” No it’s not. His latest exhibition Awakened in Mid-Air peppers the space with the banalities of outdoor, public, modernist sculpture—simplified forms that comprise the backdrop of our lives as we walk along a sidewalk or drive to wherever it is we need to be. Yet Anya Tish has compacted and concentrated this group of work (much of which is either intended to be or could be displayed outside) in the gallery space for our consideration. So it begs the question: is there more to be gleaned here, or is Anya Tish simply providing a forum to broker to collectors’ houses and corporate courtyards?

The press release does, however, rightly depict Murphy’s tangential relationship to Minimalism. While the connections may seem obvious in his reductive, formalist pieces, within minutes of spending time in the gallery it becomes clear that reduction is really the only thing that aligns the two. While Minimalism’s theatricality relies on the bodily and spatial relationship between object and viewer, Murphy’s sculptures are self-referentially dramatic. Curvy and curiously whimsical, the work often bends in on itself, or seemingly emerges from the floor or appears to incisively cut into the wall. This in turn cuts the viewer’s corporeal relation to the work out of the picture. Instead, her eye becomes focused on formal aspects of the work like surface tension, precarious edges, and the relationship to its adjacent architecture. So it seems that, despite all its volume, Murphy’s formal preoccupations often lie more with two-dimensional concerns than three, which is kind of fascinating.


Awakened in Mid-air, Installation view

Just about all of the decisions Murphy has made tell a story that lines up quite nicely with his exhibition title. As large, columnar steel thrusts upward, cartoonishly curving like a fantastical road, and smaller sculptures are bracketed with piercing edges, everything in Awakened in Mid-Air suggests moments of danger and fantasy as one is wrenched into consciousness from sleep. What may be less obvious, although equally if not more important, is how Murphy has addressed the surfaces and how patinas, graphite, lead, and other sealants buttress or detract from that narrative.

For all the objects made of steel, Murphy has applied a reddish patina that gives the work the appearance of premature aging or rusting while also protecting the material, granting it an eternal (or at the very least a long-lasting) life span. It’s Not What You’re Looking at, But What You Think You See (2013) is one such sculpture. A rectangular steel block, It’s Not What You’re Looking at twists ever so slightly, peaking at the top as if the piece itself is yawning and stretching. While the structure may be waking up, the cloudy, maybe even smoky patina suggests a surface reminiscent of a dream. While Murphy’s intentions here are understandable—that he is using both material and surface to embody a state of being in-between—the patina reads as a faux finish, the kind that would likely show up in a suburban Italian restaurant. The surface tension isn’t problematic, however, because it is kitschy; it is distracting and disharmonious with the overall form, creating two simultaneous but disjunctive narratives that detract from rather than buttress each other.


It’s Not What You’re Looking at, But What You Think You See, 2013, Oxidized steel, 108 x 24 x 40 inches.


It’s Not What You’re Looking at, But What You Think You See, Detail, 2013, Oxidized steel, 108 x 24 x 40 inches.

In Murphy’s case, the less he fiddles with the surface, the higher the payoff. About half of the work in Awakened in Mid-Air is made of wood he then covered with lead sheets. Your Enemy’s Tears (2013) is one of his smaller works—a rounded piece with a tip, a large, dense tear drop—resting on the pedestal in a carefully balanced way suggesting that with a tap, it would rock back and forth. Here the form and surface are married in such a manner that harmoniously engenders meaning. As light refracts off the lead surface, it creates subtly prismatic colors that feel ethereal. Instead of asserting control, Murphy simply lets the material do the talking, and it works.


Your Enemy’s Tears, 2013, Lead and wood, 12 x 22 x 27 inches.

But perhaps the most successful surfaces are the ones that don’t cover anything up. Intrigued by the Promise (2014) is mounted in such a way that it appears to be emerging from the wall. Sharp and angular, it feels like a shape-shifting form squeezing through an invisible crack and is now frozen in place. As the viewer approaches the work and courses her eye along the flank, she can spot wooden rings popping out from under the grayish graphite coating. In this instance Murphy has not offered us any illusions: his palimpsestic surface treatment unveils the material underneath. By simultaneously concealing and revealing, he constructs an object that is convincingly both tangible and fantastical. This is important because here the surface treatment embodies, rather than illustrates, the liminality Murphy is truly after.

Intrigued by the Promise, 2014, Graphite and wood, 80.5 x 6.75 x 11 inches.


Intrigued by the Promise, Detail, 2014, Graphite and wood, 80.5 x 6.75 x 11 inches.

Yes, there is something about Awakened in Mid-Air that, at first glance, feels easily dismissible. Give it time. For all its hard, clunky materiality, there are moments that are also whimsical and eye-catching, where sculptures thoughtfully engage the architecture. And when Steve Murphy lets the surfaces speak, that’s when the work really sings.

Awakened in Mid-Air is open at Anya Tish Gallery until March 15, 2014.

Robert Boyd

In 1787, Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton), invented a new art form called "Attitudes," debuting it at a party hosted by William Hamilton, England's ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples.

When [the audience] had assembled, he called them to hush and servants snuffed a few of the candles. In the gloom, they could just catch sight of a female figure draped in white, her hair flowing around her shoulders. As she came closer, they recognized Mrs. Hart, Sir William's pretty, witty mistress, who had been laughing at their jokes, flushed with gaiety, entertaining them with anecdotes about England. But now she was pale and almost ethereally composed. Taking up the shawls that lay at her feet, she began to swathe them around her, to kneel, sit, crouch and dance. They quickly realized that she was imitating the postures of figures from classical myth. First she pulled the shawl over her like a veil and became Niobe, weeping for the los of her children; then, using them to make a cape, she was Medea, poised with a dagger, about to stab. Then she pulled the shawls around her into seductive drapes, becoming Cleopatra, reclining for her Mark Antony.

Almost as soon as they had begun to predict her next pose, she disappeared. They sat openmouthed, as servants relit the candles and offered more wine. (England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton, Kate Williams, 2006)

Hart combined dance training she had received and her experience as a model for painter for George Romney to create her Attitudes. Emma Hart's Attitudes became a sensation for thirty years, especially after Goethe saw them and told others about Hart's new art form.


Erica Mott of La Pocha Nostra performing Corpo Insurrecto

I thought about Emma Hart's 18th century proto-performance art as I watched La Pocha Nostra perform Corpo Insurrecto at Notsuoh on the third night of the Lone Star Performance Explosion. The large open second floor of Notsuoh had two wooden risers on and around which the performance took place. The audience largely stood between the two, switching their attention back and forth between them. One was dominated by Erica Mott, who had two fellow performers, David B. Collins and Thuy-Linh Cornett,  who supported her. The other pedestal mainly featured Roberto Sifuentes, assisted by Jana Whatley.


Roberto Sifuentes with a skinned goat

The reason Emma Hart's Attitudes came to mind was that each of the performers slowly cycled through a series of poses. They moved very slowly and deliberately. They weren't doing things; they were being things. They were performing a series of tableaux vivants against a continuously changing soundtrack that went from the Ride of the Valkyries to grindcore to Supertramp.


Erica Mott and an audience member

At the same time, I was also reminded of this Doonesbury comic strip:


Gary Trudeau, Doonesbury, September 11, 1986

Here Mike Doonesbury, Trudeau's homme moyen sensuel, sees his wife JJ's performance art for the first time. Incomprehension at the antics of performance artists, sometimes bemused, sometimes outraged, was common in the 80s and 90s, culminating perhaps in the rescinding of grants to the NEA four in 1990 and the controversy that followed. Corpo Insurrecto reminded me of these 80s/90s era performances. Perhaps this is because La Pocha Nostra was cofounded by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a notable participant in the 80s-90s performance scene. The costumes worn by Mott and Sifuentes recall the miscellaneous mixture of quasi-ethnic costume worn by Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco in The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–1994). In the recent past, Gomez-Peña has been one of the performers in Corpo Insurrecto. I'm not sure why he wasn't in this particular version of it.


Thuy-Linh Cornett (left) and Erica Mott

One one hand, Corpo Insurrecto is filled with images that amuse and compel. On the other hand, it feels like a performance that checks off the standard tropes of performance art. Hodge-podge costumes? Check. Audience interactivity? Check. Nudity (semi in this case)? Check. Overt sexuality? Check. Disgusting fluids? Check. And so on. Even La Pocha Nostra seems to acknowledge this procession of familiar moves. "How can we remain open, original, porous, funny, critical, without falling to post-ironic jadedness or becoming one more 'packaged product' for international festivals?" How indeed?


Sifuentes and his goat friend

I don't think there is an easy answer to this. Watching a performance by La Pocha Nostra is like reading a new book by an established novelist. Not only will that book contain those aspects of novels that readers have come to expect--prose, characters, plot, a beginning, an ending, etc.--but it will also likely deal with concerns that the author is already known for and be written in the author's familiar style.


Collins, Mott and the audience

In other words, if this performance made you nostalgic for the 90s, it's because there is a direct link between it and the performers who created the ground-breaking performances of the 90s.


Whatley and Sifuentes

I can appreciate this continuous tradition. But this doesn't help with the other problem--the "Mike Doonesbury" problem. The meaning of this series of tableaux is not particularly obvious. Emma Hart never told her audiences what her Attitudes were meant to represent, but she depended on the classical education common of the class of viewers who saw them to fill in the blanks. Perhaps La Pocha Nostra is similarly depending on familiarity from its audience, but if so, I'm the equivalent of an ignorant peasant who has somehow stumbled into a performance of Attitudes. The meanings of the performers' actions and poses were fairly mysterious to me.


Cornett and Mott

Thuy-Linh Cornett occasionally walked around with a cane and a pronounced limp. At one point, she had a piece of cloth sewed into the crotch of her outfit. Erica Mott wore a mask with hugely exaggerated lips and a plastic extension on her tongue. Mott changed into a Mad-Max-style black outfit with an exterior spine and a huge strap on penis. She work a pink mask that resembled Pussy Riot's balaclavas (perhaps in solidarity).


Mott with balaclava and strap-on

David B. Collins wore a suit jacket, dress shirt and tie--nothing else. Except for when he donned a rubber mask (George W. Bush?) and sat in a chair, legs apart so that his penis was visible. People sat on his lap to pose for photos.



Mott and Collins

Robertos Sifuentes, dressed in a torn wetsuit and leg brace, with Meso-American-style markings on his face, posed with a skinned goat carcass. He wrapped his face in leather cord. He held his feet over a tray of lit tea candles. Then he posed with tea candles on a wooden bar resting on his shoulders.


I took this picture of an audience member taking a picture of Cornett taking a picture of Collins and another audience member.

Erica Mott donned a white rubber (?) dress and posed holding three large fish. The fish started leaking fish juice on her. Her facial expressions were somewhere between ecstasy and anguish.


Mott with her fish and Collins with his mask

I list these poses without interpretation because I don't even know where to start. My own reaction was incomprehension, boredom, amusement, and finally a feeling of dramatic completeness. But I am certain that there was much more there.


Collins in a classical pose

The audience was a key part of the performance. The performers seemed to expect people to take photos, and we did. Over the hour and a half-long performance, I am going to say that hundreds--if not thousands--of photographs were taken. Instagram, Twitter and Facebook were flooded with them, even while the performance was happening. This was anticipated by La Pocho Nostra. They wrote, "Is audience participation relevant when pop culture is constantly asking us to participate in meaningless consumerism, and every new technological gadget is asking us to 'talk back'? And whom do we talk back to?" I'm a part of these questions.


The audience between Sifuentes and Mott


Mott and an audience member play with a leather cord


Sifuentes recalls Emma Hart's Attitudes by donning a shawl


A crossbeam of tea candles on Sifuentes' shoulders


Mott covered with fish juice


Sifuentes approaches Mott...

The performers on each of the two pedestals never had any contact with one another until the end of the performance. Roberto Sifuentes carefully wrapped the now dismembered goat in a colorful Mexican blanket then carried it across the room to Mott, still holding her fish. The pair left the room together, leaving Whatley, Collins and Cornett behind. After a series of bizarre tableaux, this ending was surprisingly emotional. Suddenly the performance seemed to be about two lovers, admiring one another from afar and finally joining together.


Sifuentes gives up the goat


Whatley, Cornett and Collins remain behind as Mott and Sifuentes exit

And with that, Corpo Insurrecto was done. It was just what you want and expect from this particular genre of performance art. Within its genre, it is not an avant garde work (although it would probably seem so to the Mike Doonesburys of the world). But perhaps that indicates a maturity of the medium. Performance has reached a stage where there are conventional aspects that can be explored and recombined endlessly. I think Corpo Insurrecto was such a work.

Robert Boyd

VIDA is an organization that supports "women in the literary arts" and has for the past several years been counting how many women are published in and reviewed by literary magazines and journals. The results for 2013 were pretty depressing, as have been most previous years. For instance, The New York Review of Books really doesn't use women writers all that much:



And I guess that might have something to do with the fact that they don't review books by women very much.



Really depressing, especially because I like The New York Review of Books.

If we look at how many men versus how many women posted on The Great God Pan Is Dead, it looks pretty great!



 But not so fast. If we look at it in terms of "posts by women" vs. "post by men," it looks terrible.





The explanation (excuse?) is simple. Out of 272 posts on Pan in 2013, 215 were written by me. While Betsy Huete and Virginia Billaud Anderson contributed 38 posts together (Carrie Schneider only did one--but it was a good one!), Pan is still pretty much my project. (Also thanks here to Dean Liscum and Paul Mullan for their posts--Liscum is responsible for the most popular post in Pan history.)

To be honest, I would rather it not be a solo album with occasional guest vocalists. I'd like more of you writing for Pan. We pay nothing (which can only be justified by the fact that we make nothing). But we offer the opportunity for you to get your writing up on line quick. We want criticism and journalism, as long as it deals with art in Houston and vicinity.

I know there are a bunch of you studying art history at St. Thomas, Rice and the University of Houston. Wouldn't you like to write something that is read by more than just your professor? I invite you to get in touch with me.

All you would be writers, email me at robertwboyd2020@yahoo.com. Pan wants you!

Robert Boyd



Ken Little has a show up at d.m. allison for a few more days. Last weekend, Little played a few songs on the patio of the gallery. Some were originals, like "Simple America," and some were covers like "You Ain't Goin Nowhere," one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. All the band members were artists, too. (That's Ed Wilson on the left. Ken Little is the second from the right.) 

I think more artists should be in bands. I always liked the fact that Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw were in Destroy All Monsters before lighting out to CalArts. I just got an excellent CD of Jack Early songs (aided by Dean and Britta). When you encounter a visual artist who is also a musician, you wonder what the relationship between the music and the art is. Little's music comes out of the country/Americana/singer-songwriter realm, which I see as having its ultimate source in Bob Dylan. And Little is the right age (born 1947) to have grown up hearing songs like "Like a Rolling Stone" when they first showed up on the radio. But let's look at his art.


Ken Little, Wolf, bronze, 7 x 9 x 10 inches


Ken Little, Bear, bronze, 12 x 13 x 15 inches

This show consists mainly of sculptures of animal heads that have the appearance of masks. They look a bit like native American sculpture, and the forms are simplified and somewhat cartoonish. They're delightful.


Ken Little, Hare, bronze, 23 x 22 x 16 inches


Ken Little, Ape, bronze, 13 x 10 x 14 inches

Little indicates eyes and mouth through holes in the the bronze, which is what makes these heads seem mask-like. But he uses this technique on pieces that are obviously not masks.


Ken Little, left to right: House, Please and Soar, bronze, 4 1/4 x 4 3/4 x 4 1/2 inches; 4 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 4 inches; 6 x 6 x 5 inches

What Little demonstrates with some of these pieces is something cartoonists have long realized--all it takes to anthropomorphize an object are two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. This seems like a simple truth, but it's a powerful one. His bronze open hand is a beautiful thing, but the face on it gives in an uncanny feeling.

Not that the work here is unsettling. On the contrary, it is amusing and warm. These animals and anthropomorphized objects seem like friends. In that way, they are like Little's band--a gathering of old friends, playing amusing, lovely songs.


Ken Little, Blow Bunny, bronze, 8 x 5 x 5 inches


Ken Little on guitar

"So I [...] fielded calls from functionaries in Scandinavia, Asia, Central Europe, and the Middle east. They offered to fly me business class to their native lands, put me up in hotel rooms with balconies, and provide drivers for my tours of government-approved art. I politely declined these junkets. Curators, being certified sleazebags, may do this sort of thing; art critics may not--because it's not right."

Dave Hickey, "Idiot," reprinted in Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste

Robert Boyd

Every Year, the Hunting Art Prize is given to some lucky painter from Texas. The prize is $50,000. Needless to say, tons of folks enter. The Hunting Prize people have just sent out letters telling artists whether they have been selected to be finalists. The winner will be announced May 3 at a gala hosted by Hunting PLC, an oil and gas service company.

The prize has garnered some controversy in the past, but it has also given prizes to some excellent artists who probably really appreciated the cash! Previous winners are Francesca Fuchs (2006), Michael Tole (2007), Wendy Wagner (2008), Robin O'Neil (2009), Lane Hagood (2010), Leigh Ann Hester (2011), Michael Bise (2012) and Marshall K. Harris (2013). 

Several of the finalists this year have shared their work on Facebook. I thought the pieces looked pretty good; I suspect the judges will have a tough time deciding. Here are a few of them.


Cary Reeder, High Noon,acrylic on canvas, 30 x 38 inches

Cary Reeder's minimalist clapboard houses are always appealing to me. She recently had a great solo show at Lawndale.


Catherine Colangelo, Giant Quilt Square #10, gouache and graphite on paper, 28" x 28"

I have seen nice work by Catherine Colangelo at the late, lamented Darke Gallery. This piece looks excellent.


David Smith, Tropical Storm, Veracruz, Gulf of Mexico

David Smith's Tropical Storm, Veracruz, Gulf of Mexico is an unexpectedly 19th-century-style entry. It's refreshing to see it included.


Hannah Celeste Dean, Re-Veiled

Hannah Celeste Dean calls her work "haunting but not ghostly," but I think "ghostly" is an excellent word to describe Re-veiled.


Hogan Kimbrell, Conjure, oil on canvas, 54 x 54 inches

I've seen a couple of excellent paintings by Hogan Kimbrell at past Lawndale Big Shows. The double image here is a bit different from what I've seen before. But his subject matter--beautiful women--seems constant.


John Adelman, 61,988,ink on panel, 38 x 30 inches

John Adelman premiered these architectural process drawings at a recent show at Nicole Longnecker Gallery. I've long admired his rigorous, obsessive work.


Joseph Cohen, Proposition 360, Pigment, diamond dust, and varnish on birch 29" x 24"

You can see another piece by Joseph Cohen (quite different from Proposition 360) at the CAMH through March 23. Cohen has been one of my favorite Houston painters for a while.


Lee E. Wright, The Captain of Industry, oil and ink on prepared paper, 32 x 44

I don't really know anything about Lee E. Wright, but based on his website, he appears to be a portraitist--an honorable specialization.


Saralene Tapley, Flourish, acrylic on watercolor paper, 29 x 41 inches

I saw this piece by Saralene Tapley in last year's Big Show. I believe it's a portrait of her fellow artist, Bryan Keith Gardner.

According to various sources, there are typically between 100 and 150 finalists. Out of that crowded field there can be only one winner. Any bets on who it will be?

Robert Boyd

So for the past two nights I have been sick in bed with a nasty cold. That means I missed a bunch of art openings I wanted to see and I regret that. Next weekend will be a time for catching up. But being sick gives one time to read. I read slowly when I'm sick. My brain doesn't work at peak efficiency when I'm sneezing and coughing. That's why my preferred sick reading is unchallenging stuff--science fiction, old Marvel comics, etc. But not always. Sometimes I catch up on my art reading. During the day, I'll see some article online that looks interesting but don't have time read to right at that moment. I'll email it to myself for future reference. So since I was sick, I dug up a couple of those pieces in my "to read" folder.

I've been interested in "new casualism" since I first heard the term. The terms was coined by Sharon Butler, and as I understood the term, it seemed like a description for some painting I was seeing around Houston by certain young artists like Dylan Roberts and Brandon Araujo and others. But the definition of "new casualism" was so broad that it was hard to say where its boundaries lay.


Dylan Roberts, The New God


Brandon Araujo, untitled, 2013

So I was hopeful when Sharon Butler returned to the subject in a new article, "The Casualist Tendency" published on her blog, Two Coats of Paint. Of casualist paintings (she has dropped the "new"), she writes:

There is more to the studied, passive-aggressive irresoluteness of these canvases – which often leave large sections unpainted – than meets the eye. They reflect a concern with imperfection, extending beyond traditional Bauhaus principles of good design to the unfinished, the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. And, to my mind, they refreshingly embrace almost anything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue – including formal artistic failure. 

But she acknowledges some of the criticism of this work, including the fact that "some old-school painters have branded the most obvious approaches ‘crapstraction.'" Casualist art is said to lack craft and attention to detail. It feels offhand, easy and like student work.

Butler defends it in part by pointing out that the same criticisms could be applied to many artists in the past (and have been). She refers, for example, to the older artists Rafeal Rubenstein wrote about in his article "Provisional Painting", as well as to the "bad painters" of the 90s (but not to the "bad painters" of the 70s) and even to Matisse. She refers to such painters as Elizabeth Murray (one of my all-time favorites) and Ree Morton who in the 1970s "countered the macho posturing of the minimalists by working from an intimate point of view that embraced messy everyday detail."

These all strengthen her case, but unlike the 70s when Elizabeth Murray seemed genuinely oppositional, I don't see an underlying reason for casualist painting to exist. You know how the modernist story goes: first this happened, and then this happened in opposition to the first thing, or building off the first thing, or building off some current in the culture at large--and repeat. That progressive meta-narrative of successive theories has collapsed under its own weight, but still the question remains--why does an artistic tendency like casualism exist? Butler doesn't try to answer that question in this short post, but I hope she's thinking about it because casualism is a real thing and worth thinking about.

But for casualism to survive as an idea, it needs to survive against criticism such as "Provisional Painting, Three Hypotheses" by Alan Pocaro published in Abstract Critical, a web magazine devoted to writing about abstract art. (One thing I love about the internet is that there can be online publications for every aspect of art, no matter how specific or obscure--abstract painting, for example, or art in Houston.)

In this short piece, Pocaro does what Sharon Butler doesn't do in either of her pieces on casualism. He offers up a theory of why it exists as an approach to abstract painting. In fact, he offers three theories, each from a different point of view. First is that "gifted writers" like Butler and Rubenstein have the ability to imagine something into being by virtue of their words. They can write eloquent praise of bad painting and be convincing. As a writer, I am perversely pleased by Pocaro's praise the power of words, but I don't quite believe it. Criticism--writing--seems to me to be at its weakest point in the history of art. This is born out empirically in Don Thompson's research in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. (Or maybe not; here I am writing about art writing.) Anyway, I don't think he completely believes it either.

Instead, I think Pocaro probably would give greater support to his second thesis. He wrote about students he taught who were very cool people but did bad art.

Much of it looked “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling” and it frequently displayed “a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” that didn’t just court failure, it was set to marry it.

While Raphael Rubenstein might have called this work “Provisional Painting” and Sharon Butler may have dubbed it “The New Casualism”, at the Art Academy, a few adjunct instructors and I had a different term for it: Poseur-Art. Far from “reassessing basic elements like color, composition, and balance, based on 1920s-vintage Bauhaus principles” these students probably never understood those concepts in the first place, nor did they care. Much of the work appeared “causal” and “dashed-off” because it was, often moments before a group critique.

The quotes he embeds into the second paragraph are from Rafael Rubenstein and Sharon Butler. He suggests that this conception of art students "posing" as artists has really gone pro. "Is it really such a leap to go from Duchamp’s art-as-intention, to art-as-attitude?" he asks.

This seems very old fuddy-duddy. But I'm an old fuddy-duddy myself, and sometimes when I look at a work like some in the recent Dylan Roberts show at Scott Charmin, I wonder if it's just lazy, deliberately dumb work (the Pocaro reaction ) or if there is something interesting happen that I am struggling to understand (closer to the Butler position). The fact that I have these conflicting thoughts is what keeps me involved with this work. Roberts is an artist I am keenly interested in.

Pocaro's third hypothesis is that this rebirth of abstract painting, along with attendant theories about it or attempts to place it within a new school, is simply nostalgia. Holland Cotter alluded to this in his article in the New York Times last month, "Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex." Holland's bitter piece was widely passed around via social media. He was mainly attacking the crazy world of the ultra-rich art trade--something fairly alien to most of the artists and even most of the gallerists I know. But we're in Houston, not the New York art world that Cotter inhabits.

The place of abstract painting as nostalgia was just an aside, but I recall being thunderstruck when I read it.

Roughly since the end of the multicultural, postmodern 1990s, we’ve watched new art being re-Modernized and domesticated, with painting the medium of choice, abstraction the mode of preference. Together they offer significant advantages. Paintings can be assembly-line produced but still carry the aura of being hand-touched. They can be tailored to small spaces, such as fair booths. Abstraction, especially if color is involved, can establish instant eye contact from afar. If, in addition, the work’s graphic impact translates well online, where stock can be moved eBay style, so much the better. 

Pocaro isn't making this economic argument. His argument is that trying to invent movements in inherently a mistake.

This vaunted “re-birth” [of abstraction], hailed across the art-world, is merely another manifestation of the wider cultural nostalgia industry; a longing for the look, feel, and glories of the past in a backward-looking present thoroughly corrupted by indifference and cynicism. Since we cannot imagine what a future for abstraction might actually look like, a bevy of painters mine the past, adopting desiccated gestures as if there were meaningful aesthetic victories at stake. But there aren’t.

This sounds pretty much like Cotter so far. But then he adds:

There’s no reason to give up painting, but there are good reasons to stop making claims on its behalf. Disquisitions on “new developments” in abstract painting –or any kind for that matter- make for good copy, but they have the side effect of keeping last century’s spurious theories on life-support. The old arguments of modernism and post-modernism are worn-out, unproductive and irrelevant to the art of the 21st century. It’s time we set aside old habits and seek new avenues for production and new paradigms for discussion.

In a way this sounds like he's saying, "Stop writing down your thoughts about art." (A slightly weird stance for visual artist/art writer to take!) But I think he is misrepresenting Butler's reason for writing what she did. Butler is, like Pocaro, a painter herself. A painter who is also a prolific critic is not someone I'd ever call a poseur, whatever I thought of the quality of her work (about which I have no opinion because I've only ever seen reproductions online). As a painter, Butler writing about a tendency she has observed in painting strikes me as a way for her to understand her own practice within the artistic community in which she resides.

I wrote this to help myself understand a tendency in art that undeniably exists. This tendency needs greater explication (I completely disagree with Pocaro in this regard) and more criticism. In a sense, I want people like Butler and Pocaro to be in a dialogue, and by dialogue I mean a civilized, learned bare-knuckles brawl. This probably means people curating shows of this kind of work with the explicit intent of showing casualist paintings, followed by vigorous criticism that is unafraid to to attack the premises. I want to see a critical language to talk about this work evolve.

Dean Liscum

The second Houston International Performance Art Biennale (a.k.a. Lonestar Explosion) took place from Thursday, February 20 through Saturday February 22, 2014. During the festival organized by Julia Claire Wallace,Jonatan Lopez and Ryan Hawk, many local, regional, national, and international performance artists converged on Houston in a marathon of performances.


Jessica Santone at the CAM


Autumn Hays interviewing Jill McDermid and Erik Hokanson at the CAM 

They lectured at local universities (Sam Houston State and University of Houston), held a panel discussion at the CAMH, performed at such venues as Box 13, the Art League, and Notsuoh. While performing, some got dirty;


Dirty Dancing by Hilary Scullane 


Making the Perfect Line #2 by Josh Urban Davis 

some got naked;


Kristen Danae Keilman, Bound


Utero by Abel Azcona 


For Gloria by Emilio Rojas 

some got cold;


Romper La Noche by Carlos Martiel

some got blue;


Untitled by Nestor Topchy 

some got exploited, and some got injured and taken to the emergency room.

By the final performance, a few personal boundaries may have been violated, some psyche's may have been damaged, and some preconceived notions/prejudices may have died. Which is what is supposed to happen because those are some of the roles that performance art plays in its relationship with its audience.

I attended the entire festival and while I didn't see every performance, I witnessed most of them. Over the next couple of weeks/months, I'll recount what I experienced, share what I saw, and discuss how I interpreted it. And you can take it or leave because after an explosion what else is left but debris and impressions.

Robert Boyd

I haven't done one of these in a while, but this house popped up on Swamplotand caught my eye. It's on Morrison in Woodland Heights, and it is chock full of art. The people who live there (apparently Stephen and June Barth, according to HCAD) obviously love their art--but the thing is, I can't identify any of it. What about you? (UPDATE: I've been informed that most of this art is by June Barth.)



I noticed they had Texas Artists Todayartfully angled on the table in the foreground, indicating their interest in contemporary art. And on the wall are several very colorful paintings.



Color is the main thing. It looks like a lot of their paintings are by one person--but who?



The constellation of glass objects on the far wall is very pretty.





This living room was photographed from several angles--all filled with paintings.






I was very intrigued by the three nocturnal (?) paintings recessed in the white molding.



So we have a house very carefully and deliberately filled with art--art seems important to the owners. But who are the artists? Any ideas? Let me know in the comments.

Betsy Huete

From the early 1990s up until today, Lori Nix has built dioramas. She then photographs them and scraps her creations, the work thus existing solely as the photographic staging or evidence of the scene. Lush and excruciatingly intricate, each diorama takes, on average, seven months to complete. So while many artists will complete a series of work in a time span of say, a year, Nix will spend about four to five years on a single series. Several works from The City, her most recent and in-progress series, are currently on display at G Gallery in the Heights.

Throughout her oeuvre, Nix has displayed a serious preoccupation with the macabre, be it natural disasters, flirtations with death, or other subtle suggestions of violence. The City is no different: each photograph reads as a snapshot, a clue to a grander post-apocalyptic narrative. And here it seems Nix has prepared a giant gumbo pot of our basest instincts and latent desires, images that seem to either fall between or conflate the pleasure principle and the death drive.


Subway, 2012 (from lorinix.net)

The Laundromat (2008) is one such example. It would be hard to suppress the squealing glee one would feel at the thought of reaching through the image, grasping the glass dryer doors with oversized thumb and forefinger, opening and closing repeatedly. Or slipping the miniature flannel shirt off its hanger, dressing instead one’s pinky finger, playing finger puppets with the same reckless abandon of a four year old. But it isn’t any old laundromat: it is a microcosmic representation of our ultimate and impending horror, a snapshot of our society—or rather the detritus of it—once we’ve been wiped off the face of the earth. But somehow none of it feels scary. It instead feels like a release, or even a relief that finally the world can go back to what it was doing before we were there to screw it all up. That lack of fear is probably due mostly to that sense of removal, a knowingness that this is Nix crafting and arranging models, a safe and passive witnessing of our demise.


The Laundromat, 2008 (from lorinix.net)

But although they are obviously models, that and we know the work only exists as photographs, the shots are all zoomed in and presented largely, telling the viewer that they are to be seen and treated as life-sized cityscapes. It’s a delightful confusion: as omniscient voyeurs eavesdropping in on the apocalypse, we aren’t sure if we’re supposed to be giants or scaled down and relegated to a surreal, faux landscape. Because of this, Nix has created a sort of revolving door of engagement, opening and slamming shut entry points into the work. It is this fluctuation that is the most exciting and generative aspect of the series.


Chinese Take-out, 2013 (from lorinix.net)

Sweetly but sickly satisfying, the gallery write-up compares Nix’s work to staring at a car wreck, albeit twenty-seven of them. And that’s the main problem of the work: yes, car accidents are entrancing and they momentarily allow us to ponder our mortality, but where does that leave us once we’ve passed the scene of destruction, only to return to our normal driving? It seems irrelevant to discuss any of the other work because they are all essentially the same piece over and over and over again. Simply swap “Laundromat” for “control room” or “museum of art” and there will still be an identical equation: cute + eerie = fun to look at. But after all, this is clearly a series and these images are obviously intended to piece together snapshots of a larger story. Can it not just be that? Is it fair to put that much pressure on the work? To ask more of it?


Control Room, 2010 (from lorinix.net)

Maybe not. But it begs the question: what is the point? Shouldn’t there be more to gather from each of these photographs individually than the idea that Nix made all these different iterations because she enjoys them and they are fun? It seems that Nix has hit a nerve; by conjuring up uncomfortable human desires in a very tangible way, she has exhumed and thus revived seriously fertile territory. Unfortunately, posing the work in series devolves them into small spectacles and entertaining one-liners.

The City runs until March 30, 2014 at G Gallery.

Robert Boyd

There is a little train in Hermann Park. Hermann Park has had train for decades (I rode it when I was a whippersnapper), but this is an all-new train--somewhat bigger (it can accommodate wheelchairs and strollers now) and the track is longer. Now they are also installing a lot of new art for one year as part of a celebration of the centennial of the park. Not all of it has been installed yet (there will be pieces by Louise Bourgeois, Ugo Rondinone, Sharon Englestein and Orly Genger--but not yet), but you can see all the new art that's up--as well as art that's been there for a long time--from the train.

I got on the train at a station near Miller Theatre. The first piece of art you see is Atropos Key by Hannah Stewart (1928-2010) on top of the hill in front of the theater.


Hannah Stewart, Atropos Key, 1972, cast bronze

This sculpture has been keeping watch from this hill for 42 years. For me it recalls surrealist sculpture, and with the Greek mythological reference (Atropos is one of the fates), it has a Jungian thing going on.


Hannah Stewart, Atropos Key, 1972, cast bronze

 I like Atropos Key a lot. This abstract female figure, watching down both sides of the hill--into the theater and over towards Main Street, is a comforting presence.


Yvonne Domenge, Wind Waves, painted bronze

The next piece you see is one of the temporary pieces. Wind Waves by Yvonne Domenge is another bronze sculpture. Atropos Key feels hand-made and feels like it belongs where it is. That's probably because I've been seeing it there for so long, but the contrast between it and Wind Waves couldn't be more obvious. Originally shown at the Vancouver Biennial in 2009-2011, Wind Waves is a piece of plop art that has no particular relationship to the location it happens to be occupying for a year or two. It's a generic beautiful object, eye-catching and pretty but empty.  I don't hate it--it's too generic in fact to invite any emotion at all.



Next up is the Pioneer Memorial at one end of the reflecting pool. This is also pretty generic, but it's the kind of thing you expect to see in a city's central municipal park.



By the way, this message in the train really applies to your whole life.



There us an area by the playground where two sets of tracks run parallel. We will return on the other track.



The park was full of people on Saturday. Families, kids, teenagers, joggers, strollers, cops (lots of them for some reason) and this gentleman taking a nap near the intersection of Main and Cambridge.



Then the train approaches a green shed--the location of the next piece of art.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation

Trenton Doyle Hancock created a piece, Destination Mound Town,  specifically for this site. It's meant to be seen from the moving train, and it is especially meant to be seen by kids. (But adults can dig it. I wanted to ride the train again to see more details.)


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Destination Mound Town, 2014, vinyl installation

When we exited the tunnel, the kid behind me shouted, "Cool!" That is the perfect critical judgment.




Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks

As the train crosses McGovern Lake, you come across the next work of temporary art, an untitled twig building made by Patrick Dougherty and 150 volunteers. Like Hancock's piece, this seems like a perfect piece for the park. It's interactive (you can enter the building) and likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of park-goers. Especially kids. In fact, people who interact it may not see it as a piece of art at all.


Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks


Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks


Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks



Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks


Patrick Dougherty, untitled, sticks

To me, it's obviously a piece of art. The way the saplings are made to flow in certain directions are clearly esthetic decisions. But I don't mind it if other people see it instead as kind of an elaborate piece of playground equipment. (I don't know if Patrick Dougherty would agree.)



Now we cross by the other end of the reflecting pool, where we can see the Sam Houston Monument (1924) by Enrico Filiberto Cerracchio. Bronze monuments to hero/founders are the ultimate municipal art cliche, but I'd feel something was lacking if a park like Hermann Park didn't have one. It helps identify the park as a civic space. And Sam Houston was a cool guy.



The name of this train is the Dr. Jack Express. I have no idea who Dr. Jack is.


Jim Love, Portable Trojan Bear, 1974, pine and steel

Jim Love'sPortable Trojan Bear has been here since 1984. This is another piece that seems to waver between being an artwork and being a piece of playground equipment. Like so much of Love's work, it's cute and lovable--qualities that probably kept him from being taken seriously as an artist outside of Houston. But Houston loves him--you can see a couple of his pieces next door at Rice University, the wonderful plane at Hobby Airport, and until very recently, a lovely giant red jack at the Menil.


Jim Love, Portable Trojan Bear, 1974, pine and steel

And that's it. All photos were taken from the train in motion--I apologize if a few are a bit fuzzy and poorly composed. I hope the additional sculptures being installed for this centennial celebration will also be visible from the train. I'd love another excuse to ride it again.
 

Robert Boyd

"[South Carolina state] lawmakers voted Monday against restoring $70,000 taken from the budgets of the College of Charleston and University of South Carolina-Upstate for assigning a couple of gay-themed books to freshmen.

"Now everyone gets to play.

"On Tuesday, the House will decide whether to withhold $1 million from each public college until they ban using "pornographic content" (definition TBD) in classes and requiring students to take a class that includes a nude model." ["MORNING BUZZ: S.C. House budget bull's-eye shifts to 'pornographic content,' nude modeling," Andrew Shain and Jamie Self, The State, March 11, 2014]

Dean Liscum

Opening night of the Houston Performance Art Biennalle was at Box 13 and it began with a set of simultaneous performances by the Houston-based performance art collective Continuum and coalesced by the title Bound.

From the entrance, I could see several performance in progress. None of the performances collided or collaborated. Rather, each neatly and quietly transpired within the confines of its assigned space, its invisible performance borders. Nikki Thornton's piece immediately grabbed my attention because it was both such a spectacle, but also not at all.

Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

At the front of Box 13's large open space, Thornton, dressed in all white, sat on a white sheet on the floor with a pigs head between her legs. With a needle and bright red thread, she methodically sewed the pigs lips together.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

The piece was performed in silence. No music. No humming. No talking. Only the sound of her hands working the snout into position and the thread pulled through the flesh. She didn't acknowledge the onlookers or affect an attitude of disgust or disdain or desire toward the pig. She completed the task with an air of detachment.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

The white clothing, the placement of the pigs head between her legs, the blood lent to the work a visually superficial-sexual, possibly virginal quality. Perhaps, if this were the only performance in the space and it occurred on a dais, it would feel sexual or sacred. But it isn't, so it plays out profanely on an old linoleum floor in the corner.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

It feels familiarly uncomfortable. When I was may be 8 and used to run through the aisle of K-Mart playing hide and seek, inevitably I would come across a woman and child. She would be squatting in the middle of the aisle breast feeding the child or changing it's diaper or spanking it's exposed ass. She might make eye contact or she might not but she wouldn't stop. She would simply press on until the deed was done.

Robert Boyd

This is a trailer for an upcoming movie about the Chicago Imagists. It will premiere in Chicago in May.

 
HAIRY WHO & THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS - Official trailer from Pentimenti Productions on Vimeo.

The Chicago Imagists were a group of painters in the 60s and 70s who did highly stylized, often grotesque non-abstract paintings. They were frightfully out-of-step with what was happening in New York, where art history was being written. The best known of them are probably Ed Paschke and Roger Brown, and the Hairy Who (including Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum) is the most well-known sub-group of this movement.


Ed Paschke, Hop Head, 45 x 60 inches, oil on canvas, 1970 

I first became aware of them in the early 80s when I was taking a class from William Camfield called "Art Since the 40s." He showed just two slides of this work, and one, by Jim Nutt, caught my eye. I ended up writing my paper for the class on the Hairy Who. I wish I still had a copy of that paper, but I'm sure I'd be embarrassed by it now.

What I didn't realize at the time was that this was a local movement. It was a Chicago thing. These artists all knew each other and were all influenced by one another. There were local institutions (art spaces and galleries, of course, but also schools and bars and living rooms) that facilitated a sharing of ideas. This scene had its connectors who brought artists together and helped make things happen (Don Baum, for example). And I'm fascinated by how the mechanics of such a scene.

Over time I've come to realize that what happened in Chicago has happened in other places. Los Angeles is an obvious example. All these regional scenes have suffered from being mostly outside the official canon of art history--just two slides in an art history class. The whole multi-museum series of exhibits under the umbrella of Pacific Standard Time in 2011 and 2012 was an attempt by Los Angeles to boldly claim its place in art history.

I'm committed to Houston's art--what its artists are making today and its art history. I know there are plenty here who worry about Houston being willfully provincial and inward looking. I don't really think this is true. Houston artists have as much connection to the world as anyone (and given the fantastic accessibility of people and information due to the internet, we have way more connection to the art world than artists in the 60s and 70s did). We get a new infusion of artists from elsewhere every year because of the Core Program. In any case, I now think being provincial is good--if it leads to art scenes like the Chicago Imagists or the L.A. artists who arose from the Ferus Gallery scene.

It goes without saying, then, that I am really looking forward to seeing Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists.

Paul Mullan


René Magritte, The Memoirs of a Saint, 1960 (The Menil Collection)

In a catalog essay for the major 2006 exhibition “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images”, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michel Draguet flatly states that the artist “contributed decisively to the development of what would become known as postmodern theory”. Among these theoretical concerns are, of course, the historically constructed and variable character of representational apparatuses – including painting – and those apparatuses’ impact on the accessibility, for us, of objective reality. This has been a persistent and controversial point in debates around postmodernism.

“Memories of a Voyage: The Late Work of René Magritte” is currently on exhibition at, and organized by, the Menil Collection and is derived primarily from the museum’s large, permanent holdings of the artist’s post-1940 work. Assistant Curator Clare Elliott, with Menil Director Josef Helfenstein, curated. The show complements “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938”, which has been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil, and the Art Institute of Chicago and is also now in Houston. Viewers have the opportunity to, once again, reexamine these ubiquitous images and the objects upon which they are based.

In western painterly conventions, the curtain has been integrally related to the window, posited as a transparent opening into the world. The curtain in The Memoirs of a Saint (1950) is not hung flat and neither reveals nor conceals a window; instead – violating the laws of gravity – it rests vertically in an otherwise-empty, stage-like setting. A low light radiates from the left side of the “stage”, beyond the boundary of the canvas; the curtain casts shadows, thus confirming the floor. However, no ceiling can be discerned; the background quickly darkens, but the intersection of the floor and a rear wall is not apparent.


René Magritte, The Invisible World, 1954 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The Invisible World (1954) is similarly staged. A strong light comes from the left foreground, rather than from the seascape seen through the open balcony doors, and casts a sharp shadow to the right of the boulder mysteriously occupying the room.

The red, pleated curtain in The Memoirs of a Saint wraps around an empty space on the “stage”, creating a cylinder that is open and into which the viewer can peer. As with much of Magritte’s work, this key figure – the open drum – is centered; lies in the medium distance; and occupies the bulk of the canvas surface. Its inner side, unexpectedly, is a flat image of blue sky and sea. The top right corner of the curtain is folded back, indicating the landscape continues as the inner side wraps around and out of sight of the viewer. Curiously, any imputed light from the bright interior sky does not cause the curtain edges to cast shadows.

The Memoirs of a Saint is – whatever Magritte’s expressed opposition to symbolism – an allegory about the process of representation. The source of the landscape image is indicated nowhere; there exists no transparent window or open curtain which would reveal an outside objective world. So, the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis such a world is rendered as indeterminate. There is only the image directly inscribed on the curtain itself, an apparatus actively constructing our understanding of this hypothesized world.


René Magritte, Evening Falls, 1964 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The key figure in Evening Falls (1964) is a picture window (a single pane of glass, rather than multiple panes supported by wooden separators or muntins, which can impede a view). The setting is a domestic space: the curtains are drawn back on both sides of the window and held in place with sashes; and there is a skirting board running across the exterior wall. The large pane has shattered inwards, with fragments scattered on the floor underneath the sill. However, those sizable fragments unexpectedly still hold the image that can be seen through the jagged hole in the window: a landscape, complete with castle ruins atop rolling hills in the far distance and a sun.

Contra postmodernist readings, there is, in this case, more than a hint of traditional realist epistemologies. The source of the image is available through the damaged window pane; source and image do not merely correlate, but are identical. Moreover, the upper sun is insistently centered in Magritte’s work, in the window, and in the break. It is as if the force of the real, that sun, has guaranteed not only the appearance and veracity of that representation but simultaneously ruined and frozen its apparatus.

The duplication of the landscape is, of course, analogous to the afterimage created by looking at an intense light source, such as the sun. Further, the human eye is unable to directly perceive the true form of the sun, as such a extended gaze would destroy sight. In Evening Falls, that inability is allegorized by way of the suns’ abstracted, geometric form, a modeling strikingly different from the thin, illustrative style that Magritte used in the rest of the artwork and throughout most of his long, mature period. Each disk is a perfectly circular and thick, smooth application of bright orange oil paint that sits atop the surface of the canvas, as if it could be peeled off like a sticker. This effect is strengthened by the orange, which, relative to the artist’s typically subdued and recessive color scheme, projects forward from that surface. (All of this is clearer, only when the actual work is seen in a gallery, not merely in digital reproduction.) The landscape is brightly and evenly illuminated with a light that emanates from elsewhere.


René Magritte, Memory of a Journey III, 1951 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The face of a background cliff extends all the way past the top of a set of open balcony doors in Memory of a Journey III (1951). The room’s floor, doors, and traditional still life elements -- the table, book, fruit bowl, wine bottle, and drinking glass – have unexpectedly petrified into the same craggy rock seen from the balcony.

Those boulders perilously stacked atop one another should be large, thus signaling a background in the far distance. Their color scheme and tinting, though, is almost homogeneous with that of the foreground, suggesting instead a background in the near distance. In conjunction with the absence of a horizon line, this has a tendency to flatten out the composition and is evocative of modernism’s definition of painterly specificity. This also gives the interior a sense of claustrophobia. Inside and outside are illuminated from the left by a similar, low light, as if both occupy the same compressed space.

The balcony doors would normally act as an aesthetic site, framing a view of nature and separated from that nature. In this case, conversely, nature has rushed forward from its aesthetic representation and seized the entire world. The question of the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis an objective reality is mooted.


René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933 Oil on canvas (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

Featured in the “Mystery of the Ordinary” galleries is The Human Condition (1933). In another domestic space, a painted canvas is perched atop an easel and parallel to a picture window behind it. The viewpoint of The Human Condition is not perpendicular to those two planes, but at a slight angle from the right and at a medium distance. The stretcher’s right side – raw and white, with a row of nail heads – is visible; its left side visually, from our standpoint, overlaps the a narrow section of the left curtain. Seen through the window – those parts not blocked by the canvas centered before it – is a daytime landscape: a blue sky with clouds, a hill in the far distance, vegetation, and a foreground path. The painting-within-a-painting itself depicts more clouds and vegetation, the remainder of the path and hill, and other elements which align neatly with those of the image visible through the glass at the rear.

At first pass, then, the landscape is seemingly “completed”, hinting yet again at a realist epistemology. This completion-effect can occur, though, only from the perspective of the imaginary viewer just to the right of, and at a medium distance from, the easel; from any other perspective in the imaginary domestic space, the elements in the canvas would not align with the window’s image. Conversely, the canvas, if it was fully composed strictly from that imaginary viewpoint, would have to include the sliver of curtain blocked by the stretcher’s left side; but that is missing. So, the canvas is derived from two incompatible positions. .

As with The Memoirs of a Saint, the source of the canvas’ image exists nowhere, given that portions of the window are blocked. In that sense, the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis objective reality is again rendered as indeterminate. Further, that representation has no possible, direct referent, given its derivation from two positions unable to occupy the same place in any “real” world. This is, of course, one of the liberties long taken by painting.


René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929 Oil on canvas (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

Lastly, included in the show is 1952 gouache-on-paper version of The Treachery of Images, made famous by Michel Foucault’s equally inescapable essay This Is Not a Pipe. Foucault’s little book has been crucial, particularly in the way that it elliptically gestures towards the socially constructed character of images and their disjunction vis-à-vis language, for current postmodernist readings of Magritte.

The selections in “Memories of a Voyage” are mostly distant from the concerns of such readings. Evening Falls is concerned with longstanding questions about the limitations of human perception; The Human Condition, about the history and conventions of painting. Such dialogues were present in western art long before the development of postmodern ideas in the twentieth century. Memory of a Journey III posits an alarming ossification and collapse of the human world, and representation, into the natural world. While works such as The Memoirs of a Saint manifest a skepticism akin to that of contemporary postmodern thought, Magritte’s broader oeuvre – however ubiquitous and familiar it may seem today – is heterogeneous and resists any single narrative.

“Memories of a Voyage: The Late Work of René Magritte” is currently on view at the Menil Collection until July 13, 2014. “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938”, is on view at the Menil until June 1, 2014, followed by the Art Institute of Chicago from June 24, 2014 to October 13, 2014.

Robert Boyd

Gagosian Gallery is actually something like nine galleries, located in several countries on three continents. As of 2012, it was estimated that its annual sales were 1.1 billion dollars. Gagosian Gallery is in the business of selling extremely high-priced consumer items to very high net worth individuals. So why the hell would they buy an ad on Twitter? Who are they trying to reach?



Yet here it was, on my Twitter feed! Are they hoping to snag a few hedge-fund managers as clients this way? Seems doubtful. Of all their enterprises, only Gagosian Shop seems to sell things within the price range of any of the 99%. Gagosian's Twitter ad is a small mystery to me.

(Jordan Crane, by the way, is a really good cartoonist. Check his work out.)