Robert Boyd

During FotoFest, I find myself getting photo-ed out. I like photography fine, but so much of it feels similar--here are some interesting images, well composed, arresting, beautiful or disturbing or thoughtful, of some intriguing or important subject matter. And here are some more. You get tired of images during FotoFest. It makes me want to put on headphones and close my eyes after a while.

So I wasn't expecting much when I went to the Mission to check out their FotoFest shows. At least it was a group show, which guaranteed variety. But my favorite thing happened--I walked in having no great expectations and walked out really pleased by what I had seen.


Bryan Zanisnik, 18 Years of American Dreams, 2010, photograph, 60 x 83 inches

The Mission is hosting a group show called Lateral featuring 10 photographers. Bryan Zanisnik had a room to himself, creating a small solo exhibit within the larger group exhibit. Zanisnik created fairly elaborate tableaux in rooms that he either constructed or which already had an unfinished look (for example, an attic space). In this way, the work reminded me of some of Nic Nicosia's photos of constructed rooms, but Zanisnik's images are much more cluttered and visually busy.


Bryan Zanisnik, 22 Monoliths and a Rolodex, 2011, photograph, 42 49 inches

Part of that visual clutter is from what he puts the rooms he shoots, but a big part is the way he papers the walls. 18 Years of American Dreams has a wall covered with baseball cards. The baseball card motif continues in 22 Monoliths and a Rolodex, where the stuff pinned to the walls are pieces of paper (they look like printed out emails) onto which is stenciled a prose narrative about selling baseball cards to a collector.

Collections and attics and basements--it suggests the kind of person who gets involved in collecting something and storing it in underused places in one's home, until something makes the collector sell. It's a common enough obsession--I'm certainly that kind of person, and I've known many like myself in my life. The density of these images makes me think of the environments that collectors develop for their collections. A living collection is always one step ahead of anyone's ability to seriously organize it; we collectors are simply socially acceptable hoarders, if we're honest about it.


Jeremy Bolen, Bioluminescent Communications (in Mosquito Bay), 2011, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 44 x 34 inches

Jeremy Bolen's work in the show belongs to a classic genre, nature photography. But their all-over composition suggests something different. When I first saw them, I thought of blurry stars or maybe the flashes of light from sub-atomic particle reactions in a cloud chamber. If fact, they are photos of bioluminescent organisms taken under water. To me, the fact that I could mistake this image for something very small (charged particles) or very large (stars) when it is actually something alive suggests a thing that repeats throughout the universe. If I weren't so suspicious of the term, I might use the word "sublime" to describe what I was seeing.


Jeremy Bolen, Bioluminescent Communications (in Mosquito Bay) #4, 2011, archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 44 x 34 inches


Erica Bohm, Astro II, 2010-2011, digital photograph mounted on plexiglas, 24 x 20 inches

Erica Bohm's photos are intriguing in part because they include images that she couldn't have taken--Buzz Aldrin's footprint on the moon, for example. My assumption is that she took these photos at NASA, either photographing other photographs or exhibits of actual space hardware. But what she does with the photos gives them a majestic and somewhat mysterious look. Astro II is positively ghostly. Given the danger involved with being an astronaut and the high number of deaths in the profession, this haunted photo feels appropriate.


Jeroen Nelemans, The more I see the less I grasp #GR386300, 2011, lightbox, 25.8 x 25.8 inches

The more I see the less I grasp is a series by Jeroen Nelemans of lightbox photos seen from the back. The photo image is a somewhat generic "majestic nature" image, but what makes it interesting is the literal foregrounding of the fluorescent lights. I can't explain why (which makes me a pretty inadequate critic, I guess), but for me, the image was somehow made more beautiful seen like this. It may be partly the defamiliarization effect of seeing the mechanism normally behind the lightbox, but that seems too facile an explanation. I think the light itself shining back onto the image is beautiful. Certainly Dan Flavin found this kind of light beautiful; he was careful to not combine it with anything--just lights and walls. But why not combine it with other images? In any case, it seems to work here.

I was also impressed with the work of John Opera, Daniel Shea and Marcelo Grossman. There was a lot in Lateral to like. It runs through May 15 at The Mission.

Robert Boyd

A few weeks ago, I was at Scott Charmin Gallery, deep in the East End, and ended up in a discussion with Emily Peacock about whether or not Scott Charmin was the easternmost gallery or art space in the Houston metro area. While Houston is pretty sprawled out, most of the art is inside the 610 Loop is a few specific neighborhoods. But as I thought about it, I thought that Kallinen Contemporary, Randall Kallinen's home/law office/gallery space on Broadway was probably further east.


Unit K, Bill Daniel's studio and location of Cali Four Nication

Then a week later, I was at Bill Daniel's studio in Pasadena, and Emily Peacock was also there, and she mentioned that this surely had to be the furthest east for any art space in the Houston Metro area. Daniel was hosting a photo show of four California photographers (Eric Zo, Ralph Coon, Dave Schubert and himself) called Cali Four Nication in his studio, which for the night was being called Unit K. And if you count Unit K as an exhibition space--which it certainly was this night--it is easily the furthest east of all Houston area art spaces. That I know of, at least. (All the photos illustrating this post are from Unit K and Cali Four Nication.)


Bill Daniel, photos of bike messengers

That got me thinking, what are the furthest north, south, east and west art spaces here in the Houston area?


Eric Zo photos

EAST: To start with, I thought Unit K in Pasadena is the easternmost art space. As far as I know there is nothing in Baytown, and then you leave the city (and don't come across any more art spaces until you hit Beaumont). But there are two problems with this. First, Unit K is not really an art space--it's a studio that got temporarily turned into an art space. So if that disqualifies it, next up is Kallinen Contemporary on Broadway by the Ship Channel. But really that is a law office that sometimes doubles as an art space. So that takes us back to Scott Charmin Gallery on the East Side. Surely that is the easternmost of all the "full time" art spaces, right?


Eric Zo photos

Wrong. The problem is that while we think of Galveston as being south of town, it's really southeast--farther east than Pasadena. So the furthest east art space I could find is MíArt Gallery.It's a place that I've never heard of, and seems like a gallery that probably caters to the tourist trade, like so many other Galveston galleries.


Ralph Coon

SOUTH: So is MíArt Gallery the furthest South, then? Nope, because the east end of Galveston happens also to be its northern tilting side. I was hoping the southernmost would be the Galveston Art Center (a very fine institution that brings small temporary shows by some of Texas' best artists to the island), but instead it is Affair d'Art (which is a terrible art gallery in my opinion).


Dave Schubert prints at Unit K

WEST: the westmost art space is pretty unambiguous--it's the Katy Contemporary Art Museum. I've written about KCAM before and will probably do so again. They haven't been around all that long, but KCAM has already mounted several exhibits, including a very nice Ibsen Espada show. And KCAM is working hard to be an all-purpose community art resource, with classes and events in addition to exhibits.


photo by Ralph Coon

So it's definitely KCAM, right? Well, maybe. I know Blinn College has shown art at its Sealy campus and maybe in Brenham. Prairie View A&M also has an art gallery. Do we consider them in the Houston metro area? So the answer to westernmost art space depends on where we define the edge of town. Katy is obviously a part of the Houston metro. Sealy and Prairie View? I'm not so sure.


Unit K (with Ralph Koon in the blue tshirt  foreground)

NORTH: I mentioned this idea of finding the cardinal points to a group of artists I regularly have breakfast with, and they immediately nominated the Pearl Fincher Museum for northernmost art space. Not even close. Nor is the Lonestar Community College-Kingwood art gallery, which has hosted several notable exhibits and is slightly further north than the Pearl Fincher Museum. The thing is that the Woodlands and Conroe are significantly north of these two institutions but still decidedly part of metro Houston. The Woodlands has several art galleries as well as its own Art League.


Unit K's record collection

But even further north is Conroe, which also has an Art League. I have never been there, but it seems like it is worth a visit just to see its building. The Conroe Art League is located in the Madeley Building in downtown Conroe, a 100-year old office building. Who knew that Conroe even had 100-year-old buildings? I guess that should teach me to get off the interstate a little more often. There are apparently several galleries close by (including a Thomas Kinkade gallery, Gallery Off the Square), but as far as I can tell, the Conroe Art League is a little bit north of them.


Unit K

After Conroe, you get into rural areas and the Sam Houston National Forest, so I am willing to say that Conroe (and maybe Willis) are the north edge of the Houston Metro Area. That means Huntsville, with the Gaddis Gleeslin Gallery and Phoenix Commotion houses, doesn't count for this purpose. (That said, it's well-worth visiting and if not a part of the Houston Metro, Huntsville is definitely a satellite of the Houston art scene.)


Unit K odds and ends

Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments.

Dean Liscum

Man Under Blue Board by Raindawg at the Houston International Performance Art Biennale was literally what it says, a man standing under a blue 2"x10"x2' board. It was both minimalist performance art and truth in advertising.


Raindawg, Man Under Blue Board, performance, 2014

In the main gallery of Box 13 amid the other performances, Blue Board was the most compact, the least intrusive performance. It's just there. In being just there, the performance forced the audience to wonder what this silent man standing against the wall under a blue board symbolized, to wonder what would transpire and to anticipate it.

What's he doing? What's he going to do? Am I supposed to interact or intervene? Is that all? Am I missing something?


Raindawg, Man Under Blue Board, performance, 2014

In this minimalism, the performance's philosophical and political weight built. What did it mean? Was he referencing other performance artists? Was he emulating living statue street performers? Was he alluding to early 20th century pole-sitters, ironically? Was he referencing non-violent sit-ins? Was he referencing the homeless, not the aggressive panhandlers but the passive, shy meek masses, the invisible that we (or at least I) stare past and walk past everyday? Was he alluding to people's tendency to treat each other as objects? To view each other as commodities: tools or furniture or art or entertainment? To expect a Candid Camera-Punked experience in which a cohort questions the audience about it's reaction/non-reaction?


Raindawg, Man Under Blue Board, performance, 2014

No one interacted or intervened (at least as far as I observed) and to be fair, the piece didn't overtly invite participation.

When the piece finally ended, Raindawg slowly lowered himself to the floor, and groaned as he rolled and stretched his aching limbs. The audience, as if conditioned by his piece did not offer succor of any kind, it just stared on.

Robert Boyd

The house at the corner of Bellmeade and Westheimer is for sale. If you have ever wanted to live in River Oaks and can afford a $4.2 million dollar mortgage, this house is for you. This modern house is full of art, which is visible in the realtors photos. It seems mostly pretty subtle, with lots of work on paper. I only recognize one of the artists. How about you?



This James Surls sculpture is quite beautiful. This spinning wheel is a formhe has usedmany times. If you are in River Oaks and want to see a James Surls, they just installed a new one on Kirby a few weeks ago.


on the left: four monoprints by Terrell James

As for the other art in the house, I just can't tell. (Update: The four monoprints on the left above are by Terrell James. Certainly quite different from the work she recently showed at Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas!)) But I like the look of these pieces in the dining room.



Update: According to a commenter, one of these pieces is a Robert Wilson.



Update: A commenter says the image over the couch on the left here is a photo by Casey Williams, the recently deceased Houston photographer.





The people who live here are collectors. Their tastes are low key--this isn't visually aggressive art for the most part. My feeling is that anyone who would buy a Surls for their home has reasonably sophisticated tastes. But I can't identify any of the other work, so I will toss it out to you, the readers.

Robert Boyd


Jamie Davis, Unfinished Graph Paper, ink on paper, 11 1/2" x 11 1/2"

Art Palace has a reputation for showing art in non-traditional media by such artists as Jim Nolan, Linda Post, Charlie Morris, the Bridge Club, etc. But their current exhibit, Wabi Sabi, goes back to art's old favorites, painting and drawing, and even dares to dally with that old aesthetic whore, beauty. Jamie Davis resists the temptations of beauty, preferring humor instead. Unfinished Graph Paper reminds me a little of the Art Guys.


Jamie Davis, Purdae Peg Board, ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches

Davis is a 2014 UH MFA, and her work is pretty damn unassuming for someone with years of art education. In both Unfinished Graph Paper and Purdae Peg Board, she takes things that are normally quite precise (carefully designed and then manufactured by machines) and gives them a humorously clunky hand-made look. And not just hand-made; they're crudely made.They reminded me of the way Philip Guston drew buildings. Guston, too, made humorous, crude-seeming images. Davis' work at the thesis show at the Blaffer was fairly conceptual, which is kind of boring to me. I'm not familiar with her work as a whole and I don't know what direction she's going, but as Guston demonstrated, there are still drawings to be drawn. Purdae Peg Board suggests that this might be a fruitful direction for Davis.


Michael Villarreal, Amass, oil on panel, 54 x 75 x 3 1/4 inches

Amass is the largest piece in the show. It's one you have to see in person to get the full effect. For one thing, I think the image above darkens the painting a bit--it is quite creamy and pale in person. But more important with all of the Michael Villareal pieces in the exhibit is the sculptural thickness of the paint.


Michael Villarreal, Amass (detail),oil on panel, 54 x 75 x 3 1/4 inches

Villareal is one of the impasto boys, slathering the paint on with a garden trowel. That automatically makes one think of Geoff Hippenstiel, but Villareal's style--more or less flat areas of color representing highly abstracted figures--is very unlike Hippenstiel's more expressive work. In the abstraction of the figures, Villareal reminds me of Howard Hodgkin. In his thick application of flat colors to form the figures, the work recalls Wayne Thiebaud. Since these are two of my favorite painters, I approve. But admittedly, no artist wants to someone whose work reminds you of someone else's work.


Michael Villarreal, left: Busy and Active;  right: untitled (purple),oil on panel, 8 x 5 x 4 1/2 and 8 x 5 x 3 1/2 inches


Michael Villarreal, left: Busy and Active;  right: untitled (purple),oil on panel, 8 x 5 x 4 1/2 and 8 x 5 x 3 1/2 inches

Still, it is interesting to me that there are several regional painters working in a mode of extremely thick impasto--Villareal, Hippensteil, and Julon Pinkston off the top of my head. Such an approach certainly emphasizes the objecthood of a painting while remaining part of the tradition of painting. As someone who loves painting but worries about its relevance, this seems like a useful approach to me. But more important, Villareal's work is gorgeous visually.


Kirsten Macy, untitled, oil and enamel on linen, 36 x 36 inches

Dallas artist Kirsten Macy does paintings that look like highly graphic depictions of explosions of some kind. My first thought was of a cream pie hitting someone's face, but I guess they look a bit more like bombs going off. But the extreme whiteness of the explosions is very creamy. The backgrounds show a horizon line and not much else. The colors are poster-like in their flatness but quite pale. Looking at these pictures, I don't imagine the roar of a Hollywood-style explosion, but instead a faint "pop."


Kirsten Macy, 2 untitled paintings, oil and enamel on linen, 15 x 12 inches each

The paintings seem mainly like formal exercises with various combinations of formal elements. YOu have a horizon and an air-burst--where do you put them in relation to one another and to the edge of the canvas? How big do you make the image of the explosion relative to the canvas?

But at the same time, these unassuming explosions might remind one of how we think of our distant wars. The explosions in Afghanistan or Pakistan of Yemen that destroy so many lives and sow so much terror seem to us, by virtue of distance and our finely honed ability to tune out unpleasantness, at most like faint, distant "pops". Perhaps these paintings reflect that.


Ludwig Schwarz, two untitled works, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches each

Ludwig Schwarz recently had a "retrospective" at the Oliver Francis Gallery in Dallas consisting mostly of found objects claimed by Schwarz over the past 25 years. His website is a series of humorous, enigmatic videos and images. But despite his post-painting practice, he still puts paint on a flat surface--oil on canvas, even--just like Rubens or Kandinsky did. Schwarz's anti-painting practice was addressed by Bill Davenport in Glasstire: "It’s worth noting that, since 1995, Schwarz has been a prolific producer of paintings, or rather, of flat, painted canvases that struggle mightily and unsuccessfully against painting as a way of consuming artistic ideas. He’s made paintings that face the wall, paintings which can only be seen only on the Internet; paintings packed away in unopened crates; and paintings notable for their intentional unappealing vacancy."


Ludwig Schwarz, two untitled works, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches each

But if you didn't know about Schwarz's other activities and walked into Wabi Sabi, you would come to a diametrically opposed conclusion. The series of five identically-sized paintings here are not unappealing in any way. Their "vacancy" recalls Rothko or various minimalist painters--it certainly doesn't come off as an anti-painting gesture. On the contrary, it feels like it belongs in the continuing tradition of painting. Ludwig Schwarz is hardly blowing up the tracks of the art history train here. Instead, he's boarding the train. And these generally calm, minimal paintings fit in well with the general demeanor of the entire exhibit.

Wabi Sabi runs through May 24 at Art Palace.

Robert Boyd

Recently they tore down and rebuilt Frostwood Elementary, which I attended from kindergarten through fifth grade. The new building is very nice, although it feels a bit grandiose. The new playground, on the other hand, is an obscenity! When I was a kid, they had steel monkey bars and jungle gyms and several very excellent climbable trees, and I'm sure these were the cause of many a broken arm and bitten tongue. And beyond that, we kids built our own "playground equipment" in the wooded playground; we made increasingly large bike ramps (we were enthralled by Evel Knievel) and forts made of twigs, vines and pine needles.

Later they replaced the steel playground equipment with some very lovely wooden equipment that seemed a lot safer for kids, but still provided plenty of opportunity to climb, fall, cry, and get back up to climb some more. This stuff has been replaced by new playground gear made out of cheap ugly plastic with no sharp edges. And more freakish is that it is not set on good clean dirt but instead surrounded by a spongy rubber material, so that when junior falls off, there is no chance of scuffing or bruising.

This generational shift from dangerous but thrilling playground equipment to today's boring "safe" playground equipment was spelled out in depressing detail recently in "The Overprotected Kid," an article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. It's an astonishing and dispiriting account of how we got to today's litigation-proof playgrounds.

I was thinking about this transition when I saw Sharon Engelstein's new sculpture group, Dillididae, in Hermann Park. This is part of Hermann Park's Art in the Park program that has been installed as part of the park's centennial, which I've written about before.


Sharon Engelstein, Dillididae, painted concrete, 2014

From a distance, these blobby sculptures resemble Engelstein's great inflatable sculptures. As I drove by, I wondered how they were going to maintain inflatable sculptures in a public park. But they're actually made of concrete and are literally solid as a rock. But despite their rock-like nature and the lack of spongy rubber ground, kids were climbing on them during the dedication ceremony.


Sharon Engelstein, Dillididae, painted concrete, 2014

The pieces look like worms or bugs. The name, Dillididae is short for armadillididae, the scientific name for doodle bugs. When I posted a close-up of the central pink figure's "foot" on Instagram, people identified it as looking like a Kong chew toy for dogs. They definitely seem like cute, weird organisms, not just abstract shapes.


Sharon Engelstein, Dillididae, painted concrete, 2014

But kids seem to see these things as things to climb on. And why not? The sculpture is adjacent to the Buddy Carruth Playground for All Children. A six-year-old is not going to make a distinction between art and playground equipment. Not while there is fun to be had.


Sharon Engelstein, Dillididae, painted concrete, 2014

One of the issues facing public art is its relationship with a public that is not necessarily looking for art. Public art has to be multivalent to be effective--it can't just be an art object. While Dillididae looks like it was literally plopped down into the park, I think it avoids being stereotypical plop art because children will have a significant non-art relationship with it.


Sharon Engelstein, Dillididae, painted concrete, 2014

But perhaps its most subversive aspect is that it does an end-run around the trend of litigation-proof super-safe, super-boring playgrounds. It doesn't have to be surrounded by a rubber mat because it's not actually part of the playground. The pieces don't have to meet the guidelines spelled out in the Public Playground Safety Handbook because this is a sculpture group, not a playground. I don't know if it was the artist's intention to create sculpture that kids could play on, but I would be surprised if that weren't part of the plan.

The park has a contract to display Dillididae for three to five years. I hope that once they reach the end of the contract, it will have proven so popular with kids that they decide to extend the contract indefinitely.

Robert Boyd

Randy Tibbits wrote an article guaranteed to get some artists' blood boiling. "MFAH and the Menil Are Depriving Us of Local Art" appeared in the April 23 issue of the Houston Press. The subtitle was equally blunt: "Houston museums should display some Houston art." Now this is a bit ironic since a few days after this article appeared, the Contemporary Art Museum opened a huge one-person exhibit of drawings by Houston art star Trenton Doyle Hancock. But Tibbit's point is still well taken. Even though the MFAH has a lot of Houston art in its collection, it only shows this art occasionally. In my experience, you'll find it in themed group shows. For example, last year's Calaveras Mexicanas: The Art and Influence of José Guadalupe Posada included work by Earl Staley and Trenton Doyle Hancockand  Playing with Process: Explorations in Experimental Printmaking had work by Mel Chin. And of course every year they put on a show by the Core artists, who are artists who come and live in Houston for two years (and many over the years have stayed past their residencies and become important parts of the local scene--Sharon Engelstein, for example).

Tibbit's article has a lot of problems. He weirdly dismisses photography: "I'm not counting photography, or the decorative arts in Bayou Bend's Texas room — those are fab, but different beasts from the big 'A' art at the MFAH main campus." But he is correct that neither the Menil nor the MFAH has any particular desire to show us the art history of Houston: "We rightly (though perhaps a little too often) give ourselves lots of credit for a vibrant contemporary art scene. There's art everywhere. The city is full of galleries and studios. It's no challenge to see art that's being made in Houston. But art that was made in Houston? Seeing that is almost impossible."

The article includes a slideshow of some of Houston's earliest modernist art. This doesn't help Tibbit's case because the work shown is not that great--mostly of historical interest. After being energized by his righteously angry article, I was deflated by the lame art in the slide show (fortunately a couple of slides towards the end--a Richard Stout and a John Biggers--pep things up a bit). Tibbits has made a reputation for his interest in very early Houston art, including some excellent original research (see “Our Little Gallery” Of Abstract Art In Houston, 1938, for example) and curatorial work (Emma Richardson Cherry: Houston's First Modern Artist at the Houston Public Library in 2013), so the slide show reflects his interests as an art historian.

Devon Britt-Darby wrote a response to Tibbit's article in Art + Culture Texas. He also criticizes the work in the slideshow and asks reasonably what work from the permanent collection on display should be taken down to show this "tepid, tentative, conservative" work. (For example, Amy Nude by Leila McConnell below.)


Leila McConnell, Amy Nude, 1948

Britt-Darby accuses Tibbits of shilling for CASETA, the Center for the Advancement and Study of Texas Art, an organization for which Tibbits is a board member. I don't think this is entirely fair (he doesn't mention CASETA in the article), and anyway, he presumably is a member of CASETA because he's interested in this kind of artwork.

But the argument that a museum shouldn't lower its standards to show "local" work, which Britt-Darby makes ("The relevant period for the Menil spans roughly from the 1940s to the 1970s. What would Tibbits remove from the Menil’s walls to make room for David Adickes and Henri Gadbois?"), is a very serious one, one that has been used not just here but all over the world for decades. And it's one I'd like to argue against, because I think the premise is wrong.

Museums have a lot of missions, and perhaps the most important one is to display good art--the best art, if possible. But the definition of "good art" varies over time and is ideologically fraught to boot. Western culture has spent the past 40-odd years coming to terms with the realization that its definitions of "good art" excluded art by women and by non-white artists; that aesthetic theories masked white supremacist ideologies. As Thomas McEvilley pungently noted, "Abstract art came to seem the ultimate self-delusion of Euro-Modernism, no longer to be viewed with a reverent gaze but with a knowing smirk. Malevich's Black Square became the flag on the masthead of the slave ship, flapping sinisterly in the breeze of history" (Thomas McEvilley, The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era, p. 6, 1993). So when someone makes an argument that we are excluding a certain class of art for reasons of "quality," I am suspicious.


reclining female torso, style of the Goulandris master, Greece, Cycladic Islands, early Cycladic II, late Spedos variety, 2500-2500 B.C., white marble

Furthermore, museums have a historical mission as well. Some of the art shown is shown not because it is by some measure "the best", but because it helps us understand a moment in time--a particular bit of art history or human history in general. When I look at the Greek antiquities at the Menil, I don't see ahistorical aesthetic objects--I see remnants of a vanished civilization (several civilizations, actually) and the hands of artists and artisans who made practical and ritual objects that still manage to move us thousands of years later.

The MFAH and the Menil are Houston museums, whatever else they are. And Houston has its own history, and that history includes a history of art. In order to explicate that history, these museums (and the MFAH in particular) would probably have to take down work on view now and replace it with work that was aesthetically inferior. I don't know how this would work. Britt-Darby seems to think such a move would "come at the expense of other American artists’ representation, not the Indonesian gold galleries or the European galleries, etc.", but since we're talking about a purely hypothetical situation, I won't speculate.

But the upshot would be that if the MFAH did something like Tibbits suggests, it would be doing something to address Houston as Houston. It would no longer just be an art museum that happens to be in Houston, it would be an art museum dealing with Houston and its art history. Perhaps this would be an intolerable expansion of the MFAH's mission. Perhaps it is naive and indeed provincial to think that because an art museum has "Houston" in its name, it should have any interest in the art history of Houston.

But some institution should care. This history threatens to be swallowed up, tossed down into a memory hole, forgotten as its participants die. We let Houston history vanish every day, and that includes its art history. And the MFAH (and to a lesser extent the Menil) must shoulder some of the blame for that.

Chris Sperandio's response to the article was to suggest that the Menil and the MFAH "open up project spaces in your institutions." I agree but only on one condition--that these spaces show not only contemporary local art but also put on shows of older local art. I think we need both, and in some ways, the need for the latter is more urgent than the need for the former.

(By the way, some work has been done to remember Houston's local art history. I recommend this lecture by Richard Stout.)

Robert Boyd

 
Karin Broker, Good Girls Bad Girls, 2013, conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 inches

When you walk into Karin Broker's new exhibit, damn girls, you see a room full of flowers. These are very large drawings done on formica. If they were done in a way similar to the way she taught Rice students (like me) back in the early 80s, the formica was covered with gesso that had been repeatedly sanded until it was perfectly smooth. It forms a beautifully hard surface for her conte.

Broker has done a lot of pictures of flowers over the years. They tend to be like this--oversized and dramatic. Still, pictures of flowers, no matter how beautifully done, fall into the realm of "pretty things." They fundamentally appear as bourgeois decoration. The old academies ranked them well below important subjects like religious paintings and history paintings. And because they've been a favorite subject for Broker for so long, it feels comfortable and familiar for a viewer to walk into a room full of her flower drawings.

 
Karin Broker, Picture Pretty, 2014, conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 inches

Talk about a bait and switch. The subject of this show is not pretty flowers. It's women in their glory and their long mistreatment by men. These are, in fact, history paintings--painful histories. Behind Broker's exquisite craftsmanship and beautiful drawing, this show seethes with anger.


Karin Broker, fighting pretty, 2013, conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 inches

A drawing like fighting pretty appears from the distance a picture of flowers against a mottled, streak off-white ground. It's only when you get close and (if you're like me) don your reading glasses that you see that it is covered with text.


Karin Broker, fighting pretty, 2013, conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 inches

In this case, it's a list of women soldiers and warriors throughout history. This is one of the themes in the show, and one of the chapters in the book Broker compiled and printed for the show, also titled damn girls. In addition, she has chapters on inspirational women ("good girls bad girls"); imprisoned women, particularly those in Magdalene Asylums and girls imprisoned by psychopaths ("nice & quiet"); women who were killed for being "witches" ("too hot"); women who cross social/legal boundaries created by sexism ("belle story"); and objectification of women ("nosegay"). The book is full of uncomfortable facts and figures, disturbing anecdotes, hateful aphorisms--as well as inspirational material. It's a handbook or almanac, meant to be browsed rather than read straight through. (Given that 20 copies were produced, one could say that it is not meant to be read at all. But perhaps the text will be made more widely available--as an e-book, for example.)


Karin Broker, damn girls


Karin Broker, damn girls

Some lovely thoughts by a few of the intellectual authors of Western civilization are included in the book. They make you sick and embarrassed to read them.



Karin Broker, damn girls

Each chapter has a brief introduction by Broker. A chapter on women burned as witches and heretics opens with a personal story:


Karin Broker, damn girls

The idea that women and girls are held, often for years, as sex slaves in contemporary America has a special horror for us. These news stories hold our dread attention even when we want to turn away. Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Dugard. Michelle Knight. Amanda Berry. Gina DeJesus. Personally, no horror novel could ever compare to the feeling I got reading Emma Donoghue's Room, a chillingly believable fictional account of a woman held captive by such a madman.  Broker wants you to think about these girls. The raw facts are in the book, but even more potent is too hot, too cold, a table and six chairs, made of steel, and inscribed with writing.


Karin Broker, too hot, too cold, 2014, steel table and six chairs, table 30 x 60 x 36 inches, chairs 35 x 18 x 16.5 inches each.

too hot, too cold is a very uninviting dinner table. Cold hard steel and sharp corners demand a certain carefulness on the part of viewers. The flat surfaces are inscribed with scratchy little marks.


Karin Broker, too hot, too cold, 2014, steel table and six chairs, table 30 x 60 x 36 inches, chairs 35 x 18 x 16.5 inches each.

At first, it's hard to see what the marks on the table are. They make a kind of pattern and give the table a texture.


Karin Broker, too hot, too cold (detail), 2014, steel table and six chairs, table 30 x 60 x 36 inches, chairs 35 x 18 x 16.5 inches each.

Then when you bend down and look closely, you see thousands--tens of thousands-- of hashmarks, like the cartoon image of a prisoner in a dungeon counting the days as they pass by marking them on the wall. Each hashmark does in fact represent a day--a day that a girl was held captive as a sex-slave by a psychopath. Etched into steel, suggests that Broker wants to make sure these dreadful occurances aren't swept under the carpet of history. And Broker wants you also to remember the names of women held as slaves in Magdalene Asylums, so she writes those down in steel, too. It's overwhelming.


Karin Broker, too hot, too cold (detail), 2014, steel table and six chairs, table 30 x 60 x 36 inches, chairs 35 x 18 x 16.5 inches each.

The six chairs relate to the six chapters in the book. The table and chairs, though much more modest in scale, will remind one of The Dinner Table by Judy Chicago. Two tables, two works of feminist art. But The Dinner Table is beautiful. Indeed, it intends to overwhelm the viewer with its beauty. It has place settings for a group of women from history and myth, honoring each one with a gorgeous and unique table setting. It is a banquet, an impossible sacra conversazione amongst the great women of history. It is a lush work.

The cold grey steel of too hot, too cold is quite different. There are no beautiful table settings here, no embroidered table cloth or floor coverings. The furniture is minimal, uncomfortable and slightly threatening. It belongs in a prison or an institution. Its virtue is that it it is indestructible. It will survive. Five hundred years from now, when the threads in The Dinner Party's embroideries have frayed and faded, and the ceramic place settings are broken and chipped, too hot, too cold will still be here. It's cold chairs and unyielding table top will say, "Fuck you. We survived."


Karin Broker, I/Eye Gone, 1995, etched steel bench, 48 x 15 x 19 inches

Broker includes two more pieces of steel furniture in the exhibit. I/Eye Gone includes an etched image--a self-portrait?--where the face has been erased.


Karin Broker, Taking Self, 1995, etched steel bench, 48 x 15 x 19 inches

Taking Self, on the contrary, is entirely autobiographical. With drawings and blocks of hand-written text, Broker outlines her entire life on the surface of this metal bench.


Karin Broker, Taking Self, 1995, etched steel bench, 48 x 15 x 19 inches

In choosing this medium, Broker says that her story, too, will survive. She's written it in solid steel. I am reminded of the main character in Will Self's novel, The Book of Dave. In the book, Dave perversely writes the story of his life, his custody battle and his futile career as a men's rights activist on steel plates, accidentally creating the foundational documents for a future post-apocalyptic misogynist religion in the process. Maybe that's what Broker has done here. She has created an uneffaceable women's history, tablets that some future Joseph Smith--or perhaps Josephine Smith--will find and found a new religion with.


Karin Broker, left: my white skin, off white and right: my white skin I, 2014, monoprint and collage, 27.75 x 39.25 each

In the end, flowers wither and fade (but with luck, are ever renewed). The lives of women come to an end. But steel endures at least a little while longer.

 Damn Girls is on view at McClain Gallery through May 31.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

In 2013 Michael Petry, Director of London’s Museum of Contemporary Art, published Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition, which reveals in over 400 illustrations how leading 21st century artists have reinvigorated the genre previously synonymous with 17th century Old Masters. Included with Hockney, Twombly, Hirst and others is Houston based Karin Broker (b. 1950.) Broker’s exhibition, Karin Broker: damn girls, is currently at McClain Gallery through May 31 and on May 24 she opens Karin Broker: wired, pressed and nailed at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont. This, the fact that her parakeet crapped on the late Hilton Kramer’s suit, and flawless draftsmanship, inspired a recent studio visit.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: The large scale floral drawings at McClain are unerringly fine, but it took only a minute for me to be creeped out by the background text that spoke of that repulsive man who imprisoned the three women in Cleveland.

Karin Broker: And then the coward hung himself instead of staying alive to be raped in prison every day for the rest of his life.

VBA: A collector asked me the meaning of the marks on the table sculpture, which I said certainly relate to the Cleveland kidnapping.

KB: That’s correct. I artistically imagined Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, Gina De Jesus marking off their days in captivity, all those years they were kept from their families. Those women were in dark rooms and at times chained to the walls, beaten and starved to induce miscarriages when made pregnant by the rapes. One was forced to deliver the other’s child. The table also references Elizabeth Smart and also Jaycee Dugard, who was held captive for 18 years, and had two daughters by that evil man who took her.

VBA: There’s nothing like overlaying an ordinary domestic object with tragic content to disarm a viewer. I had to rub my hand across the table top to know it was printed. How is metal printed?

KB: The table was certainly meant to disarm, even by way of fancy, dressed-up women sitting on the cold hard steel to read about others, and I imagine if enough sit there the images will become worn and faded. The table is etched, which involves coating its surface with an acid resistant hard ground, and also surrounding it with a wooden structure so the top actually floats in its own bath of nitric acid. After drawing images through the wax I had to regrind it.


Karin Broker, picture pretty, 2014, Conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 x 3”

VBA: In the same vein, describe your conte drawing process. Do you make preliminary sketches or project an image, and it must require a ladder or repositioning the large panels so you can reach?

KB: No preliminary sketches or images are projected. I begin by rubbing conte dust with a rag to map out an image, until I get "something" then add to it like a puzzle. Initially I’m on a small stepstool, and after a rolling chair at my drafting table when detailing the flowers, I have a tool table and boards clamped to the edge. My chair, everything is on wheels.

VBA: One drawing includes a list of women institutionalized in the Dublin Dommybrook Laundry in 1911. Does the number near each name represent age or years of incarceration?

KB: It’s age. Dommybrook Laundry was one of the Magdalene Asylums where “fallen” women were forced to work. Those of childhood age were actually born there to incarcerated mothers. I regret I did not record all 30,000 names.

VBA: I was moved by the amount of research required to enumerate both accomplishments by and atrocities against women, as well as by the quantity of hand written text, which must have been enormously time consuming

KB: It was a huge amount of research. When I began studying the history of abuses against women and was reading such things as 80% of those killed in the Inquisition were women, I got depressed. So I began researching in the other direction, reading, watching films, following Google links, and learned women were pirates and warriors, and was astounded by their courage and accomplishments, for example the Russian “Night Witches” who dropped bombs on Germany. I would alternate a couple of ten to twelve-hour days of writing with some days of research, and it was very difficult, and whenever it seemed too much I would think, Karin you bitch, if you can’t endure so much less than women who were tortured, raped and killed, breasts ripped off, all these horrific things, that’s pathetic. If my art helps one abused woman to know there’s a network of women to offer empathy and support, maybe even fight for her, I’m proud.

VBA: Text such as “A 19 year old gang rape victim was sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes for violating Saudi Arabia’s Sharia law on segregation of the sexes” is straight-forward. “Good girls good girls good girls good girls” on the other hand is provocatively less so.

KB: What’s sad is so many men still categorize women that way. If a woman has her own opinion she is not a “good girl.” A good girl in Pakistan is one who doesn’t read or study, only cooks, cleans and has sex. I was told once in my position as university Department Chair to be “more nice.”

VBA: The art made a few men uncomfortable.

KB: Look, I’m not anti-men. I love men. I actually love their bodies, I love looking at them, those incredible chests, their butts, although many would insist it’s their genitals I want. It makes sense that some men are fearful of the thought of women standing up to them and refusing to be disrespected.

It was actually Bob McClain who encouraged me to go in this direction. We were discussing this drawing exhibition and he told me that as long as he has known my work he has felt my feminist side, that I was quite the strong female, and suggested I “kick it up a notch,” just put it out there. Well I left him totally energized, said OK, no shit, and told my assistant John all my ideas. This is the first show I’ve ever had that dealt not just with me but with all women. I’m extremely grateful to Bob and so proud to be working with them.


Karin Broker, nice and quiet, 2013, conte on formica with leather bound book, 84 x 60 x 3”

VBA: Of all the crazy stuff I’ve heard from artists, you might win the prize for your story about Sister Jacinta offering you an exorcism, let a priest chase out “disturbances.” Did you find that insane?

KB: Oh god no. Exorcism was just part of the whole Catholic thing – saints, spirits. Remember “Rosemary’s Baby?” There’s not a Catholic who would think that’s weird. You see, even if you’re non-practicing, this stuff stays with you. When my studio was completed we had a priest come to bless it. There we all were, standing in a circle with lit candles around us, you would’ve thought we were practicing voodoo.

VBA: When I read that the answer to your mother’s prayer was for you to get the stigmata I wondered if she desired for you other qualities associated with mystics, sweating blood in trance like Catherine of Siena or levitating like Padre Pio.

KB: My mother loved Padre Pio. She kept a large picture of him.

VBA: I was in Sicily in October and found his picture an all the pizzerias and taxi cabs. Where I’m from in south Louisiana some of those overly pious families turn out a few nutty children. How come you’re not more peculiar?

KB: My childhood was turbulent, but I was a very logical kid. My family didn't have much, it was intense, screaming and yelling, my aunt had thirteen kids. Things were very intense, and I was pretty isolated, but as a kid it seemed logical, I knew, that if I leave this, it will be better, I don’t have to be crazy, don’t have to scream. Everyone has a purpose, I might hate myself when I read this, but if I connect the dots, it is my childhood that brought me to this point. Think about this - if I had not been lonely as a child, or had not had to make do with little, I would not enjoy all the time I spend alone working, and I would not be as creative with the use of materials. And also childhood fed my feelings for justice and fairness, in childhood things were unfair for girls, I was treated unfairly. I see my purpose as using my art to help other women feel strong.

The view of women was warped. I remember in college the Sisters of Charity telling the girls that to keep a husband you need to have a child immediately, and if it is not a boy, you need to immediately have another one. I asked to leave the school.

Sometimes I rebelled. My grandfather was from Italy, and the Italian side of the family would have these reunions and after the visiting and eating the heads of the extended family would have a “meeting.” Years back, I was living here and teaching at Rice, I went to a reunion and of course was the only woman who wasn’t married, and decided to attend the meeting, figured I would pay my dues and do the newsletter. Well my uncle told me to get out. He said, “you are female, you get out!” So I told them what I thought, “even a dog could go into that meeting, even some man I casually fuck could go into that meeting.” And now I’ve gone and said “fuck,” and you’ll quote me.

VBA: This is Pan sweetie, “fuck” is appropriate.

KB: The family was silenced, total silence. I grabbed my stuff and left and after, things exploded. My brother reported it was like a match to dynamite, it shook up the family. He said their meeting lasted until three in the morning, with heated exchanges, some of the women asserted themselves, and my uncle stepped down as head of the family. It changed the family dynamic.


Karin Broker, Finding Jesus, 2009, Antique Christ figure, wood, wire, crystals, rhinestones and miscellaneous, 17.5” h x 4.5” w x 4.5” d

VBA: You make three-dimensional artworks that include Catholic ritualistic objects such as rosary beads. They mirror a jewel-like aesthetic, yet the unrefined, fake stones and dark content negate the notion of beauty. I’m thinking of the bead-covered crucifixion sculpture Finding Jesus, and the three-dimensional “hearts” made of beads, rhinestones and religious metals. Say something about their ritualistic source, and incongruence.

KB: Ritual is fundamental. I play classical piano (points to a baby grand piano), and when I was a child I played the organ in church, and went there every night to practice. The priests didn’t want the lights on, so votive candles illuminated the church and the ceiling was covered with painted images. I absorbed this atmosphere in a deep way, the look and mystery of the place. This was more than a eureka moment, it was a huge revelation, to be in seventh grade and be aware of my first art installation. This all took place before the Vatican ecumenical council. After Vatican II that ceiling ended up being painted white, because a bunch of cardinals surrounded by Renaissance and Baroque art decided some American churches should be painted white. I’ll never forgive them for that. But I knew the power of that environment. I also sang, all the latin masses, I was the good girl, and I loved, loved, that I could make people cry. I even had a huge statue of the Virgin Mary because I was going to be a nun, probably because I desired peace and quiet. Rosary pieces and rhinestones appear frequently in my art, and I associate them with the glitz and surface stuff that distracts many, such as when looking at a girl, and also with water drops, and particles of fractured light. The crucifixion in Finding Jesus was an antique from Mexico, very old and expensive, and I distorted it with beads on wires that pierced the figure to speak of a bigger theme and symbolize the abundance of “stuff,” money, power, you’re supposed to hate gays, all the other stuff projected onto Jesus. It should be so simple and pure – be kind, love one another – what covers the figure is all prickly and makes it difficult to see. It’s all “too much.” My “hearts” have colored beads wired together. We all have sadness in life. My sister Pam died six years ago of breast cancer, and my brother died a year ago of prostate cancer, so by putting all that together I was artistically mending a heart.

VBA: When I saw the clusters of blue and black rhinestones that cover Black & Blue Boys, my mind went instantly to the jewel-covered chalices and reliquaries you see in church vaults all over Italy. The viewer is jolted by that artwork’s visual drama, but its pistol hints at ominous content.

KB: That box is not pretty, it symbolizes being hit, beaten and bruised, which happens to women and young girls.

VBA: Let’s talk about your up-coming museum show, what are you showing?

KB: The opening reception is Friday, May 30, from 6-8pm, and it runs through August 31. I plan to show eight collages, sixteen gravure collages, nine boxes, seven nailed two-dimensional pieces and 24 three-dimensional wired objects on boxes.

VBA: And another book is coming out.

KB: The Contemporary Drawing and Painting Bible, also by Thames & Hudson, is scheduled for publication later in 2014.

VBA: I bet you never thought this neighborhood would become all gentile and expensive, it’s unrecognizable from when I hung out here in the early eighties. Back then there were knife fights at the bar on the corner of Knox and Washington. My car was stolen a few blocks from here.

KB: It’s totally transformed.

VBA: Remember how cold the beer was at Roznovsky’s? Because I spent a lot of time there I did a painting of their façade as a gift, and it was awful, but Mrs. Roz thought it was boo-tee-ful, and hung it over the door. Very few of the old houses, like yours, are left, and your studio is splendid.

KB: I loved Roznovsky’s. I actually built my studio in two days, got artists to come help, it was like an old fashion barn-raising, and then I took time to finish the inside.

VBA: How do you decide what to make here and what to make at the farm? I heard you have horses.

KB: We have two dogs, four horses, one pony, one miniature donkey, and six cats. I make everything at the farm, and then move it back it here. The studio there is new, and so great, so I work there, except for the steel work, all the welding is done here in Houston.


Karin Broker, We Come Bearing Gifts, 2010, Cast metal, wire, crystals, rhinestones, gold, semi-precious stones, 13 h x 9.5 w x 3.5 d

VBA: Karin, your articulation is uncompromising, a point critically made by everyone who has written about you. Many “famous” artists lack your skill. Describe your training.

KB: I have been drawing since seventh grade, with equal time devoted to drawing and print making throughout college and graduate school, and had the good fortune to encounter better and better instructors.

VBA: It can be seen that the new conte drawings achieve expressiveness through slight distortion of form. And I recall overreaching voluminous shapes in the 2010 florals on paper

KB: Expressive yes, I wanted the new works to look like they were moving and weeping, as a cathartic thing for the women killed. I was also trying to make these robust florals "weep" so I let the white drip. The McClain drawings I consider to be like paintings. My flowers are meant as sensual forms grabbing at you for attention and as objects that feel "too much,""too overwhelming." And you got it, I exaggerated forms in the 2010 works, they were made voluptuous to be “too much.”


Karin Broker, 3 fat boys, 2010, Conte on paper, 75.5 x 50

VBA: There were important things happening in New York when you were a student, Twombly’s 1979 Whitney Museum retrospective is only one example. Who were you looking at, which artists influenced your development?

KB: I was going to New York and looking at everything and loved looking, but the art didn’t influence me. Instead I was inspired by the weirdest things, people for instance, someone yelling at their kid, I wrote it down and it entered my art. I remember having great difficulty with a print series in graduate school until I simply began to incorporate what I saw around me. As the print shop assistant I took a bit of abuse, so if someone treated me like crap, I made a print about it. It’s not that I illustrated it, but visualized it, which was so emotional, personal, the art succeeded.

Similarly with Europe, I go often, Paris where I studied is my favorite, I embraced it, so different from Penn, Pennsylvania, but the art didn’t inspire me, transsexuals and hookers on the other hand got my attention, I completely responded to those things. By focusing on what’s around me my art in a way recycles memories, it represents periods of time, in the same way someone’s photographs of their kids mark time. That sculpture near you contains all of my husband’s contact lenses, to mark the passage of time, and more will be added. Weirdly I’ve kept all my old boyfriends’ letters, everything written by the bad boyfriends, I saved it, and the letters inspire me and are important to my character, they represent a broad spectrum of memory. I saved all of my dad’s letters and glued them on my art, my art is a response to things around me.

But there is one artist who directly influenced me. At the Whitney or somewhere I came across a book called The Nazi Drawings by Mauricio Lasansky and the drawings were phenomenal. I had never seen that before, that level of skill, with a profoundly serious topic, the holocaust, shocking rape scenes, it was enormously impactful, so I found Lasansky at the University of Iowa, and actually went there for graduate work because of him. I don’t think I knew where Iowa was, or the difference between Iowa and Ohio, well Iowa’s on the plains and it’s freezing cold, but I experienced his drawing first hand, not a lot of other stuff has inspired me, except film, newspaper, people’s behavior.

Oh, I do take inspiration from Gael Stack, I love that quality of line in her work, her stuff seeps in to my consciousness, I think I memorized that jittery mark she makes. And James Drake is exquisite in conte, Drake is the only other person I look at. I love his red conte, we seem to parallel each other in line quality and in the love of good drawing, he inspires me to be a bold drawer.

VBA: So your ill-bred parakeet met the famous art critic.

KB: The bird jumped on Hilton Kramer’s shoulder and pooped, and I was certain he would remember only the mess instead of my art, but it turned out he remembered my art and praised it.


Karin Broker, Two Sisters, 2005, Cast metal, paint, wire, crystals, rhinestones and miscellaneous, 7.5 w x 19 h x 5 d x 2

Robert Boyd

For the past three years, I've been checking out the art fairs in New York that happen in early May. It's a little birthday gift for myself. I like it, but it's exhausting--both physically (my dogs are barking by the end) and mentally. Your eyes get tired of looking at art for a while. But it's a lot of fun walking through the fairs with my friends LM and DC. On Thursday, I went to Cutlog alone and then met up with DC at Pulse.

I forgot my camera at Cutlog so I didn't take too many photos--just a few phone pictures. (If you want to see an excellent selection of photos from Cutlog as well as a nice write-up, real Alison Meier's report.)



Yes, I was wearing a tie that day.



This is what the entrance looked like at night. As you can see, it looks like it's on fire! But that is actually a brilliantly lit ball of fake fur, Hairdoo for a Hallway by Shoplifter. The neon phrasing is by Robert Montgomery.


Hrafnhildur Arnardottir aka Shoplifter, Hairdoo for a Hallway

It was really dramatic. I think it makes sense for an art fair to have something eye-popping in the entrance way, even if it's a kind of empty calories artwork like this. It gives you a nice feeling of "wow."


Clara Feder, Break In Case of Emergency, mixed media, 13.7 x 17.7 inches

Clara Feder's Break in Case of Emergency made me laugh. It was part of a larger project called the Wall of Temptation. Now the thing about art like this is that it is literally a joke--a one-liner, a New Yorker cartoon. And it's a good joke! But once you've gotten a joke, do you want it on your wall forever? Some of my favorite art at the art fairs are jokes--I see them and enjoy them for a moment, but feel that they have a shelf life of just as long as the laugh they get.

Borges wrote a story called "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" that includes within it a description of a Chinese Encyclopedia called "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge." In it, all animals are categorized as belonging to one of the following categories:

a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

DC and I started a similar classification of art you will find at an art fair. These would include (but not be limited to) (a) jokes, (b) art that seems good for 10 seconds, (c) art you are glad you saw but never want to see again, (d) visual overload art, (e) Anish Kapoor wall bowls, (f) abstract painting, (g) art that if you owned it, it would require you build a special room for it, (g) art that if you owned it, it would require some kind of continuous special maintenance, (h) art so quiet and unassuming, you almost miss it, (i) art so quiet and unassuming that you do miss it, (i) big photos, (j) small photos, (k) sexy art, (l) new casualism, (m) etc., (n) art that from up close looks like money.

Hairdoo for a Hallway was a (d) and Break in Case of Emergency was an (a).


Garcia Sinclair, Weapons of Mass Distraction, 2013, maple, cotton rope, plaster casts

Gabriel Sinclair's Weapons of Mass Distraction at Yellow Peril Gallery was also an (a).

There was art that was more about some visual quality or which had a sophisticated conceptual basis at Cutlog--I just didn't take any pictures. I think Cutlog is a good art fair--the art's eclectic, it's in a funky space and it brings over non-blue chip European galleries. Not to mention one from Malaysia--Fuman Art. I mention them because I was shocked as I rounded the corner into their both and saw this:


Stéphane Blanquet, Blue Ocean, 2014, mixed media on paper, 11.8 x 15.75 inches

Blue Ocean is by artwork Stéphane Blanquet, a French artist best known (to me at least) for his comics. An alternative comics artist, his work falls into the more transgressive, underground sphere of French alternative comics (as opposed to the somewhat more intellectual, twee side represented by L'Association). A small number of his stories have been published in English and one book, Toys in the Basement. Many of his comics are drawn in silhouette form (such as La Vénéneuse aux deux éperons). And the work that Fuman Art had was all done in silhouette.

Obviously one thinks of Kara Walker (or I should say that Kara Walker reminded me of Blanquet--I saw his silhouette work before I saw hers). But even more so, this work reminds me of Andrea Dezsö, an artist whose work was shown at the Rice University Art Gallery in 2010.

I have always liked Blanquet's work, and his paintings were reasonably priced. So I bought one.


Stéphane Blanquet

It's a pretty simple piece. It is painted on stained unprimed linen. But it shows a familiar creepy situation--a bug landing in your hair. It tickles me to think that an artist produced this in France presumably, it was shipped to Kuala Lampur in Malaysia, but then shipped to Manhattan for this art fair, bought by me and carried home in my suitcase to Houston. It would be amusing to draw a map of its travels.

My next stop was Pulse where I met my friend DC. The first year I went to Pulse in New York, I was bowled over by the sheer crassness of the art. Lots of loud, stupid art. Tons of pin-up derived art. I won't say that is entirely gone this year. For example, there is Fall by Jessica Lichtenstein at gallery nine5.


Jessica Lichtenstein, Fall (Four Seasons Series), c-print on acrylic, 48 inches in diameter.

An oversaturated nature scene. But look closer.


Jessica Lichtenstein, Fall (Four Seasons Series) detail, c-print on acrylic, 48 inches in diameter.

The tree is constructed of sexy naked cartoon girls.

 Gallery nine5 also has a classic example of a (g).


Katherine Mann, Fallow, acrylic, sumi ink, collage on paper and felt

Pulse over all seems to have mellowed and matured a bit. Here is some other work that was on display.



Two pieces by Jim Condron at Adah Rose Gallery.



Two pieces by Brian Dupont at Adah Rose gallery. The text is derived from depositions in the Richard Prince/Patrick Cariou case.



And here's Brian Dupont himself

There was a lot of interesting photography at Pulse.


Penelope Umbrico, Mountains Moving: of Aperture Masters of Photography (4 Westons), 2013, c-print at Aperture

Penelope Umbrico also did the amazing Suns from the Internet.


Ellen Carey, Dings and Shadows (Suite of 5, Panels A through D), 2013, color photograms, 24 x 20 inches each at JHB Gallery



Here's DC looking at some Ellen Carey photos at JHB Gallery, with Jayne Baum on the left.



Stephen Mallon captured the sinking of a subway car (at Front Room Gallery).

Among the non-photographic works I liked were these calligraphic pieces by Retna at Coburn Projects.


Retna


Retna

And I loved Loren Munk's history of minimalism (portrayed, ironically, in his trademarked visually dense, super-colorful style) at the Freight + Volume booth. Interestingly, Munk and Retna are two artists I have seen before, but only at art fairs. Sometimes art is described as "art fair art"--that's always seemed rather vague, but one possible definition would be an artist whose work you only ever see at art fairs (assuming that artist is not represented by a gallery in your city).

Loren Munk also has an alter-ego named James Kalm who does videos of various current art shows, which allow him to comment on the art scene--which will presumably inform future Loren Munk paintings.


Loren Munk, Colliding Timelines of Minimalism, 2012, oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches


Loren Munk, Colliding Timelines of Minimalism (detail), 2012, oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches

Munk's painting combine two things I recoil from in visual art--a self-referential art history content and tons of text. For this reason, I've resisted liking them even though in my gut, they appeal to me. My gut wins. I like Colliding Timelines of Minimalism and his work in general. It's wacky fun.


Dan Gluibizzi, Our Season, 2013 (left) and Story Sisters, 2014 (right)


Dan Gluibizzi, Between Friends, 2014


Dan Gluibizzi, Girls Girls Girls 1, 2014

These Dan Gluibizzi watercolors at Kopeikin Gallery also had a wacky quality to them. Both Munk and Gluibizzi want to dazzle you with intense color, and they both succeed. You might ask, why do I condemn Jessica Lichtenstein's Fall, with its naked girls, but like Dan Gluibizzi's Girls Girls Girls 1. Good question. I think it's because the girls in Fall are so fake and plastic. Something about the watercolor in Girls Girls Girls 1 gives them a much more real presence. Not real in the sense of realistic, but real in the sense of human, flesh-and-blood as opposed to just pixels.

Keith Allyn Spencer, Post-Walmart Moral Hangover, filthy disgusting dusty plywood panel found in the outskirts of Hell, student purchased acrylic paint, 1 nail only God Bless It. Dimensions vary (24″ tall -+), 2014

"New Casualism" was represented at Pulse with a booth full of the work of Keith Allyn Spencer. (Jim Condron might fall into that category as well.) I liked these ramshackle abstractions quite a lot. Spencer wears his casualism on his sleeve. The materials for Post-Walmart Moral Hangover are described as "filthy disgusting dusty plywood panel found in the outskirts of Hell, student purchased acrylic paint, 1 nail only." (Spencer was included in the Pan Art Fair in Dallas as part of the Oliver Francis Gallery's line-up.)


Keith Allyn Spencer, The Department, plywood, paint, paint, plywood, staples, canvas, canvas, staples, pain in the pain in the, 12.21″ tall -+, 2013

The booth was run by Phalanx Gallery and it was a solo show by Spencer. I wonder about the strategy of devoting your booth to one artist versus multiple artists. With the former, you can be more dramatic and less cluttered. You are also sending a message that you consider this artist very important. But you may be simultaneously sending a message to the other artists in your stable that you consider this one guy to be the star and all you other artists to be spear carriers.

On the other hand, showing multiple artists can look a bit cluttered and cheap--like a flea market stall. It makes it harder for the viewer to really see the work--individual pieces get lots in the crowd. But at the same time, you hedge your bets. If artist A doesn't sell anything, artist B might.


Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hoorah! For the home spun Dresses, 2014, 16 mm polyester film and thread, 17 13/16 x 16 3/4 inches at LMAKprojects


Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hoorah! For the home spun Dresses (detail), 2014, 16 mm polyester film and thread, 17 13/16 x 16 3/4 inches at LMAKprojects

Sabrina Gschwandtner takes old 16 mm film--in this case, some that was deaccessioned by the FIT--and makes quilt-like patterns out of them. (She also is the only person I've ever encountered who has five consonants in a row in her name, as well as another set of four consecutive consonants as well.) Her beautiful work was shown at LMAKprojects.

Station Independent Projects had a large variety of work by Conrad Bakker, pictured below.


Conrad Bakker at Station Independent Projects

All the stuff on the desk is Bakker's work. So is the desk. So is the trash can. So is the post-it note. And it's all carved from wood and hand-painted. 


Conrad Bakker at Station Independent Projects

So yeah, that piece of paper is carved from wood.


Conrad Bakker at Station Independent Projects

These books are all carved from wood, as is the Amazon box. The concept here is that Bakker is taking high art objects (the Donald Judd-designed desk) and mundane objects (a plastic trash can) and equalizing them, forcing us to contend with our ideas of "high" and "low," art-as-commodity, and blah blah blah. Conceptually, this seems like pretty weak tea. But the objects themselves are amazing! Obviously Bakker demonstrates a lot of skill as a wood-carver, and I respect that, but what really appeals to me is the slightly crude, obviously hand-made paint job he gives each object. Instead of making perfect replicas, he's made ones that is slightly off in a very appealing way.


Conrad Bakker at Station Independent Projects

This sculpture--a painted wood replica of a paperback copy of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure, is the perfect art fair artwork. It takes something cheap and mass-produced (but wonderful for the ideas it contains) and turns it into a valuable unique artwork for a member of the "leisure class" to buy--without any implied obligation that said leisure class member needs to read the words the original contained!

DC had to head home after Pulse, but I went next door to check out Select Art Fair. The main thing Select Art Fair had going for it was its immediate proximity to Pulse. Otherwise, it seems to have taken the old Pulse's worst sensationalist tendencies and run with them. The selection of galleries was truly odd. I knew two of the galleries represented, Zoya Tommy Contemporary and Unit, run by Arianne Roesch. Both told me that they had been approached by Select while exhibiting at other regional art fairs. (They were, by the way, the only two Houston galleries in New York at any of the fairs as far as I could tell.) My friend DC texted me that "Select was 100% missable, if you haven't already been." By the time I got his text, I had been.


People lined up to check out Select

The fair went more for spectacle than for depth. And spectacle can be entertaining. That's the main reason I go to an art fair, anyway--to be entertained.  The problem is that when you are repeatedly hit in the face with such art, it makes it hard to see other art. Art that is quiet or contemplative or subtle.



Pills at DNA Gallery

I don't know who did these pills/bombs at DNA Gallery--their website is unhelpful to the point of being extremely irritating--but the facile juxtaposition of pharmaceuticals with aerial bombardment, the huge size of the objects, and their shiny plastic quality make them masterpieces of glibness.


Pills at DNA Gallery


Daniel Henderson, Premo, 2011, Fossil black marble, cast glass, glass lenses, brass-plated bronze, cast bronze with patina, nickel-plated steel, powder-coated steel, nickel-plated brass, enamel paint. 79 x 38 x 68 in., 5600 lbs. Powder-coated steel base
 
When is doubt, make giant-sized versions of small things. That's what Daniel Henderson did.

One sweaty fellow told me, seemingly at random, that I should make sure I don't miss the goings on in the back room. Naturally I was intrigued and went to check it out. When I saw what he was talking about, it made me wonder if he wasn't a professional tout, like you'd see outside a strip joint in Soho.
The piece he was pointing me to turned out to be a living tableau/art-making exercise sponsored by Lambert Fine Art. It was described as a collaboration between Terrenceo Hammond and Tony Margerrison.


fruit girl at Lambert Fine Art

You were beckoned into a room by this young woman, who also gave you fruit.


Terrenceo Hammond and Tony Margerrison's naked tableau
 
In the back room, there was this scene of naked folks lounging around on cushions and couches. The woman in the center seemed to be posing the other models and taking pictures of them with the camera in the foreground on the left. Maybe this had a point beyond, "Hey look! Naked people!" But I couldn't figure it out.
Not everything was cranked up to 10. I liked this collection of detritus by Brett Day Windham. Sure, Tony Cragg did it first, but Windham's version still looked lovely.


Brett Day Windham's project


Meow Wolf installation

And I liked the casually thrown-together installation by Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe, New Mexico collective. On one side was this collection of artfully arrange junk (I liked the altered traffic cone), and on another was this large painting of a flower-sasquatch by Meow Wolf member Caity Kennedy. 


Caity Kennedy of Meow Wolf
 
So if you are a gallery that shows relatively quiet work, how do you get seen in a fair characterized by visual cacophony? My friend Zoya Tommy's gallery showed art that was kind of unassuming compared to the pulsating productions that dominated Select Art Fair.


Zoya Tommy standing in front of Mark Perry's Koi Pond 2, 2014, oil on canvas, 66"x49"

But she announced on Facebook that she had sold Mark Perry's large painting Koi Pond. So even with all the distractions, if fair goers saw a quieter work that they wanted, they went for it.


Arianne Roesch at the UNIT booth

And Select Fair was probably smart to include a lot of printers of and dealers of editioned artwork, like UNIT. Out of the 42 exhibitors, at least five were presses. The result was that work was accessible to younger, poorer collectors.


Magsamen+ Hillerbrand oven mitts

You could get these playful Magsamen+Hillerbrand oven mitts from UNIT. 

All in all, I'd say Pulse was the best fair I saw Thursday, followed by Cutlog and then Select. Friday was devoted to Frieze, which is the subject of my next post.

Robert Boyd

When we think about art collectors, we are likely to think about people like Eli Broad.


Eli Broad (right)

People who, unlike me and probably you, are very rich. Not that I have anything against rich people. The Menils were also loaded, and we Houstonians benefit from their willingness to share their art collection and to fund the Menil Foundation. (Or maybe when we think about collectors, we think about people like the Vogels, who armed with a good eye and a very tight budget managed to gather a huge, significant collection of contemporary art.) But there is something discouraging when one reads about Christie's auctioning off $745 million worth of art (at an average of $11 million for each piece sold). Or when you stroll through the Frieze art fair. It makes you feel that collecting art is only for the very rich.

But you don't have to be as rich as Eli Broad or as fanatical as the Vogels to acquire art. In the past two months, without exactly intending to, I have acquired 16 pieces of art. They are pieces by long established Houston artists as well as very young local artists. Pieces from Houston, from other parts of Texas, from around the country and even one from France. They are sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints. The ways I got them varied, but what's relevant here is that they were all pretty inexpensive while also being work that really interested and appealed to me.

Earl Staley is a long-time Houston painter and teacher. He came to Houston in the 60s to teach painting at Rice University, had a great deal of success as a painter in the 70s and 80s, moved away for a while and now is back, still teaching, still painting. He went to live at the American Academy in Rome for a couple of months last year, and came back with lots of ideas for new paintings.


Earl Staley, Pavement 8, 2014, acrylic, 22 x 31 inches

Staley had an open studio event and showed some of these new paintings, based on pavement designs in Rome. In addition to his paintings, he also had a slew of new watercolors (in addition to his extensive selection of older pieces). I found this beautiful Grotesquery 2 from his Rome watercolors.


Earl Staley, Grotesquery 2, 2013, watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 inches

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #1: Buy directly from the artist. When you can avoid a middle-man, you save money.

(Nothing against galleries, as you will see below. Galleries are wonderful institutions --they take a lot of risks to support artists and act almost like free museums for the average lookie-loo like me. I love art galleries.)

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #2: Works on paper are often less expensive than larger works. Drawings and water-colors can make accessible the work of an artist whose paintings, sculptures, installations, etc.,  might be out of reach.

That's how I was able to afford a piece by Mark Allen that I got from Front Gallery. Mark Allen runs the Machine Project, which I'll let him explain:


Machine Project Documentary Portrait by David Fenster from machine project on Vimeo.

Allen was also a Core fellow back in 1993 to 1995. He came to Houston recently with two shows--one a bunch of eye-popping posters for various Machine Project events at the Brandon.


Machine Project posters


Machine Project poster

His show at Front Gallery was quite different--a bunch of little drawings that I would characterize as almost cute. I liked the little furry fellow below, so I bought it.

 
Mark Allen, One Friend, color pencil on paper, 2013

BlueOrange gallery was approached by the family of the late Charlie Carper about selling some of his art collection. Disposing of art for estates is a common practice for art galleries. In this case, Carper had collected a lot of silkscreen prints by the Hancock Brothers, and his estate was selling them to benefit ArtBridge, a local non-profit organization that provides opportunities for homeless children to make art.

I didn't know Charlie Carper all that well, but we were Facebook friends and chatted occasionally when we ran into one another at openings. I was sorry to hear that he had died early last year. But I'm glad that his collection was being used to help fund a really great cause. So I bought a print.

 
John Hancock, Prince Randian, screen print 5/10, 16 x 20 inches

Prince Randian was a famous sideshow freak who appeared in the movie Freaks. I wonder if by portraying him in blackface, John Hancock is suggesting that freakshows were to people with disabilities what minstrelsy was to African-Americans. Or maybe he was just being provocative.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #3: Prints/multiples are cheaper than unique items, on average. And a lot of really good artists make limited edition prints.

While I was at BlueOrange, I saw some other work, including an amazing installation, by Brock Caron, a young artist (born 1987, according to Facebook) from Austin. He works in a style that I would call streetwise redneck lo-brow. Imagine the kind of art Southern Culture on the Skids would do if they were visual artists and about 20 years younger.

 
Brock Caron installation (photo courtesy of BlueOrange Gallery)

This is Brock Caron's installation in a big gallery space. In BlueOrange's tiny gallery, it is so large it takes up an entire room with not enough extra space to step back and take a photo.

I liked Caron's art a lot, and it was priced to move. So I got a piece called Mama Tried (named after the classic Merle Haggard song, natch).

 
Brock Caron, Mama Tried, 2014, mixed media on panel, 12 x 16.5 inches

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #4: Buy art by young, emerging artists. Nothing against art by older artists, obviously. But the more established an artist is, on average, the more expensive the work.

The corollary to this is that you may end up buying a lot of work by artists who go on too have not much of a career. But if you want to buy work by artists who have established careers and who have major gallery representation and museum shows and monographs, etc., be prepared to pay a large premium for the privilege. Buying art early in someone's career is more of a "risk," but only if you look at it in terms of a financialinvestment. If you look at it in terms of acquiring art because you like it, you've taken on no risk at all. I have no idea what the future holds for Brock Caron. It would be cool if 15 years from now I could say, "Yeah, I bought a Brock Caron before he got famous." But that's not why I got it.

You wouldn't think so, but selling art at auction to benefit non-profits is controversial. For one thing, if you give $500 to a non-profit, you can deduct that from your income for tax purposes, but if you give a $500 painting you made, you can only deduct the cost of the materials. For another thing, people often go to these auctions looking for bargains, which may depress the market price for an artist's work. I'm not sure that there is an easy solution for the former issue, but for the latter, there are ways around it. For example, the Box 13 silent auction allows the donors (i.e., artists) to set minimum bids on their work. Diverse Works dispenses with individual bidding all together--you just buy an opportunity to be in a raffle and then buy raffle tickets. When your number is chosen, you get to choose any of the artwork you want, unless it has already been chosen by someone else. Diverse Works also has a regulation size, 7 by 9 inches. These are tiny pieces that probably won't be mistaken for an artist's main work.

I attended both of these fund raisers and walked away with several pieces. Here's what I got at Box 13's Empty Box fundraiser.

 
Kathryn Kelly and Anila Agha, Cohesive Discord (1 of 2), 2008, tires, dyed papers and thread 

This is my second Kathy Kelley piece I've gotten from Box 13. She is an artist whose fascinating work I have been following for quite a while.


Paul Middendorf, Jog My Memory Again, ax, wood

Artist/curator Paul Middendorf is also someone whose practice I've followed for a while now, mostly through his curatorial activities.


Maggie Fuller, The Heart with No Companion, 2011, porcelain

On the other hand, I know nothing about Maggie Fuller and can't even find much about her online, except that she is a Galveston artist. But as soon as I saw this disturbing but beautiful creature, I knew I wanted it!


Dennis Harper, Offering, 2013, metal, fabric and wood

Dennis Harper is a former underground cartoonist and current sculptor, now living in Austin. I've written about his work before, included a large sculpture of his in a show I curated, and finally ended up with another sculpture of his at last year's Box 13 fundraiser. I was happy to get this small but elegant object.


Guillaume Gelot, Louise Bourgeois, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 6 inches

I was critical of Guillaume Gelot's "panty shot" paintings in a recent review, but I also liked them (for all the wrong reasons). This one seems especially offensive while being simultaneously cute, sexy and lovable. I couldn't resist. Damn you, Gelot! (Check out that insane thigh gap!)


Hillaree Hamblin, A Glimmer & a Rustle, 2013, acrylic and water-based oil on panel, 14 x 11 inches

Hillaree Hamblin was part of a group show at Gallery HOMELAND! that was the subject of an unusually controversial Glasstire review. I liked her work in that show and I liked this piece here.

And here's what I got at Diverse Work's Luck of the Draw fundraiser.


David Reed, Color Study #32, 9 x 7 inches

David Reed is a writer/painter from New York. Looking at his website, I realized I had seen his paintings before and liked them, but had forgotten his name! Choosing this work at the Luck of the Draw was a happy coincidence.


K.M. Mullins, DWI, 7 x 9 inches

Kevin Mullins is an artist based in Kansas City. Beyond that I know nothing, except that I was hypnotized by this pattern. It would be nice to stare at while listening to György Ligeti's "Volumina" on headphones real loud.


Ryan S. Humphrey, untitled, 7 x 9 inches

I saw a Ryan Humphreyshow in New York last year and it made me laugh (which I think was the intent). It's hard to look at watercolors of breaking waves and not think of Raymond Pettibon, which may be what Humphrey wants.


Tatiana Istomina, Alissa Blumenthal, untitled, date unknown, 9 x 7 inches

Tatiana Istomina was another Core fellowwhose studio I visited last year.The title of this piece indicates that it is meant to be seen as the work of her fictional alter-ego, Alissa Blumenthal, a Russian modernist who immigrated to the US in 1925.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #5: Buy art at fundraisers for non-profits (particularly those that are run on a ethical basis vis-a-vis the participating artists).

Now buying this much work in a short period of time is not something I planned to do. In all these cases, relatively inexpensive artwork became available more or less by chance. It wasn't enough that the opportunity was there, though--I had to grab it.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #6: Be prepared to acquire art on a moment's notice because you never know when the opportunity will arise.

Stéphane Blanquet painting

That's what happened when I went up to New York earlier in May to check out the big art fairs. I never go to these things with the intent to buy art because 99.9% of it is out of my league. (I usually get some books at DAP and Printed Matter, who exhibit at Frieze and NADA respectively. And this year Raw Vision exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair; I got two books and the latest issue of Raw Vision there.) But as I mentioned in this post, I happened on a Stéphane Blanquet painting that was within my price range. I wasn't expecting it and indeed hesitated at first. I left the Fuman Art booth and walked around the fair looking at other stuff, but ultimately I returned and pulled the trigger. The opportunity presented itself and I took it.

 
H.J. Bott's studio on July 1, 1979 (photo by H.J. Bott)

The craziest art acquisition this past month was But Still First, a piece made of wood and cast aluminum by H.J. Bott in 1966. Harvey Bott had a massive studio space that had morphed over the years into a cluttered storage space.

 
H.J. Bott's former studio on April 6, 2014 (photo by H.J. Bott)

But the land under the enormous metal shed became too valuable to remain a warehouse space, and Harvey had to move years of accumulated stuff out. Some he carefully put into climate controlled storage. Some was certainly going to be thrown away. But there was some stuff he was giving away, so he invited a group of us to come over and take what we wanted.


 
A public comment on the building's future (photo by H.J. Bott)


Harvey and But Still First


H.J. Bott, But Still First, 1966, sand-cast aluminum, wood, 14 3/4 x 22 inches

That's how I got this early Bott, created long before he came up with his DoV system. It obviously comments on the then current space race and the unspoken violence that lay behind it. (The space race, like much of the Cold War, was war by other means.) I feel extremely privileged and grateful to have it. And that leads me to my final tip.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #7: Become friends with someone who may someday, when you least expect it, give you a piece of art for free.

A corollary to that one is that you have to pay it forward. Buy art and give art to the people you love.

For these 16 pieces of art, I paid a total of $3264, which is by no means a trivial amount of money. But it comes out to a mere $204 each, which is pretty damn affordable. You don't have to be Eli Broad. You, too, can collect art.

Robert Boyd


Doug Aitken, I Think Very Deeply, 2013, hand-carved foam, acrylic letters and hand silk-screened acrylic, 94 3/4 x 65 1/4 inches

(Day 1--Cutlog, Pulse and Select--is here.)

Frieze again. Lots of complaints this time around--the same galleries showing the same artists, nothing new or exciting. Three Anish Kapoor wall bowls at three different galleries--again. No press pass for The Great God Pan Is Dead. Again. (Fortunately, Pan friend LM had some free passes from PPOW Gallery.) Last year had the giant blow-up balloon dog by Paul McCarthy out front. This year, nothing so spectacular. The art was large and expensive as usual, and there were the usual spate of pieces that hilariously flattered the viewers (and potential buyers), like Doug Aitken's I Think Very Deeply at 303 Gallery.


Jeppe Hein, You Are Perfect As You Are, 2013, powder-coated aluminum, neon tubes, two-way mirror, powder coated steel, transformers, 39 1/3 x 39 1/3 x 4 1/3 inches

Just imagine how insecure you have to be to want to own Jeppe Hein's You Are Perfect As You Are (shown at Johann König). And I thought these collectors were supposed to be "Masters of the Universe"--big deal hedge fund/private equity super-rentiers. Do they need this level of narcissistic affirmation?

Sarah Oppenheimer also used two-way mirrors in her work at the fair, but to more subtle and interesting ends.


Sarah Oppenheimer, P-01 (14), 2014, anodized aluminum and coated glass, 73 ½ x 73 ½ x 19 ½ inches (at PPOW)


Sarah Oppenheimer, P-01 (14), 2014, anodized aluminum and coated glass, 73 ½ x 73 ½ x 19 ½ inches (with me reflected)

This piece is actually a 19 1/2 inch-deep  hole in the wall with a piece of semi-relective glass set in it at an angle. No photograph can do justice to how disorienting it is. PPOW had to build a extra-thick wall for it. This is a piece that belongs in the category of art that requires collectors build a special room for it. A collector has to be really dedicated to own P-01 (14). But it's beautiful, so perhaps it's worth the effort.


Sylvie Fleury, Eternal Wow on Shelves, 2007, shelves, polished stainless steel, sculptures, fiberglass and car paint, 108.27 x 34.65 x 28.74 inches (at Salon 94)


Sylvie Fleury, Eternal Wow on Shelves (detail), 2007, shelves, polished stainless steel, sculptures, fiberglass and car paint, 108.27 x 34.65 x 28.74 inches (Salon 94)

More shiny art, but while Sarah Oppenheimer's art is intellectual, Sylvie Fleury is a comedian. Strangely enough, this is the second piece lampooning Donald Judd this weekend--the first being the Conrad Bakker installation at Pulse.

PAINTING

If I were an art student today, painting would seem old hat. There are just so many other ways to make an image available to artists now that smearing goo around on a canvas just because it's been done a lot in the past seems crazy. But the fact is that as a viewer, I find myself drawn to painting. This weekend I saw lots of paintings that I loved. Just because painting is an obsolete, archaic medium for nostalgists, I refuse to deny myself the simple but exquisite pleasure of looking at a good painting.


Jeff Elrod, #InterZone, 2013, UV ink on Fischer canvas, 84 x 146 inches (at Luhring Augustine)

Of course,  you can use a computer to design your painted image and have it printed on canvas, like Jeff Elrod.


Joan Mitchell, untitled, 1965, oil on canvas, 63 3/4 x 44 3/4 inches (at Cheim & Read)

But Frieze wasn't 100% about the now, as this beautiful Joan Mitchell painting from 1965 attested. 


John Williams, untitled, 2014, oil on canvas, 120 x 192 inches (at Brennan & Griffin)

Some paintings were enormous, like this booth-sized John Williams. 


Lisa Yuskavage, Sorbet Sky, 2012, oil on linen, 33 x 27.9 inches (at Greengrassi)

And some were quite modest in size (if not subject matter), like this cute li'l Lisa Yuskavage.


Lucas Arruda, sem titulo, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm (at Mendes Wood DM)

A lush scene of a jungle seems a bit of a cliche coming from a Brazilian artist, but Lucas Arruda does it so well that I can forgive him for conforming to an outdated stereotype.


Nathan Carter (at Esther Schipper)

A lot of galleries didn't bother putting informative wall labels, so I don't know what this lovely Nathan Carter painting is called. (At least Esther Schipper named the artist--lots of galleries didn't even go that far.)


Philip Taaffe, Foraminifera, 2014, mixed media on canvas, 51 x 97 inches (at Luhring Augustine)

Philip Taaffe had some intense colors, which I liked.


Robert Janitz at Team Gallery


Robert Janitz, Places of Interest, 2014, oil, wax and flour on linen, 77 x 60 inches


Robert Janitz, Charmin Tubes and Wilted Flowers, 2014, oil, wax and flour on linen, 77 x 60 inches

Robert Janitz basically smeared big transparent brush-strokes of one color on an underpainting of another color. The approach is simple, but I love the results.


George Condo, Grey seated female composition, 1991, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches (at Sprüth Magers)

I don't love George Condo's work generally, but I found myself charmed by this Picasso pastiche.


Uwe Kowski at Galerie Eigen + Art


Uwe Kowski at Galerie Eigen + Art


Uwe Kowski at Galerie Eigen + Art

Galerie Eigen + Art was another gallery that didn't provide labels, so I don't know what these three Uwe Kowski paintings are called. But I loved his choppy brushstrokes.


Johannes Kahrs, Untitled (ostia), 2011, oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 118 1/8 inches (at Luhring Augustine)

This atypical landscape from Johannes Kahrs was a moody, gloomy note in a fair otherwise mostly full of bright colors.


Karl Wirsum, Hi! Water Mark Whaz the Point, 1988, acrylic on canvas (with painted wood frame), 56.625 x 40.625 inches (at Derek Eller Gallery)

Karl Wirsum, on the other hand, never skimps on the bright colors. Derek Eller had a whole booth full of classic Wirsum work. Interestingly, he had a whole booth of Wirsum last year, too--at NADA. I noticed that Lisa Cooley had a booth at Frieze this year (last year she was at NADA, too). I assume this counts as a promotion of sorts. Did Frieze poach them, asking them in effect, "You ready to play with the big boys now?" Or did they approach Frieze?


Karl Wirsum, Great Skates III, 1976, acrylic on board (with painted wood frame), 31 x 25 inches (at Derek Eller Gallery)

However it happened, I was glad to see it because I love Karl Wirsum and have ever since I saw a slide of his work in an art history class in the early 80s. Derek Eller was showing work from various stages of Wirsum's career--it was almost a mini-retrospective. I'm glad his work is being reevaluated--I'd like to see a full-scale museum retrospective.


Karl Wirsum, Great Skates II, 1976, acrylic on board (with painted wood frame), 31 x 25 inches (at Derek Eller Gallery)




Karl Wirsum, (left to right) Mary O'Net, Chris Teen, Nurse Worse, 1972, enamel on wood, fabric, dimensions variable (at Derek Eller Gallery)

One thing that surprised me were the three sculptures that were included. They were like bizarre polychrome store dummies wearing dresses. Did Wirsum design the dresses too?

SCULPTURE


Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Flower Power Kids (Dueling), 2014, Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, leather, fiberglass, and decommissioned antique flint-lock gun,  Overall: 54 3/8 x 106 1/4 x 19 5/8 inches

Wirsum wasn't the only artist dressing up mannequins.  Yinka Shonibare had his trademark colorfully dressed characters at both Stephen Friedman Gallery and James Cohan Gallery. There was quite a bit of that at Frieze--the same artist's work appearing in more than one booth.


Yinka Shonibare, MBE Magic Ladder Kid III, 2013, Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, leather, fiberglass, wooden ladder, steel baseplate, globe, Overall: 118 x 48 x 31 1/2 inches

Sculpture is an inherently more versatile medium in paint, at least since the 20th century freed sculptors to use any material they wanted. The problem with sculpture for a collector is that it requires more space than painting. It requires more of a commitment on the part of the collector.


William Kentridge, Bicycle Wheel, 2013-14, wood, steel, brass, aluminum, found objects, 140 x 125 x 253 cm. (at Goodman Gallery)

That said, I doubt that is an issue for the collectors at Frieze. If you can afford $160,000 for William Kentridge's Bicycle Wheel, you can find a place for it.


Georg Baselitz, Zero Ende, 2013, bronze, 37 x 137 x 36 inches (at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac)

My assumption is that Georg Baselitz's Zero Ende is ultimate destined for a museum. But I admit it tickles me to imagine it in someone's living room. (Attention Great Art in Ugly Rooms!)


Los Carpinteros, Robotica, 2013, wood, metal, Lego bricks, 114 x 59 inches (at Sean Kelly)

Los Carpinteros made their sculpture out of Lego. I saw someone take a brick off, examine it, then put it back.


Sarah Lucas, New Religion (Orange), 2013, 15 1/3 x 21 5/8 x 71 1/4 inches (at Sadie Coles)

If you bought New Religion (Orange) by Sarah Lucas, how long do you think it would take before some drunk party guest gets the brilliant idea to lay down in it and manages to shatter it?


Roman Signer, Hemd (Shirt), 1995, shirt, ventilator, helium, string, dimensions variable (Galerie Martin Janda)

Hemd (Shirt) by Roman Signer belongs to the class of art that requires constant maintenance. Specifically, the owner of this piece must inflate new balloons every few days and tie them to the string. When you buy the art, so you get a lifetime supply of balloons with it? (I assume you have to supply you own helium.)


Jonathan Monk, All Possible Combinations of Eight Legs Kicking (One at a Time), 2013, steel, motor, control unit, cables, fiberglass, textile, each set of legs 43.7 x 13.8 x 22.8 inches (at Galleri Nicolai Wallner)

All Possible Combinations of Eight Legs Kicking (One at a Time) by Jonathan Monk was the first piece that we (me and my two companions at the fair, DC and LM) determined belonged to the class of artworks that if DC were to buy it, his wife would divorce him. But that was too easy--lots of art fell into that category. Obviously a set of eight randomly high-kicking legs wouldn't fly, but DC would never consider buying such a work in the first place. So we narrowed our quest down to art that DC might plausibly be interested in that his buying it would cause Mrs. DC to immediately file for divorce.


Matt Johnson, "Eight" (Lautner Beam / Super String), 2014, mild steel with patina, 43 x 24 x 23 inches (at 303 Gallery)

Now on the other hand, one can almost imagine DC buying a tasteful sculpture like "Eight" (Lautner Beam / Super String) by Matt Johnson. But what puzzled us about this was the material, "mild steel." What is mild steel. Fortunately, Wikipedia comes through: "Mild steel, also known as plain-carbon steel, is the most common form of steel because its price is relatively low while it provides material properties that are acceptable for many applications, more so than iron. Low-carbon steel contains approximately 0.05–0.3% carbon making it malleable and ductile. Mild steel has a relatively low tensile strength, but it is cheap and malleable; surface hardness can be increased through carburizing."


Nicolas Guagnini, Rad Dad, 2014, vitrified glazed ceramics, books, pedestal, 57 x 68 x 14 inches (at Bortolami)


Nicolas Guagnini, Rad Dad (detail), 2014, vitrified glazed ceramics, books, pedestal, 57 x 68 x 14 inches (at Bortolami)

Rad Dad by Nicolas Guagnini was not the first artwork I saw taking off from Richard Prince this trip--Brian Dupont had two Prince-based paintings at Pulse.


Matthew Darbyshire, CAPTCHA (1)--Corporate Cooler, 2014, Multi-well polycarbonate, 69 x 15 x 16 inches (at Herald St.)

Amazingly enough, Matthew Darbyshire's CAPTCHA (1)--Corporate Cooler is the second sculpture of a water cooler I've seen at Frieze. In 2012, Adam McEwen displayed a life size sculpture of a water cooler made of graphite. It will only take one more artist doing this before it becomes a trend.


Harry Dodge, Autotelia, 2012, Broom handles, redwood scraps, wax, blue foam, pourable rigid foam, plastic shopping bags, urethane resin, spray paint, latex paint, urethane alkyd gloass enamel, 69 x 55 x 42 inches (at Wallspace)

As I said, sculpture trumps painting because it can be made of anything. For example, Autotelia by Harry Dodge.


Jeon Joonho, Composition of Poetry, 2014, polished stainless steel cast, mirror, LED light (at Gallery Hyundai)

Or Composition of Poetry by Jeon Joonho (which seemed to have a family relationship to Dodge's sculpture).


Jeon Joonho, Composition of Poetry, 2014, polished stainless steel cast, mirror, LED light (at Gallery Hyundai)


Daniel Arsham, Ash, Glacial Rock, Obsidian, Rose Quartz and Steel Eroded Basketballs, 2014, volcanic ash, glacial rock dust, obsidian fragments, rose quartz fragments, steel fragments, pulverized glass, sand, crushed marble, hydrostone, metal, 43 x 49 x 10 inches (at Galerie Perrotin)

I saw at least two basketball-themed sculptures, including this eerie one by Daniel Arsham.


Ei Arakawa and Henning Bohl, The Day When Soccer Became Money, 2014, styrofoam, fabric, cord, various metal chains, set of five balls, edition of five (at Taka Ishii Gallery)


Ei Arakawa and Henning Bohl, The Day When Soccer Became Money, 2014, styrofoam, fabric, cord, various metal chains, set of five balls, edition of five (at Taka Ishii Gallery)

Soccer also had its sculptural champions with Ei Arakawa and Henning Bohl.


 Maria Nepomuceno at A Gentil Carioca

 
Maria Nepomuceno at A Gentil Carioca

Maria Nepomuceno's lovely woven rope installation reminded me a lot of Ernesto Neto, which makes a certain amount of sense given than Neto is one of the founders of A Gentil Carioca.


K8 Hardy, rrrookie, 2014, wood, lacquer, cloth, eather, 36 x 60 x 37 (at Karma International)

K8 Hardy is mostly known as a performance artist, but I liked this little chainsaw sculpture.


Nick Cave, Sundsuits, 2014, mixed media including fabric, sequins, shoelaces and bugle beads, 97 x 26 x 20 inches (at Jack Shainman Gallery) and me (photo by DC)

Everyone seems to love Nick Cave's Soundsuits. I remarked that I wished art fairs had cosplayers, and DC suggested that they would wear their own homemade Soundsuits. Would that be considered insulting to the artist or an homage?


Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth

Of course, it wouldn't be Frieze without a giant Paul McCarthy. When art writers complain about "same old same old" at Frieze, it's stuff like this that they're talking about. But the thing is, I love it.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Last year was a big year for photography at Frieze (Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky had lots of really big photos). It seemed less so this year.


Carrie Mae Weems, Slow Fade to Black, Set II, 2009-10, inkjet on paper, 13 x 10 1/8 inches each

But at least there was this suite of photos by Carrie Mae Weems. But as I looked at it, I wondered if photos of black performers were chosen to be shown at Frieze by the gallery because they'd be more easily accessible to the overwhelmingly white collectors there.


Beom Kim, Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge), 2008, 24 seconds, single channel video (at Gallery Hyundai)

Video also was not such a big presence. I was highly amused by Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge) by Beom Kim. I can't remember where I stumbled across this gif online, but whoever made it, thank you!


Candice Breitz, The Interview, 2012, dual channel film installation (at Goodman Gallery)

And I liked The Interview by Candice Breitz, featuring Chinedu Ikedieze and Osita Iheme, two of Nollywood's biggest film stars.

But the best video I saw wasn't on display. Goodman Gallery is located in Johannesburg and carries the work of a lot of African contemporary artists. I suspect that the South African market is not quite enough to sustain them and they really depend on international art fairs like Frieze. They had a great photo by Kudzanai Chiurai on display, and LM asked about Chiurai's videos. The gallerist took us into a little storeroom and showed us a mind-blowing video by Chiurai on his computer. I think LM would have been interested in buying it (he did buy a photo at Frieze from another dealer), but the edition had already sold.

Then there were a lot of interesting painting-like objects that weren't exactly paintings.


Damien Hirst, Hollywood, 2013-2014, scalpel blades and Hammerite paint on canvas, 67 1/8 x 107 7/8 inches (at White Cube)

I was kind of shocked by how much I liked Damien Hirst's Hollywood, which is in fact a street map of Hollywood made out of scalpel blades. I assume there is some reference to cosmetic surgery going on. But what appealed to me was the look. The silvery blades against the black background look great--dramatic and dangerous. As a map, it's a bit hard to read--but that's part of the fun. I spent half an hour looking at my photo of it and a satellite map of Hollywood to figure out if I could see my old apartment in Hirst's map. (Alas, no--it is just a little off the left edge.)


Ghada Amer at Massimo Minini

When DC saw this beautiful embroidered work by Ghada Amer, he was surprised by it because he was more familiar with her female nudes. But looking at this piece closely, one realizes that all the embroidered lines are actually partial contours of female bodies. It suddenly goes from abstraction to eroticism when you realize this.


Ghada Amer detail

Another artist who plays with eroticism is Donald Moffett. That play was on full view at his solo exhibit at the CAMH back in 2011-12, and it showed in a subtle way in the three paintings he had at Marianne Boesky. I spoke of objects that were like paintings but not exactly? Moffett's really are paintings. The "fur" in each of the paintings below is somehow simulated using oil-paint.


Donald Moffett, Lot 041214 (magnetic violation), 2014, oil on linen with wood panel support, 21 x 16 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches


Donald Moffett, Lot 022414 (titanium strafe), 2014, oil on linen with wood panel support, 31 x 25 x 2 1/2 inches


Donald Moffett, Lot 051610 (magnetic hole), 2014, oil on linen with wood panel support, 28 1/4 x 20 x 5 1/4 inches

But perhaps the most erotic work that LM, DC and I saw was an off-site installation we saw after leaving Frieze and walking back to Manhattan on the Ward's Island Bridge.


Anonymous, Frankie Rocks Ass, Krylon enamel paint on steel.

But as has been remarked elsewhere, this edition of Frieze seemed more conservative. I'm not criticizing it for that--I liked a lot of the paintings I saw, after all. But last year's Frieze seemed to have more installation art (the big Jack Early installations, for example) and much more political art (which frankly felt a little out of place). One very interesting project Frieze had was a recreation of an installation/happening from from 1971 called Al's Grand Hotel by Allen Ruppersberg. Ruppersberg and Public Fiction created a two-room hotel inside Frieze. Reading about it in the New York Times made me wish I could have stayed there!

I had to settle for the Holiday Inn. But despite that, I enjoyed Frieze. I saw Mark Flood there and he said, "So you're the kind of person who goes to art fairs now?" I guess I am.

Robert Boyd

I saw Keren Cytter's blood-soaked Rose Garden last night at Diverse Works. It was shot at the Rose Garden bar (up off of Airline in the greater Heights area of Houston), a place that Wayne Gilbert characterized as a dive. The cast consists of a combination of local actors and artists, including Emily Peacock, Nick Meriwether, Wayne Gilbert, Otis Ike and Jim Hatchett.


Rose Garden from keren cytter on Vimeo.

There is a strange logic to the story, but mostly it seems absurd. For example, the bar patrons' reaction to the accidental shooting of Emily Peacock is almost total indifference. The music, a combination of of eerie flute and banjo, was perfect--it gave the video a suspense-filled spaghetti Western feel. The non-actors mostly non-acted, to be blunt, but Otis Ike has to be praised for delivering an amazingly creepy erotic phone-sex monologue.

This video is Keren Cytter's contribution to a larger project, Der Stachel des Skorpions ("The Sting of the Scorpion"),which includes contributions by Tobias Zielony, Chicks on Speed, M+M, Julian Rosefeldt andJohn Bock in addition to Cytter. It is a deliberately surrealist project, based on L’Âge d’Or by the divine Luis Buñuel. L’Âge d’Or has been divided into six sections, and each artist films his or her own version of one of the sections. Therefore it is a film version of the Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse. Cytter has transformed the feast in the mansion into a Texas bar scene.

Diverse Works brings a lot of artists to Houston who work in non-traditional media or else who are not primarily visual artists at all.  Cytter, an Israeli artist, is one of these. She had a performance and exhibit at Diverse Works in 2013. At times, I've resented this direction from Diverse Works. It veers into theater, which I don't feel especially equipped to deal with critically or even as a viewer. (Claire Bishop, I ain't.) Plus, you can often feel in such situations that the art space has parachuted in some artist who is making a tour of the provinces. It risks feeling unconnected to the here and now.

But one thing Rose Garden made me realize is that a lot of the artists that Diverse Works brings in use Houston--its people, its locations, its events--as material. For example, Liz Magic Laser's Tell Me What You Want to Hear, which included a number of local Houston journalists and political strategists (Houstonians one rarely sees in an art space like Diverse Works, it should be noted), and City Council Meeting by Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay, which featured a number of Houston amateur actors, including an actual Houston city councilman. Tell Me What You Want to Hear,City Council Meeting and Rose Garden each engage Houston in very specific non-superficial ways.  (You might conclude that I am pretty slow on the uptake if I'm only realizing this now. Probably so!)

My worry that out-of-town artists would necessarily have no connection with Houston and its specific situation is therefore totally unwarranted. When you think about it, Diverse Works and the artists it brings to Houston have made a serious effort to integrate their work locally, even though the artists are here only temporarily. Whether this is the specific intention of Diverse Works or an unintended by-product of the artists they choose to bring here (or some combination of the two), I don't know. But I'm glad they do it and I'm glad that I finally noticed it.

Robert Boyd

A quick apology to readers for the slow posting. I'm in the process of moving, and it is sucking away every spare moment I have.



I have a few posts in the pipeline, but if you're really jonesing, here is a choice John Waters quote from the book Art: A Sex Book.

You have to participate in the art world. You have to learn to see art, but that's what's so exciting. After going around to look at what's in galleries all day long, when you walk home--it doesn't last for more than a couple of hours--but every single thing you see reminds you of art: the trash, the signs, the bus stop. It fades a little as time goes by so you have to return to the galleries to get the 'art' back into your life.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

She spoke of visiting the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, and it was fun to imagine Sharon Kopriva examining the artistic possibilities of centuries-old Sicilian corpses. In the same breath she said it wasn’t until she went to Palermo that she understood her grandfather’s garden. He planted orange trees, and fennel, and other plants she discovered to be in abundance there in the city of his birth.


Sharon Kopriva, Riding the Pices Moon, 2013, Mixed media on photographic print, 42 x 49 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

It was unnecessary for Art in Americato call our attention to forest imagery in Kopriva’s art. For years it’s been evident that nature is on an equal footing with the longstanding themes of death and Catholic religious mythology. Arguably, forest landscape intermingled with gothic cathedral architecture has precisely the same connotations as sculptural mummified religious figures. They serve as referents to actuality that is inexplicable and transcendent. On a recent studio visit I learned the following:

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: After a number of years of incorporating nature into your work, the landscapes should now be thought of as established orthodoxy. Self-portraiture on the other hand, numerous examples of which appear in your solo exhibition Illuminations (at Deborah Colton Gallery through June 26), is relatively new. It’s my assessment that depictions of your flying nude body in paintings such as Time Traveling and Riding the Pisces Moon, similarly to those of dogs that fly through forests and gothic cathedrals, originate from something buried in your psyche. This will probably piss a few people off, but have you ever floated out of your body?

Sharon Kopriva: Only one other person has ever asked me that - Walter Hopps.

VBA: The late Walter Hopps organized your solo exhibition at the Menil Collection in the year 2000.

SK: I floated through the walls. My out of body experience took place almost twenty years ago when I was in the hospital. I realize now that if I had not been there in the hospital I probably would not be here today. The thing I remember most as I look back was an incredible freedom, and I recall having absolutely no fear. It is the only time I remember flying THROUGH anything, and it was different than any dream I have ever had. It was very real. I do remember hearing my name called, and called again, and I came back to a doctor who looked more anxious than I was.

VBA: My father did that when he was a kid. He slipped through an inner tube, and found himself up in the sky looking at his body on the pier, and he told me he saw the older kids who were supposed to be watching him crying and screaming. Then he was back in his body vomiting water and crying. Surely Hopps recognized this in your art.

SK: That conversation with Walter was a very brief but memorable moment when he asked me if I had ever “traveled.” Walter was special, on the edge of many things. He sometimes called in the middle of the night. For him time was eternal.

VBA: Even if you hadn’t admitted to floating around the hospital, openness to extra-dimensional reality is easily detected in the sculptural dead, decaying and mummified figures, and paintings of ghosts and phantom dogs. Have you experienced other things not of this world?

SK: Pop, the man who raised Gus, appeared to me after he died. I saw him clearly. He had something important to tell me. It was very personal, advice I followed. I think we all have these opportunities to communicate. Most of the time, we do not allow them to happen. Your questions have allowed me to think about the few times in my life when I reached beyond the physical. They are being revisited in my memory.


Sharon Kopriva, From Dust Thou Art, 1997, Papier-mâché and mixed media, 54 x 23 x 39 (Collection of Nancy Reddin Kienholz)

VBA: It’s well known that travels in Peru shaped the rotting-mummy aesthetic in your art. I traveled that entire country with my archaeology group, so I recognize how closely derived your sculptures are from their Peruvian mummy sources. It was unexpected to see the open pits at Nazca, and mummies with hair preserved and textile wrappings remarkably un-faded, the colors of which by the way account for the ocher, reds, and earth tones in your art. Archaeological interest though was not my sole reason for going to Peru. As you know, Peru is considered the most significant area on the planet for extra terrestrial sightings, and I figured if that is real and it probably is, then it’s the most important thing anyone could talk about, so I went there to talk to Peruvians about their experiences, and heard some marvelous stories. Be assured Robert Boyd will receive a few complaints about silly ass interview questions, but have you had any extra terrestrial encounters?

SK: My experiences in Peru were totally wonderful, but unfortunately remained earthbound. I have not abandoned the possibility of experiences at a later date. I did see the Nazca lines which some believe are the work of extra terrestrials.

VBA: I was certain I would die seeing those lines, kept waiting for the plane’s single propeller to malfunction.

SK: And the planes make those scary loops and turns. I would love to talk more about Peru with you, and although I have not seen extra terrestrials, I believe I experienced an earlier life, which might have been in Peru. We saw the mummies when we first went there in 1982, an elderly guide took us to the burials, and we saw bones, bleached by the sun, thrown everywhere. There were whole limbs, hair, sculls, and of course, missing was the pottery the thieves took, and the wonderful woven cloths. On our next trip almost 25 years later, that spot was "cleaned up," there were still a few bones off in the distance, but the site was suddenly organized. There is a picture of it in my New Orleans Ogden Museum exhibition catalog.

VBA: Masterful is the only word to express the manner in which you capture knotty leg joints and muscles in three-dimensional renderings of your Peruvian hounds Luna, Pluto and Thor. I once saw a superb bronze of Thor with the figure twisted as if about to chase its tail, which reached to Degas’ level of observation and nuance. But the way you distorted your dogs’ images in the Seven Deadly Sins installation at Project Row Houses in 2011 was shameful. Spread through the row house were dog sculptures meant to represent the seven human transgressions. In the rear of the house was Gluttony asleep on the floor, in the form of an obese stingray, surrounded by Frito bags, Big Mac containers and dog shit. You disgraced those animals.

SK: One day I’ll do another sculpture series of the dogs, probably in bronze. Gus and I are forever watching our dogs spin around and interact with each other. Long ago we decided they have all the same qualities as humans when dealing with each other. So when I was invited to do an installation at Row Houses, it was Gus who actually suggested I use my sculptured dogs as actors to demonstrate the sins. What fun. I managed to reserve the only house still divided into rooms, and off we went. Humor is good. I have so often seen my dogs demonstrate envy and greed, of course gluttony and lust. And I have seen anger and vanity.


Sharon Kopriva, Insomniacs Nightmare, 2010-11, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 68 x 40 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: The thought of you arranging doggie excrement in the row house brings to mind Kienholz with whom you studied after graduate school. As an art history student I was haunted by my first encounter with Kienholz’s The State Hospital, which must have required meticulous manipulation of materials to construct the diseased and decaying figures, as well as unpleasant installation of bloody, urine-stained mattresses. When you handle, complexly, animal bones, clay, cloth, and papier-mâché or arrange sculptural tableau such as in The Confessional are you conscious of Ed Kienholz’s influence?

SK: I am very aware of the Kienholz’s influence. I also knew Ed Kienholz through art history books long before I met him and Nancy. It was Ed who inspired me to move into the more complex installations and multi figure pieces, he continually pushed me to explore new territory. The Confessional was one of my first multi figure works, and perhaps my most important piece to date. I’m grateful to both Ed and Nancy for moving me to a new level. How lucky to not only get to meet my heroes but to become so close.

VBA: Perhaps even more influential than Kienholz was your sculpture teacher James Surls, whom I had the opportunity to meet in 2010 when I wrote a newspaper article about one of his exhibitions. Let me remind you of 2005 when Gus Kopriva organized the group exhibition Still Crazy After All These Years to celebrate Lawndale Art Center’s 25th anniversary, and to evoke the dissipated art student environment of the University of Houston Lawndale studio. As much as the event honored the U of H Lawndale and the subsequent Lawndale Art Center, it was a tribute to James Surls who set everything in motion. I came across an Art in America article from the late eighties in which Surls was quoted as saying he “exploited” his students by arranging exhibitions so they could interact with collectors and curators to experience how “real” artists conducted themselves. In my estimation Prey for Us, your sculpture of an altar boy figure over which a shadow image of a predatory cleric was projected, was a focal point of the show.

SK: Wow, Still Crazy! You aren’t leaving any stones unturned. That was a great show. I saw that exhibition as a chance to re-live history. As you know, the old Lawndale was a separate animal from Lawndale Art Center, it was part of the university and directly involved the students. James Surl's soul was all over it. I was there in 1979 when we put the first coats of white paint over the yellow walls of that old cable factory. Even after Surls moved on, his spirit stayed. The new Lawndale is a wonderful alternative exhibition space, vital to this city, and now has a history of its own. Lawndale and the MFA exhibition Fresh Paint were responsible for kicking off the careers of many young artists in Houston.

VBA: I recently saw some of your wall-mounted relief works at the Spring Street Studios exhibition and witnessed how their mysterious quality silenced a few viewers. You achieved the meditative intensity required to re-direct thoughts to life, death and the nature of reality, which for you obviously stretches beyond the physical.

SK: The four small works at Spring Street were done originally for an exhibit in India. I think we all have the capacity to think or be "beyond physical." I also feel most of us do this intuitively rather than consciously. And I think that many things come forth through art that may not have through the spoken word. Images do come that are sometimes totally conscious and sometimes not. I’m especially interested in art that is beyond real, surreal and most often spiritually motivated. I love the art historical trail through romanticism and symbolism, and believe many of the artists were reaching into metaphysical states in their visions, in search of the spiritual and the sublime.

VBA: You are speaking about the 2011 Mumbai gallery exhibition Phantoms and Milestones in which the ghost dogs appeared with depictions of historically significant events related to struggles for liberty. I’ve not yet been to India, but I’m drawn to the Hindu notion of an energy or force that connects all living and inanimate things, and one day hope to see Banaras where Hindus go to prepare for passage to the unknown reality beyond the borders of life, and pray to escape rebirth. Sharon, you already mentioned a possible past life in Peru and in a 1996 interview you stated “everything cycles.” Explain more about how reincarnation fits into your philosophy.

SK: Cycles of life interest me probably more than any other condition of our existence. I think all of my art is related to cycles in one way or another. Long before India I saw the cycles clearly in Peru. The mummy forms in my sculptures come out of the cycles there. In Australia, I also saw evidence of transformation and cycles in the aboriginal life and art, as I did in India. I do not know if all people reincarnate, but I believe some might. I do not know if I will, but I believe I could. There might be complicated reasons about why and how, but I do believe it happens. Matter is not created or destroyed, it is transformed and recycled. But that's the physical part. There are places where I have stepped where I feel I have been before, particularly in Peru. That's the spiritual part. In Australia, beings are believed to move in and out of inanimate objects. I find that fascinating. A rock may possess the spirit that will become a person and a person's spirit may yet become one with a rock or a tree or an animal. I didn’t have much time to spend in India but hope to return and experience more of that land and culture and learn more about how it fits into the "whole" picture. I do not believe the spiritual part of a person disappears. Some think we just cease to exist, some we either go to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. I think we might not all do the same thing. I believe the souls of some float around earth, some because they cannot figure out where to go, some because they choose to or have unfinished business. I believe some might take on a new form and cycle again.


Sharon Kopriva, Joan of Arc, 1988, Papier-mâché, burned wood, mixed media, 72 x 36 x 28 (Menil permanent collection)

VBA: The years haven’t dimmed my memory of your Menil show. Why did the sculpture Joan of Arc unsettle me?

SK: The Joan of Arc sculpture is one of three of my works that entered the Menil Collection. I think Walter and Mrs. de Menil chose this work together to be donated by Edward and Nancy Kienholz. Mrs. de Menil was especially moved by the female martyrs. She personally chose Catherine's Wheel to have a permanent home at the museum. And I think of the series of martyrs whose legends found their way into my studio in the mid to late 80's, Joan was my favorite, and she is most people's favorite. It's her story, her role as an early, strong feminist that moves us. She was caught up in politics, first a hero, then proclaimed a heretic and burned at the stake in her teens, thanks to the Catholic Church, then 400 yeas later, proclaimed a Saint. Surely she had out of body experiences, had to be in a trance when she led the army into battle and when she was ablaze. In fact, don't you think all of our martyrs experienced religious induced trances? I think Joan's story is so compelling because she is in regular history books. That puts a mark of “TRUE Reality" on her that I do not believe others have. As part of the process of making Joan I actually set her on fire. A faint smell of that burn remains. Martyrs have always held a special place for me. As a child, I wondered and hoped if put to the test, I could risk my own life for a cause. I have seen real martyrs in my life, like those who acted to help others without thinking of their own safety, silently without needing glory, such as those in 9/11.

VBA: Not martyred, but known for bizarre self-mortifying, was Rose of Lima, on whom you based an important sculpture. It seems her head is in the Basilica in Lima, “uncorrupted” like the head of Catherine in Siena, which I saw a few years ago. Rose wanted to suffer at the saintly intensity of Catherine, so she wore a spiked crown on her head to endure a crown of thorns, and was dead not surprisingly by 31, after which the required miracles made her the first saint to be canonized in the Americas. Did you see Rose in Lima?

SK: Of course, Rose of Lima is so loved in Peru. Yes, I visited the beautiful Church which houses her relic. I have visited it twice. The people are very proud of their special saint. The Cathedral was filled with worshipers the times we went. Rose was a beautiful woman who worked hard to destroy her beauty. You mentioned Catherine, and there are many saints whose bodies are believed not to have decomposed, I have a book, I think it is The Incorruptibles. My Saint Rose of Lima sculpture is in the collection of the museum in Lima. Love that city!


Sharon Kopriva, Saint Rose of Lima, 2006, Papier-mâché, mixed media, approximately 50 x 30 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: Those shoes! You’re never more perverse then when devising shoes for the religious figures. When I was a kid in Catholic school, the nuns wore black leather lace-up shoes beneath their floor length habits, which to me looked ridiculous. And the priests’ heavy leather shoes seemed ill-suited to their long robes. Comment on the shoes.

SK: It is getting harder to find those nun shoes. All the kids are now in sneakers. The priests’ etc., are a bit easier to find. Once Gus left a pair of damp shoes outside the door to dry out and when he came home they were on a bishop. (I thought he was throwing them away) They looked great on my sculpture and Gus got a new pair of shoes. I have actually spent a great deal of time working on and making correct clothing, rings, shoes and even the belt buckles on my Catholic figures. I have a very good friend who is an ex-nun and enjoys helping me research these details. It is important that they be correct, and I love the research.

VBA: We know from statements you’ve made that the religious sculptures are not a condemnation of the church’s canon as dead or stuck in the past, as has been critically asserted, and that to interpret the art as a denouncement of the church and your Catholic upbringing is overly simplistic. You did say the figures are frozen in time performing rituals that you witnessed when younger, and that in each piece you are searching to try to understand yourself. Essentially, the mummy sculptures, akin to your fantasy landscapes, invite us to contemplate the ultimate enigma, where do we come from and where are we going, simply put, they encode our spiritual search. In that bodily putrefaction, recycling, consciousness, and the eternal imagination are part of the universe’s energy, the artworks facilitate deeper levels of awareness.

SK: Yes, the figures are frozen in time. I liken them to the bodies of saints that refuse to decompose. Years ago the Church sucked us in with ritual and fear, bells rang and we beat our chests and felt holy. All of that fear and ritualistic participation are in my religious figures. They are frozen in time performing their acts of religion. They similarly denote the death and ritual close to the surface in primitive societies. The art signifies my search for self knowledge, an attempt to reach a higher state. My forests as cathedrals, with tree branches superimposed over church architecture, reflect broadening of my religion, an expansion of my spirituality.


Sharon Kopriva, Cathedral Green, 2012, Oil and mixed media on photo canvas, 81 x 186 x 2.5 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: In 2012 the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans mounted From Terra to Verde: The Art of Sharon Kopriva, a survey of works created between 1982 and 2012. At the time curator Bradley Sumrall wrote that the exhibition reveals “the breadth and unity of her career.” Was it fine to look back on thirty years of artistic expression?

SK: It was so wonderful to look back at thirty years, all in one spot, one clean, lit spot. Bradley did such a wonderful job in preparing the exhibition, he worked on it for a full year, even traveled to my home in Idaho where we hiked my favorite trail and he really "got" the place and understood how it became such an important influence on me in the last ten years. Back to the question: I was looking at the path my life and art had traveled through thirty years and decided to arrange the show to begin in the early 80's underground in beautiful, spiritual Peru, move through my examination of my life and religion, and end with nature imagery represented by paintings such as Cathedral Green. It clarified where I am and where I had been, and the lovely closure was that it mentally created space for whatever comes next, in my own time. There were works in that exhibit that I had not seen in many years and reunited with. I guess we should call it the family reunion, when all the kids come home. Virginia, some might find it surprising that I publicly discussed those personal out of body experiences, but what the heck! Those experiences are part of my life and my art.

Robert Boyd



I'm reading The Essential New Art Examiner, an anthology of writing from the great Chicago-based art magazine, and a passage by Derek Guthrie, one of the co-founders with Jane Allen, resonated for me. Allen and Guthrie had been critics at the Chicago Tribune when they were suddenly fired, apparently for writing an article about the Illinois Arts Council that made the wrong people mad. He blamed the Chicago "collector/dealer/trustee" cabal. He writes:

This was a disaster for us and made clear that we had no professional future in Chicago. Jane was not prepared to be shut out of her home town and said in simple, practical terms, "If we want to be art writers we are going to have to be oir own publisher." A fearsome prospect. But Jane drew strength from the fighting spirit and wisdom of her great aunt, Jane Addams of Hull House, who said, "There is no point in going elsewhere to find greeener pastures; what you have to do is look after your own backyard, and if you do it well, eventually others will notice." (Emphasis added.)

A good philosophy for a regional blog like The Great God Pan Is Dead, no?

Robert Boyd


Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present

When I was an undergraduate, Thomas McEvilley taught a film class which he memorably described as the "art history of film history." This was his way of letting us know that we would be studying films that were not necessarily the most popular but which had artistic significance. It seems like a simple enough idea (even though it's also a path strewn with esthetic landmines). My interest in comics is similar. And finding books that treat the history of comics as a species of art history is difficult. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics comes close, but its text is pretty skimpy. (Not that I'm complaining--I rate this book as the single best volume of comics ever published.)

If I were a professor teaching the art history of comics, what would I use as my Janson's History of Art or Gardner's Art through the Ages (two art history survey texts that were popular when I was an undergrad)? Two candidates have been recently published. The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay by Thierry Smolderen (translated by Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen) covers the very early history of comics, while Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present by Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner, deals with the recent history of comics.


The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay

American comics fans understand that there are comics all over the world, but have little knowledge of the histories of those comics. In terms of comics history (much less the art history of comics history), nothing could be more limited and useless than the American fannish'schema that divides all comics worth discussing into "ages": "golden age,""silver age,""bronze age" and so on. This history narrows comics history to American superheroes published since the first appearance of Superman. While this is obviously limited--by time (ignoring comics' long history before Superman), by region (ignoring all non-American comics), by genre (it ignores anything that isn't a superhero), by delivery system (it ignores almost anything that didn't originate as a comic book) and by style (it ignores almost anything created outside the ultra-constrained "house styles" of the large corporate superhero comics publishers)--it is nonetheless ubiquitous in much fan-oriented discussion of comics history in the U.S.

While it is too much to hope that these two books break through the parochialism of the average American comics fan, one could hope that these books might be adapted for classroom use by those teaching comics history, where they could do some good. I remember being astonished by the films I saw in McEvilley's class as a neophyte film buff--and enthralled by A Short History of the Movies by Gerald Mast (1981), the text for the class. I read and reread that book until it fell apart. If Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present or The Origins of Comics had a similar effect on some current undergraduate, the authors would have reason to be proud.

The two books are quite different in tone, but their similarities are what make them plausible candidates for classroom adoption. Each is well-designed, featuring substantial numbers of illustrations--specifically reproductions of entire pages of work. Both books recognize that showing sequences--such a basic feature of comics-- is necessary. Isolated panels or images are not enough. In addition to reproducing full pages of comics, the books reproduce much of their work in color. They are handsome volumes whose arguments are greatly aided by the design decisions.

In looking at these books, I don't want to approach them purely as works of critical art history, even though they are certainly that (The Origins more than Global History). I want to also look at them from the point of view of Janson or Gardner or Mast--books that introduce a reader to a broad swathe of art history. I want to consider them as the kind of books that might get assigned in an art history of comics university class. How effective would they be if used for this purpose?

The Origins of Comics is less a general art history than a thesis about the development of early comics. This means that while it might be a good text for a more specialized class or an excellent book to refer to for a research paper, it would not necessarily be a good book for a comics history survey class. This is not really a criticism. The Origins actually functions very well on two levels. First, it makes a case for situating the origin of comics with William Hogarth, but more important than that, it places the early development of comics within the context of other contemporary arts (the novel, photography, pantomime) and theory (Lessing's "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry," for example).

The other level on which The Origins succeeds is as an illustrated book. I would go so far as to say that even if one didn't read the text and only looked at the illustrations and their captions, one would get the gist of the book--that comics are a thing that have been around for at least a couple of hundred years. It would be hard for even the most curmudgeonly American super-patriot to argue in favor of an American origin for comics after flipping through this book. Not that Smolderen is the first to make this observation. David Kunzle's amazing (and sadly out of print) The History of the Comic Strip,The Nineteenth Century (1990) demonstrated the pre-Yellow Kid origins of comics beyond the shadow of a doubt (and Smolderen depends on Kunzle's scholarship to help him build his case). The only reason I mention this is because even today, there are still many who cling to the idea that comics were born in American newspapers in 1897.

But the title, The Origins of Comics, might lead one to believe that Smolderen is primarily making a case for William Hogarth (1697-1764), the artist who created the novelistic print series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Marriage ala Mode and others, as the father of comics. And Smolderen does make this case, but that is only a small part of the book.


William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress, plate 4, 1735

Smolderen identifies Hogarth's narratives in prints as the starting point of comics not just because they are sequential visual narratives--after all, there are many of them in the history of visual art. Hogarth wasn't even the first to present a narrative in etchings (i.e., in an early mass medium). But Smolderen identifies in Hogarth a quality that will continue to be a part of comics--Hogarth's work is "polygraphic":

Hogarth's prints addressed a culture already saturated with a seemingly infinite variety of graphic systems of representation: his satire pushed the humoristic tradition towards the domain that I propose to call polygraphic humor. [...] To decipher Hogarth's images, the reader had to navigate a multilayered visual text saturated with allusions to conflicting systems of representation (ranging from the highly rhetorical language of history painting to the rebellious insolence of graffiti drawings). It was a game of stylistic collisions, ironic contrasts, and hybridization, and it gave Hogarth a powerful visual tool for making sense of the modern metropolis. (p. 9)

The task of the rest of the book is to demonstrate that this vaguely defined polygraphic quality carries on after Hogarth through the 19th century and is a quality that we can associate with comics in general. After discussing Hogarth and his work, Smolderen moves on to Rodolphe Töppfer (1799-1846), the Swiss artist that many consider the true father of comics. Töppfer's early comics are fairly well-known--they were widely translated and published in the 19th century and you can even get a current edition of his complete works in English. Smolderen places this work within the world of theater (Topffer was an avid amateur actor). Smolderen relates Töppfer's use of sequential gestures in his picture novels to the theories of acting and pantomime that were common at the time. For a visual artist like Töppfer, various theories of theater--among others, Smolderen specifically references Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoon, which theorized in favor of a poetry of progressive actions as opposed to descriptive poetry--spoke to a way out of detailed, realistic academic images and into sequential storytelling with images.


Rodolphe Töppfer, (top) from Histoire de M. Crépin, 1837 and (bottom) from Histoire de M. Jabot, 1833. These series of gestures are similar to the rhetorical gestures employed by actors and illustrated in contemporary instructional texts for dramatists and actors.

Smolderen seems to have read every scrap written by Töppfer--essays, novel, letters--and synthesized a theory of comics from it. Töppfer was by no means as rigid as Lessing, and his work was "polygraphic"--it constantly undermined its subjects, as befits satirical work, but also undermined its own storytelling conventions. We're used to seeing this in modern comics, where there are long-established conventions that are quite easy to toy with. Töppfer on the other hand barely gave his readers a moment to understand his newly created manner of storytelling before he undermined it.

Töppfer's innovations were eagerly imitated in Europe and the United States by such artists as Gustave Doré (1832-1883), George Cruikshank (1792-1878) and Cham (Amédée de Noé, 1818-1879), who redrew some of Töppfer's books for publication in magazines. To modern readers, many of these subsequent comics will seem like backwards steps away from our modern conception of comics compared to Töppfer's original picture books.

This paradox requires explanation: Töppfer's albums, at least when read superficially, correspond more closely to the concept of comics we hold today than do their immediate successors. This is mainly a  distortion caused by hindsight. The landscape of humorous images of the 19th century has lost many of its dimensions for us. A century of symbiosis between comics and the cinema separates us from this era, a period during which the audiovisual steamroller has radically simplified the model of progressive action by shifting it from the rhetorical domain to the cutting room. To look at the novels in prints of the era, including those of Töppfer, exclusively from the point of view of narrative sequence drastically blunts the complexities of a culture penetrated by many other dimensions of the readable image. (pp. 65-66)

This effect will be familiar to students of art history--when we see still-life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, we are impressed by their charm and the artistic skill on display, but their complex layers of visual symbolism usually require expert explanation. Ironically, some contemporary cartoonists whose high level of invention makes their work challenging to readers--Gary Panter and Chris Ware, for example--have deliberately abandoned the mechanical "cinematic" progression that has typified comics for just over a hundred years. Their work occasionally has an odd "19th century" feel to it.


A. B. Frost, from Stuff and Nonsense, 1884. Frost makes fun of an old-style painter who refuses to incorporate the new knowledge of horse movement, discovered photographically by Muybridge.

Subsequent chapters take the development of comics throughout the 19th century for granted. Now the question is not "Is this a comic?" but rather  "How are comics evolving?" New technologies, as mentioned above, affect this development. Photography not only changes the physical production (photoengraving removes the need for laborious wood engraving and allows drawn artwork to be reproduced directly) but also the content. One chapter deals with cartoonist A.B. Frost (1851-1928), a student of Thomas Eakens, who was influenced by the motion-capturing photographic experiments of Eakens and Eadweard Muybridge. Another chapter deals with the relatively late importation of the word-balloon from satirical and political drawings (such as those by Thomas Rowlandson) into picture stories. Each of these developments evolves the 19th century comic a little more towards the art form we are familiar with.


A.B. Frost, from Harper's New Monthly, January 1880

The Origin of Comics is an excellent work of scholarship, but because of this it might not be a very good introductory text for classroom use. It presents original research and proposes novel theories--neither of which are what you really want in a survey textbook. This is not to say that students of the comics form shouldn't read this book--on the contrary, it is, as far as I know, the only book currently in print that deals with the broad, international landscape of 19th century comics. It's an erudite, eye-opening study, translated into clear, readable English.

A better candidate for a survey of the art history of comics is Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. The starting year for Global History seems a bit arbitrary. It opens with American underground comics which exploded onto the scene in 1968, and they reflect the seismic upheavals occurring all over the world in that fateful year. But while American undergrounds are a decisive break with tradition, such breakages happened even earlier in France and Japan.

In 1964, [Sanpei] Shirato and editor Katsuichi Nahai launched the independent monthly Garo, which published work by maverick older artists (its flagship series was founder Sanpei Shirato's politically charged period drama Kamui-Den) but also welcomed new talent and experimental styles. Garo represented the first true, concerted movement toward comics as a medium of personal expression and creative freedom anywhere in the world. (pp. 15, 16)

Given this, one wonders why Mazur and Danner didn't pick 1964 as the starting year. Or they could have picked 1962, the year that saw the publication of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella. Choosing 1968 suggests an America-centric focus, which fortunately is not carried through the remainder of the book. Nonetheless, by picking the 60s as the starting decade, Global History is focusing on the era of comics-as-art, an era of "personal expression and creative freedom." This is not to suggest that personal expression and creative freedom are necessary for creating artistically excellent comics--this is obviously not true. Look at the work of Frank King, Harry J. Tuthill, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, etc. Conversely, most comics created under conditions of total artistic freedom are undistinguished. The revolution that started with Garo and the undergrounds didn't necessarily make comics better, but it did broaden our conception if what comics could be.

Global History is in effect two things combined--an annotated list of great comics and a history of comics. It's hard to pull this off. There have been numerous examples of the former (I helped write one such list for The Comics Journal in 1999. Other examples include 500 Essential Graphic Novels by Gene Kannenberg and 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die by Paul Gravett). As for histories of comics, they're too numerous to mention. But they differ from Global History in concentrating on personalities, business history and the culture of the comics world(s). Global History can't help but touch on some of that, but its focus is on the works within the context of history.


Comics, A Global History p. 239. The page design emphasizes multipanel sequences and breakdowns.

Global History tells three parallel stories: English-language North American comics (primarily from the U.S.A.), Japanese comics, and French-language comics (primarily from France). Work in other languages and from other countries is touched on--comics from Spain, Italy, the UK, Belgium, Germany, Argentina and Korea get decent treatment.  But many other national and linguistic traditions of comics are passed over, which will disappoint fans of Mexican or Australian comics, for example. There are by necessity other omissions and slights, as well as inclusions that may seem inexplicable. To list them would simply reveal my biases, though. Suffice it to say that as the volume gets closer to the present day, the choice of what comics to discuss gets more problematic. History hasn't had time to form a consensus yet for many of these comics--this is one pitfall of writing an art history survey that effectively goes up to the day the authors turned their manuscript in to their publisher.


Yoshiharu Tsuge, page from Akai Hana (Red Flowers), 1967

Each geographic/linguistic area is broken down further into "mainstream" and "alternative." This feels a little jarring, but Mast also dealt with this dichotomy in film. While the 60s saw the birth of a comics culture that put artistic and expressive considerations first, most comics were still primarily commercial propositions. This means that an unfortunate amount of space is devoted to the market for comics in each country and the business of comics. One might wish that these things were irrelevant to the art history of comics, but that is not the case.


Lapin, the square-bound anthology magazine of L'Association, deliberately set itself apart from the glossy French comics magazines of the 70s and 80s. Releasing black-and-white minicomics, such as the ones on the right, aligned L'Association more with the American small-press moviement than with the mainstream French publishing industry.

For example, Global History describes how France in the 70s saw the founding of L'Écho des Savanes (1972), Metal Hurlant (1975) and (À Suivre) (1978), artist-driven (and in some cases, artist-run) publications, and Futuropolos (1972), an artist-driven comics publishing house. Each offered considerable freedom to their creators and were venues that hosted comics of real artistic merit by such cartoonists as Moebius, José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, and Jacques Tardi. But these magazines over the course of the 80s found themselves struggling and the comics art in them stagnating. Many ended up purchased by corporate publishing entities, under whom quality deteriorated even further until finally the plug was pulled. Even Futuropolis was sold to publishing giant Gallimard before being retired as an imprint in 1994. The French comics industry had by that time become increasingly conservative, putting out hardcover albums by known quantities and sure sellers. This is spelled out in chapters 8 and 9, but the story picks up again in chapter 16, where we see the birth of L'Association, another artist-run publishing house founded more-or-less as a spin-off from Futuropolis in 1990. If the big corporate publishers were intent on strangling creativity in favor of proven commercial properties, artists would have to seize the means of production themselves. In a sense, we see this story over and over again in various countries at various times. This may feel to a casual reader a bit extraneous to the primary subject of Global History, but this cycle is a key feature of the history of art in capitalist countries, and therefore deserves to be discussed in an art history text.


Late Osamu Tezuka: left, Ayaka, 1972 and right, Burakku Jakku (Black Jack), 1972

But the discussion of this is in passing. The authors dwell more on particular artists and writers and particular works. No artist is discussed at length--the format of the book doesn't permit it. But some artists and works are mentioned very briefly, primarily as exemples of a certain tendency or movement, while others are given more space to explain their relative importance: Robert Crumb,  Yoshiharu Tsuge, Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, Jacques Tardi, Alan Moore, and so forth. Occasionally, space is given to artists who are important in their own country's tradition, but are little known outside of it--for instance, the work of shōjo manga artist, Yumiko Ōshima, and the feminist comics of Chantal Montellier. Only one artist gets his own chapter, Osamu Tezuka. It's a brief chapter dealing with Tezuka's often quite pessimistic work for seinan (young men's) manga in the 1970s (for example, Ode to Kirihito). One of the problems with Global History is made obvious in this chapter--many comics artists have long careers, and the time period for this volume means cutting those careers in half. Tezuka's late work is well-respected and Tezuka, like Leoš Janáček or Philip Guston, is notable for drastically changing direction at an age when most artists are very much settled in their ways. But to discuss Tezuka without discussing his early work is a bit strange but necessary given the structure of the book.

Most knowledgeable comics readers would, if tasked with writing a book like Global History, would come up with books that have different emphases and vastly different details. That is the inherent problem of books of this sort, but it's far from fatal. These books are designed to lead a relative novice in--her future path (for scholarship or deeper reading) might be encouraged by a single paragraph here or illustration there. Global History is not meant to be the last word on its subject--it is, on the contrary, the first word. It will be, I hope, the starting point for young scholars and enthusiasts in the same way that Gardner, Janson and Mast have been.

Robert Boyd

I stole the title of this post from a great book by Bart Beaty. Comics Versus Art, dealing with the relationship between the world of comics and the comics world, is required reading if you want to think about these two things together. But it's not the last word since comics and art keep on going. For instance, this month Artforum turned its gaze on comics. Why not? Summer is the slow season. Everyone's on vacation. The New York galleries are full of second stringers from theprovinces. Anyway, every few years the art slicks turn their attention to comics. It's been like this since the late 60s.


Artforum, Summer 2014. Cover from "I Am My Goals" by Julien Ceccaldi.

One of the essays in the special section on comics, "Wonder Worlds" by Stephen Burt, covered some of the same ground as I did in the previous post, particularly discussing Thierry Smolderen's The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. There was a curated section by Art Spiegelman showing the comics that have been meaningful to him after a lifetime of thinking about the subject. Among other things, he discusses the Heta-Uma ("unskilled-skillful") movement in 1980s underground manga, which parallels a tendency in North American comics starting with artists like Gary Panter and Mark Beyer in the late 70s and early 80s and which continues until today.

But in a way, there is something rather old-fashioned about this comics section. It touches briefly on the most recent trends in comics, but it seems obliged to educate Artforum's readers on the totality of comics-as-art--a task too big for one section in one issue of a magazine. (Comics from outside North America, for example, are barely discussed.)

In The Comics Journal, there was a brief exchange about the issue between Paris Review managing editorNicole Rudick and Comics Journal editor Dan Nadel. Rudick wrote:

Betsy Huete

As always, Lawndale’s The Big Show is a giant conglomeration of artwork from a wide array of artists, the only real commonality among them being that they are from Houston. Many familiar names like David McClain and Elaine Bradford crop up year-to-year, but then again we get to experience a slew of fresh talent that we might not have seen otherwise. As overwhelming as the exhibition can be, it’s also a lot like hunting around a flea market: it is enticing to think there could be a hidden gem lurking right around the corner. Juried and curated by Erin Elder, Visual Arts Director of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, this year’s exhibition is much more subdued and even-keeled than Duncan MacKenzie’s selections last year. However, with 115 works by 106 artists, there are undoubtedly wide ranges of media, concepts, themes, and pieces to consider. Without further ado, here is my top ten:

10. Torie Shelton, Wonder & Curiosity, 2014
Walking up to Torie Shelton’s Wonder & Curiosity, it was hard to suppress the Oh Christ not another curiosity cabinet groan gurgling in my throat. But the “needle felted specimens” that she’s filled her cabinet with are well crafted, childlike, and incredibly sincere. Frankly, I wish Frippo was my friend, and Squirrelephant looks like a curmudgeonly old man who wants me to get the hell off his lawn.


Torie Shelton, Wonder & Curiosity, 2014, Wood cabinet, lithograph prints, needle felted specimens, found objects and screen printed insects, 82”x98”x21”


Torie Shelton, Wonder & Curiosity (detail, “Frippo”), 2014, Wood cabinet, lithograph prints, needle felted specimens, found objects and screen printed insects, 82”x98”x21”


Torie Shelton, Wonder & Curiosity (detail, “Squirrelephant”), 2014, Wood cabinet, lithograph prints, needle felted specimens, found objects and screen printed insects, 82”x98”x21”

9. Michael Sean Kirby, Caerulia, 2014
Michael Sean Kirby’s Caerulia looks like a stone from the future. It doesn’t look like it came from the actual future, though, but instead a shitty B-movie from the 1960s depicting the future. Sexy, sleek, cheesy, smooth, nostalgic, distant, and cold: Kirby manages warmth and evasiveness all at the same time. I have no idea how to feel around Caerulia, and that is precisely why it works.


Michael Sean Kirby, Caerulia, 2014, Painted cast stone, 8”x32”x5”

8. Kamila Szczesna, Ungraspable Territory No. 10, 2013
Garish and very very gold, Kamila Szczesna's Ungraspable Territory is completely over the top, and completely unapologetic about it as well. Its slow ascension and bulbous, pointy surface reads as a decadent virus, or a tipping, orgiastic tree trunk.


Kamila Szczesna, Ungraspable Territory No. 10, 2013, Resin and gold leaf, 21”x34”x15”

7. Vincent Fink, Curiosity (2), 2014
Vincent Fink’s Curiosity (2) at first glance looks like a run of the mill urban scene: concrete, an apartment building, clothesline, and a chain-link fence with a cautionary sign comprise a tall, skinny acrylic panel. But things quickly get weird as six parrots perch atop the breast pocket of a giant office shirt as an oblivious origami cat, sitting next to an errant Gatorade bottle, stares quietly off into the distance. With vivid colors and tightly controlled surrealist moments, Curiosity (2) feels like a wistful daydream.


Vincent Fink, Curiosity (2), 2014, Acrylic on panel, 48”x15”

6. Leticia Garcia, Mourning, 2013
Speaking of control, it is immensely difficult to maintain it while attempting to convey sadness and loss. Yet in Mourning, Leticia Garcia does so expertly. A subdued figurative painting teetering on abstraction, Garcia depicts a crowd of people gathering for what looks like a funeral procession. Foggy, elongated figures feel like they are crying as a murky, torrential sky looms above.


Leticia Garcia, Mourning, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 20”x26”

5. Luisa Duarte, You Are Not Stronger Than Me, 2014
We all make plans. Sometimes we make lists, or share them with friends, or opt to simply keep them in our heads. With collage in the form of geometric abstraction, Luisa Duarte plots a coup. We don’t know who it is that’s stronger than her, or what it is she thinks she needs to overcome. But it is easy to root for these seemingly mundane white squares as they propel themselves off platforms, or hold our breath as a clunky white car nearly plummets Thelma and Louise style into an orange ravine.


Luisa Duarte, You Are Not Stronger Than Me, 2014, Collage and canvas over art board, 11”x14”

4. Mack Bishop III, Earth Child 1, 2014
Mack Bishop’s Earth Children look like a couple of infantrymen having a side meeting away from their drifter army of shards and trash. But even with glass horns and wire fists, short and pudgy Earth Child 1 looks as though it’s just as likely to play catch in the back yard as it is ready to go into battle. It may be a little silly and dumb, but here Bishop makes a compelling case that not every artwork needs to be smart.


Mack Bishop III, Earth Child 1, 2014, Driftwood, mirror, wire, and board, 3’x2’x5’

3. Adair Stephens, Going Dutch, 2013-4
Whether it’s the first date or a twenty-five year relationship, shared silence can be tense. With Going Dutch, Adair Stephens shows a young couple fumbling, looking upward in opposite directions, each seemingly clueless as to how to move the conversation along. Heavy, self-deprecating brush strokes, nauseating skin tones, and a disorienting corner make this piece equally vulnerable and claustrophobic.


Adair Stephens, Going Dutch, 2013-4, Oil on wood panel, 24”x32”

2. Caroline Sharpless, Between Pine and Grief, 2014
This dull, deadpan painting of a home interior by Caroline Sharpless feels thick, burdensome, and ominous. Mid-afternoon sunlight peers in through an unseen window, as a background staircase leads to places, or situations, unknown. It is as incriminating as it is innocuous, as if we are glancing at a foreshadowed moment, or a ghost.


Caroline Sharpless, Between Pine and Grief, 2014, Oil on canvas, 30”x40”

1. Christopher Wallace, Haunted House, 2013
Unlike Sharpless, Christopher Wallace doesn’t see ghosts as ominous—but he does think they are assholes. As much as he seems to hate them though, they are lovingly rendered everywhere in Haunted House. Skeletons, angels, and walls with faces pop up at every turn in a drawing bursting at the seams with imagery. Residing somewhere between an extravagant doodle and a densely layered mind map, I could spend hours poring over Haunted House, trying to piece together what exactly it is going on in Wallace’s head. Also, it’s hard not to love a work that references Patrick Renner and a NASA Lego man.


Christopher Wallace, Haunted House, 2013, Pen and ink on paper, 30”x44”


Christopher Wallace, Haunted House (detail), 2013, Pen and ink on paper, 30”x44”

Robert Boyd

Once you get outside the Loop, works of art get more and more scarce. Fewer museums, fewer galleries, fewer public spaces hosting public works than inside the Loop. (The two airports are big exceptions to this rule.) But one thing that does pop up outside the Loop is highly eccentric art--art that doesn't fit into the categories a dedicated art-worlder like myself will expect. I like those surprises, like the cubes at the Sun Blossom apartments on Gessner or the Eclectic Managerie. I got another one of those surprises when I went to Gallery Furniture recently to buy box springs.


31, Bob Mosier, reclaimed steel

This abstract metal sculpture was the least likely piece of art I would have imagined ever seeing in front of Mattress Mack's temple of furniture. What was the story behind it? And what did the "31" at the top mean?


31, Bob Mosier, reclaimed steel

The first thing that occurred to me was, this isn't bad!  I've seen a lot of corporate plop art in my time, and it is usually pretty boring. Sleek and expensive, corporate plop is decidedly devoid of real meaning while simultaneously projecting wealth and power. It signifies "good taste" and modernity without challenging its viewers in any way whatsoever.

31 on the contrary has a loose-limbed, unbalanced stance. With its bent and twisted I-beams bending out from the center, it seems to be on the verge of falling apart. It has wit and the number "31" carved into the top, through which you can see the sky, adds a layer of slightly humorous mystery.

 
31, Bob Mosier, reclaimed steel

So what does it mean? The granite plaque in front of it explains all.



This fire was big news when it happened. The alleged arsonist was a former salesman at Gallery Furniture--he was ruled incompetent to stand trial in 2012. The "31" evidently refers to Fire Station 31 on Crosstimbers, whose firefighters were probably the ones who responded to this fire.

It would be easy for a sophisticated fellow like myself to snicker at this, especially the self-congratulatory phrase "magnificent work of art". But in fact I totally approve of this. It's a nice work, a commemorative sculpture, remembering a destructive event and constructed from the remnants of the destruction. I wish there were more works like it in Houston. We all know how bad Houston is about commemorating (or even remembering) episodes from its own history. Gallery Furniture decided its warehouse fire was something that shouldn't be forgotten, and that their gratitude towards the firefighters should be expressed publicly. In the scheme of things, this warehouse fire wasn't a major disaster--no one died, thank goodness, and Gallery Furniture was able to stay in business despite their substantial losses. But from the point of view of the Gallery Furniture organization, it was a very important event. So why not commemorate it?

Bob Mosier is an accomplished sculptor from Conroe who specializes in glass. This work is a little different from his usual work, but he used the unusual circumstances of the commission to make something interesting. I appreciate that Gallery Furniture used a local artist for this commission, but given Mattress Mack's Houston area boosterism, I would have expected nothing less.

So if you need to do a little furniture shopping, stop by Mattress Mack's place and take a gander at Bob Mosier's 31.