Robert Boyd

I read a few books about art this year. This list reflects pretty well my interests in art: understanding contemporary art, recent art history, biographies of individual artists (real and imagined), art that has a family relationship with comics, outsider/self-taught art, art from Houston and Texas and the social science of art. I don't recommend all of them, but quite a few were excellent.



Your Everyday Art World (2014) by Lane Relyea. A combination of a theory and a history of a particular tendency in contemporary art. Reviewed here.



Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (2014) by Joan Rothfuss. A fantastic biography of Charlotte Moorman, who is best known as Nam June Paik's collaborator. But as this book demonstrates, she was so much more than that. Among other things, she was an incredible impresario--an equal to Sergei Diaghilev. Art history usually ignores the impresarios, the organizers and fixers who made sure that artists had a platform on which to stand. But that's a mistake--in addition to being a pioneering performance artist, Moorman was key in promoting the idea of performance art (before it even had a name) to audiences who had never in their lives imagined such art works.



The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (2006) edited by Marvin J. Taylor. This book was a gift from Earl Staley. Thanks, Earl! The book is quite scattered, and I kind of wish it had been written as a narrative history instead of broken up in essays describing different art forms. One weakness it has, in my opinion, is that it is overly wedded to the geographic of "downtown," wedding the physical place to the overall vibe too closely. Still, it covers a lot of art that remains a fascination for me, and it's one of the few books I know that writes equally about the music, dance, visual art, performance art and literary scenes in a particular place and time.



Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor with an essay by Hilton Als. I thought this was an ideal catalog for the MOMA exhibit (up through January 18, if you happen to be in New York City in the next three weeks). Als is not your usual art historian--he is the opposite of dry and academic, and his writing is blessedly free of jargon. But he does write about the fascination that theory had for men of his and Robert Gober's generation. He weaves in personal encounters with Gober's art with a deep knowledge of the work and a lived experience of the milieu that Gober arose from--especially the rise of AIDS and the concurrent politicization of gay men.

But that's only part of the book--the back of the book is a combination timeline of Gober's career (and important events in world) and an oral history. What's fascinating is that you see a picture of a gifted artist starting from the bottom and gradually growing as an artist and in the esteem of the world. But what you also see is someone for whom everything broke right. Chance played a big part in his (temporal) success, although it should be said that Gober took that luck and ran with it. 



33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah Thornton.The author of Seven Days in the Art World returns with a new book where she visits a variety of artists on several occasions. Very readable. Reviewed here.



The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein. The shortest book on this list, but it has a kind of Borgesian efficiency--it punches well above its weight. I loved it and reviewed it here.



Midcentury Modern Art in Texas by Katie Robinson Edwards. An important book of regional art history. Reviewed here.



What Nerve!: Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present by Daniel Nadel. The catalog of this very diverse show features a bunch of very diverse essays as well as some absolutely wonderful photos. I saw the exhibit and wrote about it here.



Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity by Gary Alan Fine. A very useful sociological study of the world of self-taught art (sometimes called folk art, outsider art, visionary art, art brut, etc.). Like Howard S. Becker's Art Worlds, Fine examines this world from every angle and constituency. He doesn't try to come up with a theory of self-taught art--instead, what he presents is data and what conclusions the data leads him to. It's an approach I appreciate highly, and one I think he does well. I wrote about the book in conjunction with my review of One of a Kind: Artwork from the Collection of Stephanie Smither at the Art League of Houston.



More Than a Constructive Hobby: the Paintings of Frank Freed by William A. Camfield. The funky, funny paintings by self-taught artist Frank Freed were a part of Houston's art scene in the 50s and 60s. I picked up this book on sale at the MFAH mostly because the text was written by my old art history professor William Camfield. I found the book delightful and wrote about it here.



The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson. This is kind of a sequel to his earlier book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. Thompson is an economist who has made a special study of the art market. While his earlier book was a unified work where Thompson presented the results of his research on what determines the monetary value of a work of art, this book is a collection of essays where he riffs on the changes in the art market since his first examination of it. He applies his research techniques to more contemporary blue-chip work, looking at collectors and art as an asset class, galleries, auction houses, art fairs, emerging markets and contemporary artists like Mauricio Cattelan and Jacob Kassay. It's a dirty business, but it's interesting to read an actual economist's take on it. The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark is the more important book, but The Supermodel and the Brillo Box is interesting and informative.



The Essential New Art Examiner (2011) edited by Terri Griffith, Kathryn Born and Janet Koplos. A great collection of articles and reviews from 1974 through 2001 that appeared in Chicago's New Art Examiner. There used o be a lot of regional art magazines--New Art Examiner, Artpaper, Art Lies, etc. Aside from the Brooklyn Rail, do any survive? Or are they relics of the age of paper?



Whitney Biennial 2014 by Stuart Comer,Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner. This is the catalog for this spring's Whitney Biennial, which like all Whitney Biennials was a bit of a mess. Aren't they all? There were good bits, though. But it was a show that really required the viewer to see it over time, and I only had one day. The catalog doesn't make up for that, either. It's less fun than the exhibit, but I liked the Michelle Grabner section which featured short interviews with all the artists she selected.



White Cube (2014) by Brecht Vandenbroucke. This book of interestingly-drawn cartoons dealt with the art world, but was, unfortunately, cruel and witless. Review here.



Role Models (2010) by John Waters. It's a bit of a cheat to include this book here--only one chapter is about art. It's called "Roommates," and it's about his art collection. Isn't that a perfect word to describe your art collection? They are, in fact, the perfect roommates--while they never do the dishes, they likewise never leave any dirty dishes in the sink. Waters writes, "I love how mad Mike [Kelley]'s work can make some people. Isn't that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate? The real naysayers who can't see the reverse beauty of Mike's sculptures or paintings should be outraged because they secretly know that his art does hate them and they deserve it." (Ironically, my biggest "roommate" is a series of photographs... by John Waters.)



Art: A Sex Book (2003) by John Waters and Bruce Hainley. Now this is an authentic art book, and in true John Waters fashion, it's quite filthy. He and curator/critic Bruce Hainley assembled a bunch of art by many different artists that relate in some way to "sex"--sometimes in obvious ways (very, very obvious ways), and sometimes in pretty much invisible ways. They interview each other about the work pictured in the book. It comes off as a catalog for an exhibit that they'd like to have done. (The cover is by Mike Kelley, appropriately enough.) Hey, art world--let John Waters curate a big group show. He is obviously capable, and it would clearly be great!



Seeing Out Loud: The Voice Art Columns Fall 1998 - Winter 2003 (2003) by Jerry Saltz. It's easy to follow Jerry Saltz nowadays. His writing for New York Magazine appears online, free of charge, as do his many Facebook comments. He's everywhere. I've seen him walking around New York three times, and I don't go to New York all that often. But before he was a media figure, he was another ink-stained wretch at the Village Voice, incubator of many a great writing career. This book covers what was happening in New York in the late 90s. As always, the writing is very entertaining.



The Inspector (1973) andThe Labyrinth (1960) by Saul Steinberg.I picked these up at my favorite used bookstore, Kaboom in Houston. Steinberg used to be an artist that every New Yorker-reading sophisticate was required to love, and quite rightly--his work is lovable. But what does it look like 40-50 years on? It feels a little dated because it refers to a world (and more particularly, an America) of Steinberg's time. But his drawing still feels adventurous, as if beamed in from the future. Because Steinberg got his start as a cartoonist, these books are sometimes seen by art comics aficionados as a species of art comics. And while there is occasionally a hint of narrative progression, what Steinberg mostly does is riff on ideas, creating more and more variations until he has exhausted one trope and moves onto the next. Beautiful work.



Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) by Jens Hoffmann. This book marks a milestone in the increasing acceptance of curators as artists. Most of these exhibits were group shows that involved a gathering and selection by the curator. I don't know how I feel about that, but I can't deny that Hoffman (himself a well-known curator) has chosen some pretty consequential exhibits. As I read this, I wished for two things: first, that I had seen more of these when they happened (I only saw one), and second, that it had more photos. But to truly have "enough" photos, the book would have been 50 times as large. Each section tantalizes you with glimpses of a great exhibit you missed!



Painting the Town Orange: The Stories behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (2014) by Pete Gershon. The writer approaches this subject from the point of view of a historian and as a journalist. The book is accessible to the average non-specialist reader, but is packed with information. This is an important, necessary work of Houston art history. Not only did I review it here, but we ran several posts by Gershon that had been excised from the actual book for reasons of space. You can read these here, here, here and here.



The Blighted Eye: Original Comic Art from the Glenn Bray Collection (2014) by Glenn Bray. Glenn Bray, like the Vogels, is not a rich collector. He inherited his family's hardware store in the San Fernando Valley. But he is an obsessive collector, often collecting the kind of art that no one has any interest in--at least until he collects it. The Blighted Eye is a book about his collection. It includes work by art world figures like George Grosz, Jim Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance, but most of his collection is of comics artists (especially underground comics, EC comics, punk comics, European adult comics, and bizarre comics from the odder tributaries of comics history) and "alternative" artists of every sort--Gary Panter, Robert Crumb, Carl Barks, Ernesto Cabral, Daniel Clowes, George Herriman, Daniel Johnston, Jaime Hernandez, Harvey Kurtzman, Chris Ware, Robert Williams, Jim Woodring and many more. As a small-time collector of inexpensive art myself, Bray is a role-model. The Blighted Eye is a beautiful book.



The Blazing World: A Novel (2014) by Siri Hustvedt. A fascinating novel about a woman artist who uses male "fronts" as an experiment to see if her art will be more easily accepted if it's by men. An unusually rich and thought-provoking read, I reviewed it here.



Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste (2013) by Dave Hickey. I loved his books The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar, but art critic Dave Hickey's newest book of essays, Pirates and Farmers, feels much less consequential. There are definitely some good bits in it, but mostly it feels a bit masturbatory. I'm a fan of gonzo criticism--of putting yourself in the work--but Hickey's act has gotten stale. This book, combined with his disastrous talk at Rice University early this year, it may be time to write the guy off. But he sure can write, which is a lot more than you can say for most art writers.



Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014) by Masha Gessen. Gessen is a Russian-American journalist who gained sudden fame with her alarming, eloquent writings and statements about Putin and the growing hostility to LGBT people in Russia. I had been reading her for a long time, though--she was one of the first two write about what happened to the intelligentsia after the fall of communism (Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism in 1997), a subject I have a passing interest in. In this case, I think she wanted to get a book out on Pussy Riot before anyone else did. After they were arrested, she attended their Kafka-esque trials, and she visited them in prison as frequently as she could, getting their story under the watchful eyes of the turnkeys. And the story is amazing--not just their own personal histories and the history of the performance collective, but the story of getting this story from them. More than in any of the other books by Gessen I've read, Gessen is a character. She is not separate from the story she is telling. Perhaps that is appropriate given that the iron was still white hot as she wrote. Maybe in the future, there will be a dispassionate, scholarly history of Pussy Riot. This book isn't it.

Robert Boyd

Back in the early 80s, with his dark hair, his demonic beard and his drooping eyelid, Basilios Poulos looked a little bit villainous. Imagine Dostoevsky with even darker eyes. It was an intimidating look for an art professor. But his good nature more than made up for it, as did his love of art. I well remember him showing us an image of himself sitting in front of Jackson Pollock's The Deep. He said told us that many people didn't like the late paintings by Pollock, but that this was a great work.


Jackson Pollock, The Deep, 1953

Today, his hair grey, his beard trimmed and an easy smile on his face, he looks the opposite of villainous. And he turned his back on abstraction--it seemed to him to have become too easy, too bourgeois. He loves Jerry Saltz's idea of zombie abstraction, referring to paintings that may be accomplished and even interesting in some ways, but which mainly exist as valuable decorative items. That said, if you look at his current paintings without knowing anything about them, you'll likely perceive them as a group of colorful abstractions.


Bas Poulos's studio

But for him, they are landscapes--two very specific groups of landscapes. One are based on bridges on the Peloponnese in Greece. These bridges all were within driving distance of the village where Poulos spends time. The other series are winter landscapes from South Carolina, where Poulos is from and where he still has family.


bridge paintings

The earliest bridge painting (on the right above) was more-or-less naturalistic--grey stone bridge, dark trees, blue water, morning light. But as one can see with the painting on the left, Poulos abandons the use of local color for an intense palette. Trees, bridges, rocks, ground and sky become almost abstract shapes. His touchstone here is Andre Derain's The Turning Road, a masterpiece owned by the MFAH.

Andre Derain, The Turning Road, 1906, oil on canvas

In my experience, artists of Poulos's generation revere modernism. His studio was stacked with books of the artists he loves--Picasso, Braque. Matisse, Derain and the other Fauves, Marsden Hartley, Francis Bacon, etc. Painting is for many artists younger than Poulos a contentious medium. Thomas McEvilley said that when painting seemed to come roaring back in the 80s after a decade in "exile," that it wasn't triumphant but "chastened." But with painters like Poulos, painting is never went away and never was about process, nor was it conceptual, nor "meta," nor ironic. Painting exists for the purpose of producing paintings--satisfying paintings that are expressive, paintings that are the result of specific materials and the specific training and the specific practice of the artist.


Bridge painting and Ornomenos

The painting on the left above is another bridge painting (you can see the bridge in the upper right), but the one next to it is one that some readers may remember from the 1980s. It's Ornomenos (1984) and it was shown in the famous painting show at MFAH, Fresh Paint. Poulos has two shows in Houston coming up in 2015. One, at HBU's Contemporary Art Gallery, will show his recent landscapes. The other, at his longtime gallery Meredith Long & Company, will show earlier work from the 80s. I've always liked this 80s work, but it really looks 80s. If Poulos attempted these abstractions now, they'd feel like zombie abstractions. When you realize this, you understand why his work has evolved the way it did.


More South Carolina landscapes


Poulos hanging a recent painting

But the value of visiting a studio is not just in seeing an artist's latest work. The proverbial white cube may not be an "ideologically neutral" space, as "Hennessy Youngman" ironically called it, but it's a pleasant enough place to see some art. But a studio is different. It's personal. Artists, especially painters, collect images and objects and put them on the wall. Parts of Poulos's gallery are open and airy. Others look like this:


Bettie Page, Francis Bacon, Giacometti, Pollock, Picasso, etc.


Flattened metal objects picked up alongside the road before they all got replaced with plastic.


Some of Poulos's own ceramic art, plus a folk-art carved fish.


Old photos and visas and passports


A bird made by the late, great Jeff McKissack.

And when you use Bas Poulos's restroom, you see three (four?) sexy Graces.



To me, a trip to an artist's studio destroys the notion of the autonomous work of art. Someday, those Bridge paintings and those South Carolina paintings will leave the studio and enter people's collections. When that happens, their link to the studio is frayed. But for me, I can't see them without seeing Fancis Bacon pointing, Bettie Page in lingerie, a dusty Jeff McKissack, etc. Poulos is a traditional painter--he is not a bricoleur or a relational artist or an installation artist. But as with many artists whose studios I've visited, I will carry a memory of the profoundly individual, casually curated clutter of the space, and I won't be able to see his paintings without thinking about it.

Robert Boyd

I'm always slightly perplexed by what gets read (or at least "viewed") on this blog. But I shouldn't be. It's pretty simple, really. There are a certain number of people who check in regularly on the blog, and a certain number that check in occasionally. These numbers don't change all that much over the course of a year. They are what I consider the natural readership of The Great God Pan Is Dead. That readership could be increased if I were a better writer; if I had more writers contributing; if I covered a broader range of arts; if I covered a broader geographic area; if I posted more frequently; etc. I'm not likely to do any of those things, so the baseline readership will probably remain about the same. And I thank all of you for spending a little time here.

So what distinguishes these top 10 posts from any other? I would like to say their inherent superiority, but mostly it's due to outside links. When some other blog or popular website links to The Great God Pan Is Dead, it sends a flood of new readers over. The sites that have contributed most this blog's "extra" page views this year have been Swamplot, The Comics Journal,Glasstire, The Comics Reporter and Hyperallergic. It almost goes without saying that these are some of my favorite online publications, and any time one of them deigns to notice The Great God Pan Is Dead, I feel honored.

The following are the top 10 posts of 2014, starting with the most popular.


1. Joseph Cohen's Use-Value. This was a studio visit with painter Joseph Cohen. A nice little post about a very interesting artist, but why did it get so many page views? It was mentioned on Swamplotand apparently captured the interest of a lot of Swamplot readers. Cohen built his unusual triangular house on an unusual triangle-shaped lot--a lot many have noticed over the years because it's right on the Heights bike trail. Cohen designed the house with the help of an architect, and built it himself. He's an interesting painter whose work is often quite beautiful, but I think it was the brilliance of the house itself that attracted many readers. Houses designed by artists are a special, eccentric genre of architecture, and this is a brilliant example of the genre.


2. Lonestar Explosion 2014 - Untitled by Nikki Thornton. This brief post by Dean Liscum is the only one that got its rank organically. No site linked to it--most of its page views were sent over by Google and Facebook; in other words, via the Internet version of word-of-mouth. I think the performance hit readers' OMG! buttons. It is a bit grisly, and the contrast of the horrible pig's head and the beautiful woman is striking. Thornton appears to be bottomless (she's not, actually), so it almost seems like a strange birth scene. It confirms the average person's idea of performance art as shock art. I assume that for all of those reasons, it ended up capturing the attention of readers. They should have come to the actual performance--it was part of a carnival of smallish performances happening simultaneously at Box 13 as part of the Houston International Performance Art Biennale.


3. Argument for the Elimination of Art Fairs in Houston: HFAF 2014, part 1.Every year I go to the art fairs in Houston, and every year I'm appalled. Most of the readers who wanted to share the hate found their way to this post on their own, but a bunch were helped over by a link from Glasstire (in which Bill Davenport outsourced the hate-viewing to me). There was too much horrible art for one post--I concluded with part 2.


4. Real Estate Art--Bert Long Edition.This long-running series ("Real Estate Art") usually involves me taking some photos published on the local real estate site HAR and trying to identify the art in them. I used to spend a lot of time on HAR, but since I moved this summer, I look at it less frequently. So most of the Real Estate Art posts in 2014 involve looking at houses that Swamplot has brought my attention to (and to which I always link back). Then Swamplot notices my posts and links back to them! It's logrolling at its finest, but I always get the better end of the deal since Swamplot sends so many readers my way.

This was a very special "Real Estate Art" post, since it dealt with the home of the late Bert Long, one of Houston's most important artists. Not only was Long's house full of incredible local art, it was designed by an important local architect, Brett Zamore. The post was enlivened with photos from Zamore's webpage showing the house--his first--in "before" and "after" stages.

After I posted this, I got the opportunity to tour the house in person, which resulted in another post here.


5. The Diminishing Returns of Being an Artist.  When cartoonist Mike Dawson wrote an essay on how poorly his latest graphic novel sold and what that meant for him as an artist, it ignited a firestorm. This post is one of many responses to it. Because the Comics Journal and the Comics Reporter linked back to it, this post got a lot of readers. These were readers mostly interested in comics, but to me the post applies to all artists.


6.  Real Estate Art on Woodland Heights. Nothing special about this post (in my opinion)--another art-filled house on HAR. But because Swamplot noticed, a lot of real estate fans came over to Pan to check it out.


7. Bill Davenport and his shop, Bill's Junk. When Painting the Town Orange was published, I learned that there was a chapter dropped for length. I offered to publish that chapter for Pete Gershon, the author. Because it covered four artistic environments, we publishedit in four parts, of which this is one. Again I have Swamplot to thank for this post's popularity. Art environments like Bill's Junk are one place where the interests of The Great God Pan Is Dead and Swamplot happily overlap.


8. Real Estate Art: 2630 West Lane Pl.I love this Real Estate Art post because the homeowners have art by three of my favorite local artists--Dorothy Hood, Laura Lark and Mark Flood.


9. Real Estate Art: 2526 Bellmeade.This elegant house had a beautiful James Surls tucked under the stairs.


10. Creatives in a Post-Industrial Society.This post was prompted by a trip to an artspace in Brooklyn called Pioneer Works. Its readership was enhanced by linkbacks from Hyperallergic and the Comics Reporter. Like "The Diminishing Returns of Being an Artist," this one used its subject as a jumping off point to talk about bigger issues.


Which leads me to a final entry on this list. It's not in the top 10, but it's my personal favorite post of the year, a piece of writing that I'm proud of. "The Show Is So Over" was about Jamal Cyrus's temporary installation A Jackson in Your House, but it was really about the complexities of gentrification and art. In fact, four posts this year make up an unintentional quartet on the position (societally and economically) of the artist and art in this new millennium: "The Show Is So Over,""The Diminishing Returns of Being an Artist,""Creatives in a Post-Industrial Society" and "People Should Get Paid For Their Work." These issues have been on my mind, and I expect that to continue in 2015. I hope you all return to read them.

Betsy Huete

Sure, there are a lot of top ten lists out there, and in the last week or so they’ve come in droves. I’ve seen the top exhibitions of the year several times over from all different kinds of people, websites, blogs; the toptenartlistsfromHyperallergic; Artnet’s fifty most interesting artists and most important essays; and so on. Hell, Robert even posted two top ten lists in the past week or so—one on comics and one on art books. So, surprise, surprise! I’m throwing my hat into the ring with my top ten pieces exhibited in Houston in 2014. Like last year, I’m being really specific, picking individual works instead of exhibitions. There have been many times, just like last year, where the exhibition as a whole either didn’t stand out to me or I didn’t have anything specific to say about it, yet a piece or two individually did something really special. Here they are:



10. Karyn Olivier, Still Life Series (Matinicus), 2014, How the Light Gets In: Recent Work by Seven Core Fellows at the Glassell School.These series of photographs are images of things that, in themselves, aren’t very interesting. Blemished painted foam, colored mirrors, and colored papers are a few objects that Olivier has arranged and photographed in various ways. But the precision of the photographs, like this one in particular, as well as the arrangement makes it look delectable, like cake.


Courtesy Devin Borden Gallery

9. Clark Derbes, Charlie, 2014, American Sculpture at Devin Borden. As a whole, this exhibition at Devin Borden seemed pretty tame and unassuming, which made Charlie stand out all the more. Derbes normally paints onto found wood, which is what he has done here. The truncated piece of wood twists, and the application of the colorful checkers make the whole piece feel elastic and dynamic. I have no idea who Charlie is or his relationship to Derbes, but if he’s anything like his sculpture, I want to meet this guy.


Courtesy Art Palace

8. Deborah Roberts, Buttress, One and Many at Art Palace. A collaged creature-woman floating in a large field of putrid gold abstraction, Roberts’ Buttress is brazenly disharmonious. The slightly slumped shoulders of the woman command our empathy with her vulnerability while still looking vile and distorted.


 (Photo by Adam Clay)

7. Carter Ernst, HOOT, Texas Sculpture Group 2014: A Panoramic View, Lawndale Art Center. Tucked in a corner on the second floor of Lawndale during the Texas Sculpture Group Exhibition, stood this larger than human height, fabric-covered owl. It felt huggable, until I stared into its bulbous, mirrored eyes. Ernst’s owl feels cute and ominous, and it reminds me a little of those giant puppets that used to play at Show Biz Pizza.


From stillinberlin.de

6. Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, Collective Reaction: FotoFest 2014, The Station Museum.With How Not To Be Seen…, Steyerl conveys exciting ideas about the intangible image as a physical material, and thereby questions what happens with our material bodies as we continue to communicate increasingly via images and pixels. She enumerates—within this framework—on how to disappear in not only a compelling but humorous way, suggesting that one could disappear by being a woman over the age of fifty.


Courtesy Inman Gallery

5. Angela Fraleigh, we held hands beneath the dirt, 2014, Ghosts in the Sunlight, Inman Gallery. Whatever is going on with this woman’s expression, which is deliberately unclear, we as viewers can’t help but wonder what’s happening to her, what she’s doing. With cropping, Fraleigh smartly gives us only partial access to this woman, effectively turning this painting from fully representational to an abstraction.


From glasstire.com

4. Julia Brown, The Dancer, 2014, The Core Exhibition 2014, The Glassell School. Brown doesn’t do much in this video: she simply points and shoots at a pre-pubescent girl dancing to a hip hop song. We see the girl practicing, running through some of the dance moves with ease and faltering through others. The girl eyes us in the camera, flitting from childlike innocence to the sexuality of a grown woman. Here, Brown simply and cleanly nails what it feels like to be an adolescent girl. I remember watching this the first time, actively cringing while also nostalgically reflecting on the slumber parties I would have with my best friends, staying up all night practicing N*SYNC choreography. Ok, that was last week.


From ggalleryhouston.com

3. Dylan Roberts,Bully, Beyond Graphite: Fab 15 + Performance, G Gallery.Bully is a putrid mixed media painting of skin-like pinks and reds with a seemingly wheat-pasted neon yellow drawing on top of it. The drawing is intricate and strange. The material underneath looks like melting plastic, like pimply, bubbling skin. Every time I look at this piece I want to vomit, which is why it is my number three pick.


From houstonmuseumdistrict.org

2. Wu Tsang, Moved by the Motion, 2014, Moved by the Motion, DiverseWorks.With Moved by the Motion, Tsang has constructed a dual projection short film with a loose narrative around the gender-ambiguous performer boychild. The film is unabashedly, almost absurdly, queer. Boychild—sensual, confusing, disgusting, beautiful, sexual—commands our attention, and it was impossible to stop watching her. Also, the beanbag chairs were exceptionally comfortable.


From glasstire.com

1. Paul Kittelson, Lawn Chairs, 2014, True North, Heights Boulevard esplanade. Let’s not lie. Public art can be boring. That’s usually because it has to filter through several committees first (see HAA fiasco), becoming a soulless skeleton of the artist’s original intent. But Kittelson’s lawn chairs sweetly garnered everyone’s attention and sense of nostalgia, making passersby squeal with glee as they climbed (illegally) onto the giant chairs, flailing their legs around as if they were little kids.

Robert Boyd

I promise I will get back to writing about art soon. I just got back from New Orleans where a saw a whole bunch of art, some of it pretty good! But a couple of days ago, I made a discovery that I had to share. I learned that the The Portal to Texas History, an online repository of scanned publications, documents and images from Texas, has a pretty good run of the Rice Thresher(Rice University's student newspaper), including issues from fall 1985. (Thanks to Scott Gilbert for pointing this out.)

As it happened, I was at Rice in fall 1985. At the time, I was a "senior" actively weighing my options, which were: should I draw some comics or smoke another bowl? Occasionally, I decided to draw some comics, which were then published in the Rice Thresher. The character, Iron Shrapnel Man, came from a dream that my old friend John Richardson had. He told me that he had dreamed that I had created a character called "Iron Shrapnel Man." I figured that if I had invented him in John's dream, that was sort of like inventing him in real life. (I realize now that this is ethically shaky ground--sorry, John!) I literally haven't seen these comics since they were published. Here they are:


(OK, I was trying to be satirical but I think this could be read either way. Not very good satire, then. I was strongly influenced--practically to the point of plagiarism--by Gilbert Shelton's hilarious Wonder Wart-Hog comics.)



(For some reason, psychology had a reputation as an easy major at Rice. If I had been honest about it, I would have made him an art major. Period note: people thought Communism still mattered in the 1980s.)



(I'm pretty sure I stole the joke in the last panel. Also, I'm not sure why I suddenly changed the format. Probably because I was high.)





(The second panel was a direct swipe of Wonder Wart-hog. Damn that Gilbert Shelton was good. Also, the letter published directly above this strip is from me, complaining bitterly about the editorial policy of the then editor in chief and suggesting that students vote him out in the next election. On an unrelated note, I later learned that the Thresher staff had lost all my original art.)



This was the last Iron Shrapnel Man. The bowl won. I dropped out and ran off to Africa, ending the first chapter of my wildly checkered college career. Eventually Rice gave me a degree, so all's well that ends well. As for Iron Shrapnel Man, these six strips demonstrate quite well why I never became a professional cartoonist.

Robert Boyd


Miao Jiaxin

I first became aware of Miao Jiaxin when he had a performance and exhibit in 2012 in Houston. Now I am about to become one of his willing victims. He has set up within his apartment in Brooklyn a cage which he rents out for $1 a night. But you have some serious rules to follow if you stay there. It is like any other Airbnb rental, except for one thing: from 9 am to noon, "you CANNOT access internet, NO electronic devices, books, radio, pens or craftwork. You CANNOT talk to anybody. You CANNOT do Yoga or any other exercises. You CANNOT sleep." Oh, and one other thing--you will be livestreamed as you sit there silently in the cage. This is where I will be tonight.


Miao Jiaxin, Jail's Seeking Prisoners, 2014, performance and video

When Miao created Jail's Seeking Prisoner, it was an actual Airbnb listing. It was like any other Airbnb listing--it had a price, it was an accommodation, and it had house rules. But the Airbnb people decided this was all too much for them and delisted it. Hyperallergic covered the whole sequence of events. If you want to stay for a couple of nights in Jail's Seeking Prisoners, you will now have to access it through its Facebook page.


Vincent Tiley following the Jail's Seeking Prisoners rules

And tomorrow morning, from 9 am to noon Eastern time, you will be able to see me sitting in Miao's cage. It will be a challenge. I have a restless mind and like to be doing something all the time. If I had practice in meditating, it would be simple enough. (I suspect it will be a fairly boring Livestream!) I surely won't be wearing an amazing outfit as Vincent Tiley and Jodie Lynkeechow did.


Jodie Lynkeechow in Jail's Seeking Prisoners

See you tomorrow, Sunday morning, live from Jail's Seeking Prisoners!

Dean Liscum

In December I attended two art events that captured my imagination, 24 hours at the Lightnin' Hopkins Bus Stop by THE BLACK GUYS, and Planned Obsolesce by Alex Tu. On the surface, they could not be more dissimilar, but underneath they shared some concepts and methods.


(Photo by Robert Pruitt)

24 hours at the Lightnin' Hopkins Bus Stop by THE BLACK GUYS, which consists of Robert Hodge and Phillip Pyle the Second, was held from 10 a.m. December 10th to 10 a.m. December 11th. The event was one from their series THE BLACK GUYS in which Hodge and Pyle recreate and/or appropriate a series of the Art Guys' (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing) performances as well as present some original pieces. 24 hours is based on the Art Guys 1995 event entitled Stop-N-Go, where Galbreth and Massing worked as clerks at a convenience store for 24 hours straight.

The duration of the piece was the primary commonality between the Art Guys performance and that of the THE BLACK GUYS. After that, the works diverged. Where as the Art Guys performance may have had some political overtones: protesting the 90s commodification of the art market and drawing attention to the plight of the convenience store clerk, THE BLACK GUYS piece was explicitly political. In publicity about the event, Hodge and Pyle stated that their objective was to temporarily reclaim the Lightning Hopkins bus stop, to which Hodge had contributed a customized bench and large sign when Hopkins was honored by the city of Houston. Since the commemoration, the local drug trade at the 24-hour Gulf station across the street has spilled over to the bus stop. It serves more as an open air market than as public service or a commemorative space. When I spoke with Phillip around midnight, according to his unscientific research, he'd only seen 3 people catch the bus at that site.


Photo by Lovie Olivia 

Hodge and Pyle's downplayed the political aspect of the piece. They described their performance as "spending 24 hours" at the Lightning Hopkins bus stop at Dowling and Frances. They made it participatory, inviting fans, art appreciators, friends, and residence of the neighborhood to join them. And come they did. In their video about the event, a constant parade of friends, fans, fellow artists, neighbors, and patrons stream by. People brought food, drinks, music, and even a portable fire pit fueled with recycled cooking oil to keep them warm. Both artist had brought books and videos in case no one showed, but I doubt either had time to open a book or start video.

The power of the TBG's piece was that what appeared to be a 24hr block party on the surface was actually a clandestine demonstration. Hodge and Pyle parlayed their artistic cache into political action and very subtly enlisted their artistic entourage into helping them reclaim the space. From what I observed and heard, it was neither a defensive nor a confrontational act. There were no shouts or accusations between the usual denizens of the stop and the TBG's retinue. Both artists are from Houston and are aware of the complex history and politics of the Third Ward as well as the artistic communities ambivalent relationship to the drug trade. In fact, I doubt if most of the participants realized what their participation was actually accomplishing. It was a positive protest in which Hodge and Pyle created the future they envisioned for this spot and for the Third Ward in general. TBG co-opted the Art Guy's Stop-N-Go performance and turned it into a positive protest by reclaiming the public space and making it one of camaraderie and friendship, which to fully appreciate, you had to be there.

Planned Obsolesce, Alex Tu's show at the Civic TV Collective wasn't a performance per se. It was a standard opening with an after party in situ. If you breezed by, glancing at the work, chatting with many artists and art appreciators that stopped by, snacking on the pigs head and roast duck, grooving to the DJ, and then moving on, you might have missed something, like the art.

Like TBG's piece, Tu's photographs were appropriations of other works of art/images. They are grainy images enlarged to monumental proportion. These images were once important political and cultural symbols. Now they are backdrops, the visual equivalent of elevator music, artistic white noise. The image of Mao has gone from a potent political symbol, to a pop art icon, to the artistic equivalent of a still life assignment: every art student has to add one to his/her oeuvre.


Idol Gazing At Himself Television infomercial for prosperity and fortune generating golden statue, Beijing, 2012 

The obelisk's significance has gone soft from over use by purveyors of national pride.


Empty Obelisk Transmitting Light Globally/CCTV, Beijing 2012 

The images of lush beaches have grown tired and cancerous, succumbing to the over exposure as a stand in for a purchasable paradise.



Prosperity and Good Fortune in the First World, mural found above meat department at a Chinese American supermarket in Alief, Houston 2012

Further contributing to the work is the site itself. The location of Civic TV Collective is in what was previously Chinatown, but has been recently re-christened as EADO. Like the images in Tu's show, it remains the same geographic location and yet it has been transformed. It's context has changed. The pig's head and roasted duck from one of the last Chinese grocery stores in the area provide sensual remembrance, a taste and smell, of things passed and passing.

The context of old China town and Tu's appropriation and recontextualizing of these ubiquitous images exposes their dubious futures. Do the symbols go on to live in perpetuity in the pop lexicon? Do they pass into oblivion? Are they reborn with a new cogency, a new artistic agency? And Chinatown, what of its future? Does it become a site of urban renewal that retains its current residences and welcomes new ones? Or are the denizens displaced and relocated? Does everything eventually evolve into rebranded EADO whatever that entails?

Planned Obsolesce, the title of Tu's work, begs those questions. I'm not sure how many of the audience struggled to answer them. Tu, himself, was taciturn and thoughtful. Directing people to the food and beer and chatting about any topic but the work. However, as with TBG's performance, if you stuck around for a little while and engaged the work, observed where you were and contemplated why the artist chose that work for that place, you might have discovered that you had unknowingly become part of the performance / piece itself.

Robert Boyd

When I was a kid, I made models and built a town out of Legos. I've always been fascinated by models and dioramas. It's often an art that doesn't quite realize it's an art, as in the case of model railroaders or makers of dioramas or dollhouse builders (interestingly, Robert Gober got his start as a dollhouse builder). I've written about artists working in this realm before--Seth's Dominion and Seth Mittag's We're Still Here, for example. A few years ago, a documentary about Mark Hogancamp, Marwencol,came out. I wrote about it briefly in relation to the work of Charles Ledray, another artist who likes making little models.

Hogancamp was attacked outside a bar in 2000 by five men. The savage beating put him into a coma and even after he came out of it, he remained brain damaged.  Afterwards, as a homemade attempt at therapy (he couldn't afford the professional kind), he started to build a highly realistic World War II-era Belgian town in his back yard, populating it with customized action figures representing himself ("Hoagie"), his family and friends, and his attackers. The town is meant as kind of a respite from the war, where people can find healing and rest. This remarkable creation was "discovered" accidentally by an editor for Esopus magazine, who brought the town and Hogancamp's photos of it to a wider audience.

I was visiting New York and saw that an exhibit of new Hogancamp photos was going to be on display at Pioneer Works. The Women of Marwencol focuses on a side of Marwencol that is a key to its existence--the town is inhabited by women and who rescue and nurture men. On one hand, it's a male fantasy--a town full of sexy ladies who keep you happy and do your laundry and genuinely care about you. On the other hand, Hogancamp seems to be identifying the world of men as a dangerous, violent place and the world of women as a nurturing, healing place.

The new works are strange. There is still plenty of World War II imagery (including female Red Army soldiers), but he seems to have added fantastic elements (Deja Thoris, from Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars books, is referred to). It was lovely to see the prints--he sets them in nature that is wildly out of scale, but somehow feels convincing. He's not just a good model-maker, he's a good photographer as well.


Mark Hogancamp, Hogie With His Camera, 2014, Digital C-print, 13 x 18 inches


Mark Hogancamp, Anna, Hogie's wife, brings him a raincoat after a bloody skirmish, 2014, Digital C-print, 27 x 36 inches


Mark Hogancamp, Hogie's mother Edda relaxing on Mother's Day, 2014, Digital C-print, 13 x 18 inches

Hogancamp gives his alter-ego, Hogie, a family. I love that his mother Edda is an elegant, sexy older woman (older compared to most of the other women in Marwencol). The titles of the pieces, like Anna, Hogie's wife, brings him a raincoat after a bloody skirmish, show that there is a narrative happening. Whether that narrative can really be pieced together from the photos, even with the descriptive titles, I don't know. Of course, part of this narrative was explained in the 2010 documentary. But it seems to have continued developing since then. I hope one day there is a big beautiful book of these photos. If so, I recommend ordering them chronologically according to the narrative and using text to fill in the narrative gaps.


Mark Hogancamp, Untitled, 2008, Digital print, 13 x 17.5 inches

Some of the outfits and hair color show (as in the photo above) that Hogancamp, despite his keen eye for detail, isn't trying to go for any kind of historical accuracy.


Mark Hogancamp, Jacqueline looks at Deja Thoris, 2014, Digital C-print, 27 x 36 inches


Mark Hogancamp, Deja Vu, Belgian Goddess of Youth, whose look turns men to stone, 2014, Digital C-print, 27 x 36 inches

I cannot imagine a better title for any work of art in any medium than Deja Vu, Belgian Goddess of Youth, whose look turns men to stone. 


 Mark Hogancamp, Untitled, 2014, Digital print, 13 x 17.5 inches


Mark Hogancamp, Untitled, 2014, Digital print, 13 x 17.5 inches

There are several photos that come off as erotic, but Hogancamp never poses his dolls in overtly sexual poses. In many a kid's bedroom, Ken or G.I. Joe got it on with Barbie, and the whole premise of Marwencol has an erotic undertone. But perhaps it's Hogancamp's seemingly worshipful yet shy attitude towards women (the name, Marwencol, was created by taking part of his name and parts of the names of two women he had unrequited crushes on) won't let him go that far in his photography.

Mark Hogancamp, Untitled, 2006, Digital print, 13 x 17.5 inches

The images, as in the early one above, can be quite surreal. It's tempting to interpret them in light of Hogancamp's experience, but it's more pleasing to simply bask in the strangeness of the military woman, gripping a pistol in one hand and a teddy bear in the other, cropped so you don't see her face or feet. And the totality of these images is like that. They seem a little off no matter what--a bourgeois artist with an MFA wouldn't make these images which is part of what makes them so compelling. It is enough to know that they are therapeutic; further interpretation is not necessary. Hogancamp created this fantasy to deal with the world that hurt him so badly in the same way that Henry Darger created his fantasies to deal with his troubled world. Hard-nosed types who dismiss fantasy would do well to remember the good it does for damaged people like Mark Hogancamp.

The Women of Marwencol is on view at Pioneer Works until December 12.

Dean Liscum

It's bad manners and it goes against all art world decorum but you just want to touch the photographic works in Emily Peacock's exhibition Soft Diet at the Hello Project. The works beg you to gently run your finger tip over the crevices of teeth, to press your palm into the pile of finger nail clippings, to smear the jello from edge to edge, to write your name in the pink and white smears. But it's not your fault, it's hers. She wants you to.


Incisor, Canine, Premolar, Molar, 30 x 38 inches, Archival Giclee Print Mounted on Aluminum 2014


Gently Cleans, 20 x 20 inches, Archival Giclee Print Mounted on Aluminum

Even though that's a weak-ass excuse to offer any docent, it's true. Peacock acknowledges the imminent extinction of the snapshot, of the photograph as a physical object, a picture on a piece of paper. This exhibition attempts to recapture their fleeting prominence and presence in our lives. The physicality of Peacock's photos is purposeful and stunning. The images are strikingly sensual. The sculptural composition of the photographs of objects placed on top of other photographic images are so sharp and present as to engage one's sense of the hyperreal. Your impulse is to touch them. But you can't because they're just photographs.

These are nostalgic images for Peacock and for us. For Peacock, who often works within her own personal history either using friends and family members to recreate works as in her series You, Me, and Diane and Pieta or as subject themselves as in Reenactments and A Matter of Kinship, they are her story. For us, they are popular images from the culture of our youths, the not too distant past of ball pits and Thanksgiving Day rituals. Peacock's obfuscation of these images with food and finger nails make it unsettling and immediate tapping into the vague memories of what should have been childhood nirvana but wasn't.


Refrigerate Until Served, 30 x 45 inches, Archival Giclee Print Mounted on Aluminum, 2014 

As I've already alluded to, the technical mastery casts its own sensual spell.


Nail Appearance, 30 x 45 inches, Archival Giclee Print Mounted on Aluminum, 2014

Beyond the expert execution of these images and their acknowledgement of physical photograph's cultural attrition, there is a second layer of meaning, a second attempt at salvation, the battle against mortality. In her statement about the show, Peacock mentions that she started making the series when her mother was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. She confronts it with all her humanity. Her most potent weapon in this battle is the video.


Soft Diet, 5:22, Looping Video, 2014

In the eponymous video Soft Diet, she uses a combination of sexuality and silliness. A pair of gloved hands stroke, caress. and massage a jello mold like the ones served at hospitals. As the video progresses, the hands move more vigorously, until the fingers penetrate and destroy it.

In the Iodine Money Shot Challenge, Peacock conflates the porn industry's money shot trope with the icebucket challenge craze. She uses iodine as her currency, which moves the video's anticipatory antics of heavy breathing and wide-eyed staring from sexual satisfaction or charity martyrdom to the anxiety of a patient awaiting the dressing of a wound or an ominous prognosis. And yes, it's as disturbing and poignant as it sounds.

Distribution and Habitat, 2:07, Looping Video, 2014

In Distribution and Habitat, a hand covered in an institutional blue glove opens to reveal an earthworm that then slowly crawls away from its confines. Metaphorically it could be us fleeing our own mortality or the medical institutions that attempt to protect and profit from that mortality.
My Father, 14 x 20 inches, Archival Giclee Prin,t 2014 

My Father is a photograph that directly addresses the subject of mortality. Its composed of two images. One images portrays him softly, blurred in the foreground while focusing on the lush scenery behind him. The other image portrays him in sharp detail revealing every wrinkle and pore in front of a dark, shadowy landscape. This photographic diptych captures the essence of the videos and her artistic strategy against loss and mortality. She combats it with life in all its sensuousness, sexuality, and humor.

Peacock's biographical information helps in the deconstruction of these photographs, but it's unnecessary for the enjoyment of them. Once again, she's turned the camera on herself and her life and in doing so helped us all reflect on ours -- lost teeth, jagged nails, white smears and all.


88% Of Moms Agree Nothing Works Faster,30 x 45 inches,Archival Giclee Print Mounted on Aluminum, 2014 

Dean Liscum

On January 11th, galleryHomeland held "Homeland Soup", which served as the awards ceremony for the Charge Practicum Grants. Attendees paid $5-$10 for soup, entertainment by Daniel and the Thunder Heads, the presentation of the Charge Grants, and a chance to vote on the first recipient of the Homeland Soup grant.

The proceeds from the dinner funded the Homeland Soup grant. Contenders for the soup grant were

• Sebastian Boncy of Purple Time Space Swamp (PTSS)
• Angel Oloshove
• Mystic Crystal Revelations Movie Club

Boncy will use the Homeland Soup grant to fund the next phase of the project, print-on-demand (POD) collections of the PTSS photos. In my opinion, it will be money well spent.

Dean Liscum

Over a 48-hour period, Houston has let two cultural "icons" be destroyed. One, the Funnel Tunnel by Patrick Renner, was new and had regional attention. To be honest, it was a potential icon that showed real promise. The other, The Flower Man's House by Cleveland Turner, was almost two decades in the making and had achieved international acclaim. It was a bona fide icon. Both were hugely popular within the communities in which they resided.

What puzzles me is why the city of Houston (or the Houston Arts Alliance [HAA], manager of the city's civic art collection) which is in constant search of a cultural identity, didn't seize the opportunity to own this locally produced art and attempt to preserve it?

Institutions pay exorbitant amounts of money to event organizers to generate exactly the type of community involvement and identity that these artworks generated naturally. The City of Houston regularly forks over millions to rebrand itself, a.k.a. give the city a cultural identity. For instance, in 1997, Bob Lanier spent $1M in tax payer money and another $2.5M in private funds to produce "Houston: Expect the Unexpected." That is only one of many branding rat holes down which city leaders have poured tax payer money. HAA had a similarly disastrous foray into sloganeering with it's "Houston is Inspired" mural by committee. Local blogger Harbeer Sandhu at texphrastic painfully detailed it.

Funnel Tunnel and Flower Man's House grew out of the urban ecosystem that is Houston. They were created by local artists, are unique, have garnered national and international publicity, and had popular support in their neighborhoods.

What more could a city struggling to establish its identify ask for?


Patrick Renner creator of the Funnel Tunnel

There are, of course, official reasons why both exhibits were torn down.

The primary one given for the Funnel Tunnel was that it was established as a temporary exhibition. Temporary alludes to the fact that the Art League doesn't have the infrastructure (read money because that's what were talking about) to maintain the structure long term. Nonetheless, the artwork itself was partially constructed by volunteers, maintained by volunteers, and disassembled by volunteers. Plus, it's steel infrastructure looks anything but temporary. It seems (from the outside) that a small amount of money from the city, some weather proofing of the substructure, and the efforts of volunteers could easily sustain it in perpetuity.


If you can't preserve it, cannibalize it. Volunteers helping to disassemble and collecting souvenirs.

Imagine if you will an annual or bi-annual neighborhood festival centered around a local art work that is popular with its adjacent residents and Houstonians everywhere. The city/HAA could close down the northbound lanes on Montrose and make the southbound lanes two-way, thus limiting traffic for a few hours but not blocking it. (I'm not a heretic.) The Art League Houston could donate it's parking lot and facilities to the cause. Vendors could turn the ALH parking lot into a mini-festival while volunteers maintain the sculpture. 4 hours. $20K. Cultural icon established.


Only the skeleton remained

The Flower Man's house was a little more complicated. By complicated, I mean it would have cost more money to restore/preserve than the Funnel Tunnel and it's in a historically African-American neighborhood. History and empirical evidence reveal that money tends not to flow these neighborhoods.


Cleveland Turner, a.k.a. The Flower Man. Photo by Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments

The verdict on the house was that it was a public safety hazard. Turner died in December 2013 and so the house had been left unattended for over a year and became infested with mold.


Inside the Flower Man's house. Photo by Pete Gershon
 
Mold is a harsh reality in Houston. If you're poor, mold remediation is virtually impossible. If you have $1M that's been redirected from a poorly conceived rebranding campaign, it's totally do-able. Worst case, the city/HAA acquires the property, demolishes the building, builds a replica of the house or a museum, and donates it along with the annual funds to properly maintain it to a non-profit already in the area like Project Row Houses. Then, it could function as a cultural destination like the Orange Show or the Beer Can House.


Street view of the Flower Man's house. Photo by Candace Garcia

I know. I know. I know.

The Orange Show and the Beer Can house have private, non-governmental organizations that fund them. Actually, it's the same one. My response: who gives a shit. The fact that those white folk artists, their family, and their very wealthy friends\supporters had more disposable income than the Flower Man is irrelevant to his cultural significance. He's a folk artist with the same passion and intensity as Jeff McKissack and John Milkovisch. He deserves the same treatment and would very likely inspire a non-profit foundation to augment and possibly take over any initial support from the city.

Imagine the same volunteer festival that I fantasized about for the Funnel Tunnel. However, in the case of the Flower Man's house, it isn't a fantasy. Over the years, Project Row House organized several volunteer efforts to help paint and repair the house.

Plus, Cleveland Turner's personnel story from homeless drug addict to community advocate is the perfect redemptive story...except he's not white or overtly religious. His religion was his joy, which manifest itself in his art. What's not to love about that?

Nevertheless, nada from our cultural curators at city hall/HAA.


Demolition of the Flower Man's house. Photo by Francesco Conti

And so by night fall of February 8, 2015, both were no more. It's a shame because efforts to save those public art works would have supported the city's unique culture. The Funnel Tunnel and the Flower Man's house could have contributed to a Houston identity based on the efforts of Houstonians, which in my opinion, is a far better use of tax payer dollars than a lame rebranding campaign that leaves us all wondering "Who were the ad wizards that came up with that one"...and alas, culturally poorer.

Paul Mullan


Mel Chin, M-16 (wound brooch), 2005-6, Precious metal, gemstones, 2 1/8 x 2 1/2 inches

Numerous institutions are currently highlighting the work of Mel Chin, who was born and raised in Houston and spent formative years (1975-1983) here, as well. Four decades into his career, Chin is known nationally as a “conceptualist,” one with a political bent.

Mel Chin: Rematch originated at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and is organized by Miranda Lash, formerly NOMA Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and currently Curator of Contemporary Art at The Speed Art Museum in Louisville. In Houston, the exhibition is presented as major collaboration between the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAMH), the Asia Society Texas Center, and the Station Museum of Contemporary Art. At the latter, “Degrees of Separation” includes an homage to Chin by other artists and collectives. The Art League Houston’s separate show on Chin, “Paper Trail and Unauthorized Collaborations,” just closed. Given this sprawl, I will mostly limit my discussion to the CAMH, where works are installed in the lower-level Zilkha Gallery.

There are various possible modes of relating art and politics. Art can represent oppressive social conditions through an imagistic form broadly accessible and readable by public audiences. Art can also, in a similar approach, represent the really-existing political struggles against those conditions. Paraphrasing a chestnut from Karl Marx, the distinction is an understanding of the world, in the former instance, versus an effort to change that world, in the latter instance. For example, Social Realism prominent in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, encompassed both of these strategies.

Eschewing mere “passive”, distanced representation of a situation, such as economic misery, is a third mode. Simultaneously, this mode eschews simple representation of political movements: organized to transform those situations; external to the sphere of art; and orientated more towards the future. Instead an art is created which can itself, through its internal processes, more directly and immediately materialize a new, changed set of conditions in the real world and in real time. “Social practice art” is one name for this contemporary approach.


Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1991-ongoing, Plants, industrial fencing on a hazardous waste landfill. An ongoing project in conjunction with Dr. Rufus Chaney, senior research agronomist, USDA

One aspect of Chin’s oeuvre has been associated with this art and has a greater prominence at the Blaffer installation. Revival Field (begun 1990) was a collaborative project between agronomists with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the artist. The first Field was in Saint Paul, Minnesota at a former landfill for industrial waste, one where soil was badly contaminated with poisonous metals such as cadmium and zinc. Chin’s work tested the effectiveness of hyperaccumulator plant species (including types of corn and lettuce) in absorbing those metals and making the land safe once again. These experiments actually provided useful data for scientists examining this “phytoremediation” process.

Rather than centrally representing this threat to public health, or engaging in conventional political campaigns – petitioning or pressuring the government to take future actions that may or may not happen – Chin’s initiative helped to immediately and directly resolve a problem on the ground. This is considered a strength of social practice art.

At the CAMH, another aspect of Chin’s oeuvre has greater prominence – that of traditional representation vis-à-vis politics.


Mel Chin, Night Rap, 1994, Polycarbide plastic, steel, wireless transmitter, microphone element, batteries, 24 x 11 3/16 x 5 1/2 inches

The vicious 1991 beating of African-American Rodney King by Los Angeles police was (unusually for the time) captured on video and shown extensively on national news reports. Despite popular outrage, the following year a jury – of ten whites, one Latino, and one Asian-American – acquitted officers on charges of excessive force, triggering in LA the largest urban rebellion seen since the 1960s. There are parallels to the recent Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri.

Made two years later, Chin’s Night Rap (1994) looks like a standard-issue, black police baton mounted on a mike stand, dramatically spotlighted – as if on a stage – in a lonely corner of the CAMH’s gallery. Seamlessly attached to the “business” end is a microphone, turned on, with ambient sound projected through speakers mounted elsewhere in the gallery. Hip-hop – including groups such as NWA and Body Count, rapper Ice-T’s metal band – during this period spoke out energetically against police brutality. Chuck D of Public Enemy declared – in the paradigmatic reading of the art form and referencing the then-important (now superseded) news network – that “rap is CNN for black people”.

The “business” end is suggestive of state violence against African-Americans: a “rap” over the head. Metaphors here have a literary quality, which appears elsewhere in Chin’s sculptures and titles. Simultaneously, the microphone is suggestive of how such violence becomes part of the material foundation for rap and the projection of radical, black voices: oppression breeds this resistance.

A third interpretation is possible. The 1991 Rodney King video “exposed” police abuses for the doubtful: to wit, white people. Black people, Latinos, and those at the bottom of the economic ladder are not as likely to have such doubts, to say the least. This widespread “exposure” of something hidden, disguised was a factor in sparking the 1992 LA rebellion. Today, on the other hand, that is arguably less the case. Cameras are everywhere – on phones or tablets, in surveillance systems for cities and private buildings – and their images are ubiquitous. The recent choking-death of African-American Eric Garner by New York City police was recorded by a passerby on the street and can be seen globally on YouTube. That hardly prevented the brazen killing, or a grand jury from refusing to indict the NYPD officers.

The microphone, then, in Night Rap does not primarily posit the resistance of rap and hip-hop culture. Instead, that posits the state’s recording of its own acts of violence – and the broadcasting, unambiguously and unashamedly, of its willingness to kick your ass and let the whole world know it.


Mel Chin, (Belief/Punishment) Yaqin Saza (for Jam Saqi), 1986, Books, asphalt with hair and glass fiber, encaustic, paper, steel, rivets, wood, 53 x 75 x 9 inches overall

Jam Saqi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan, was arrested in 1978 and imprisoned for years by the government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Chin created (Belief/Punishment) Yaqin Saza (for Jam Saqi) (1986) for a Houston fundraiser by Amnesty International, to publicize Zia’s human rights abuses.

The sculpture’s left part is a circular agglomeration of books: perpendicular to the wall from which they are hung, with tails facing the viewer; and smeared with asphalt, pages fused together, and titles obscured. In the stack’s center is a lone, unmodified book with a red cover; the text is not visible, only the bottom. The disc is tightly bound by a ring of riveted steel. All of this allegorizes abstracted “belief”, as a category, and its containment by the state. The specificity of this belief is undefined, which is oddly consonant with the military dictatorship’s zeal to render invisible and destroy the secular leftist opposition – not coincidentally, to ultimately be supplanted by another “opposition” more in accord with the interests of the Pakistani regime and its US backers. That is, of course, Islamic fundamentalism, further strengthened by US support for rebels who fought Soviet intervention in neighboring Afghanistan from 1979-1989.

The right part is a club wrapped in paper treated to look like flayed skin, per the exhibition catalog (although that would be cryptic to anyone in a museum audience who does not torture people as a profession). In this allegory of “punishment”, Chin was influenced by Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, which argues that pain “unmakes” human consciousness. Through historical studies of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the 1967-1974 Greek military junta, and others, Scarry also notes that implements of torture are commonly presented visibly and in advance to the victim – who then must imagine torments to come.

In Night Rap, the police nightstick represents not only an instrument of state violence, but how representation itself, whatever its good intentions, can be complicit in reproducing that violence – via its recording and broadcasting. Belief/Punishment presents, again, not only such an instrument, but how presentation itself is embedded in the structure of torture.

There is one distinction. The former work proposes a Foucauldian counter-power, in rap, “made” by power itself. This is absent from the latter work, in which power – via the club and containment – is proposed to operate in a traditionally conceived, purely repressive mode of “unmaking”. Only the red book at the disc’s center – signaling the heart of the human subject and its autonomous commitments, not constructed by an external power – survives such destruction.

Chin is registering ambiguities of representation and problems of classically liberal strategies of ideology critique – of “exposing” something “hidden”, expecting that will be decisive in resolving the problem. Only during certain, limited political periods does such ideology critique have any efficaciousness.


Mel Chin, Elementary Object (For Corsica), 1993, Corsican briarwood, steel, plastic, concrete / vermiculite, excelsior packing material, flannel, paper tag, fuse cord, triple-F blasting powder, 3 1/2 x 12 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches (object in closed case)

What initially resembles a smoking pipe, in Elementary Object (For Corsica), sits on a bed of wood shavings in a steel strongbox. The box is presented on a horizontal plane, in a wall-mounted, glass display case; its lid is open; and when observed from above and at an angle, the “pipe’s” orientation and the shaving’s color scheme evoke Surrealist René Magritte’s well-known The Treachery of Images. The “pipe’s” bowl is sealed, with a wick inserted: it is actually a bomb, (nominally) complete with blasting powder. As is frequently the case with Chin, this can be recognized only by way of the wall labels or secondary commentary.


René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929, Oil on canvas

A key question here concerns the artistic image’s ontological ground or model – a “real” pipe in the outside world – and the contrast between similitude and resemblance. Magritte’s painting was famously interpreted by Michel Foucault as setting into motion a network of similitudes, internal to the work itself, and definitionally without that grounding origin. Elementary Object points, instead, towards a relation of resemblance, per se based on that model.

This is a linguistic play on “pipe bomb”, frequently used by Corsicans organized underground to fight for their island’s independence from France (one of the national struggles persistently bubbling just underneath the surface in Europe). The disjunction between iconic signifier and its proper referent – between the explosive “pipe” and a real pipe – is, then, the “treachery” in question, one with potentially fatal consequences.

Conversely, theses concerning state violence in Night Rap or Belief/Punishment presuppose a proper correspondence between iconic signifier and referent. Crucial to their functioning, the club and the baton are objectively, correctly decipherable as such. Once more, “truth” and veridicality seem to be on the side of power.


Mel Chin, Scholar’s Nightmare, 2001, Wood, dye, animal part, 30 3/4 x 60 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches

Surrealism is evident elsewhere, including Scholar’s Nightmare (1991) at the Asia Society. A domestic table leg morphs into an animal hoof, echoing Magritte yet again – specifically the boots merging into human feet.



Mel Chin,Rilke’s Razor, Jung’s Version, 1990, Razor, velvet, wood, brass, mirror, 10 x 13 x 2 inches (open), 10 x 6 1/4 x 2 inches (closed)

Two early-twentieth-century poems from Rainer Maria Rilke were Chin’s inspiration for Rilke’s Razor, Jung’s Version (1990), a modified straight-razor resting in opened shaving kit. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” enjoins: “You must change your life”. Further, from the “First Elegy” in the Duino Elegies:

Beauty is only
       the first touch of terror
              we can still bear
and it awes us so much
       because it so coolly
              disdains to destroy us.

This concept, art’s transformational power and its demands, is figured in the silhouette of the Venus de Milo hand-carved into the razor’s cutting-edge. That ancient Greek statue has long been considered a canonical moment of beauty in western art. One can imagine the “terrible”, “destructive” wound that would result from this instrument, the force of beauty. This imagined wound – a jagged tear, abstracted, and without form – can be counterposed to the Venus’ rigorous, classical form.

Traumas of very different origin are given well-ordered form in M-16 (wound brooch) (2005-6), made during the US occupation of Iraq and based on photographs of bullet wounds from an M-16 – the US Army’s standard-issue rifle since 1967. The center is a roughly circular hollow; surrounding rubies reference blood; and onyx references contusions. Other works in this Cluster series similarly fix, as decorative jewelry, the size, shape, and – sometimes – position of real instances of war injuries, as revealed by medical and forensic documentation.


Mel Chin, AK-47 (liver wound/sulfobromophthalein collapsing necklace), 2005-6, Precious metal, gemstones, Variable/wearable

In both Rilke’s Razor, Jung’s Version and M-16 (wound brooch) are overtones of a highly dualistic reading of gender. In the former, the grand theme – the source of art’s rending of consciousness – is feminized in the Venus. Its mode of appearing is banal and quotidian – the masculine activity of shaving, personalized through the small, intimate mirror and sequestered via the velvet-lined, wooden box. In the latter work, rending is more literal and more deadly, a paradigmatically masculinist, collective act of war. Its mode of appearing is feminized costume jewelry, properly for display in public space.

Within modernist thought of the blood-soaked twentieth century, an equivalence was not infrequently drawn between the shattering potential of art and the destruction inherent to politics and war. Chin, laudably, tries to attenuate this troublesome equivalence, by way of a dialectic of form – and the more debatable, gendered metaphors.

“Points of view established in the past are no longer up to date,” Chin states of this current retrospective. “It’s time for a rematch.” Nonetheless, despite some being almost three decades old, his works at the CAMH still have a striking resonance today.

“Mel Chin: Rematch” is currently on view in Houston: at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, through March 21; at the Contemporary Arts Museum, through April 19; and at the Asia Society Texas Center, through April 19. “Degrees of Separation” continues at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art through May 1.

Robert Boyd

In the past few weeks, I've hardly written a thing. The Great God Pan Is Dead is my blog, but only one of the past seven posts has been mine. I started a post in January on Prospect 3 in New Orleans but didn't get too far. A friend of mine noticed this, but generally it has been unremarked. Which I would expect. I'm not so vain to imagine that people miss my writing here.

There are some practical excuses. I've been working more lately. I have an actual day job that has been requiring more hours and more focus, leaving fewer hours and less mental energy to devote to this blog. And then there has been some personal stuff that has demanded a good deal of my attention. Life happens, and there are only so many minutes a day one can devote to one's hobby. And writing this is a hobby. (I have been paid a little to run this blog, so I guess I can't claim that it purely a hobby. Since commencing in August, 2009, I have earned $537.65--$500 from Box 13 for an ad, and $37.65 from Amazon for books sold through this site.)

These excuses would explain diminished output--but not silence. The fact is, while I could have been writing (and attending openings and looking at art), I've been filling up my time in less productive ways. I've caught up on my television (Marvel's Agents of Shield is completely stupid but highly entertaining). I've drawn a lot; little more than doodling, really. Nothing that anyone but me needs to see. But it's pleasurable, and it has reminded me that drawing as an untheorized activity has a high value. And I've read a lot. That's part of the problem.

Since the beginning of the year, I've read 24 books. Eleven of these have been books of comics which generally require less of a time commitment than prose books. So let's say 13 books. Not to mention the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail and various online publications and blogs. Right now, I'm reading Nature and Art are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008 by Rackstraw Downes. Downes is a painter whose work I don't dislike, but in which I have only a little interest. I don't even know why I bought the book. Maybe it was the unusually modest but extremely handsome format--it's like a blank mass-market paperback untouched by an art director. And I totally judge books by their covers.



Downes wrote for ARTnews, Art in America, The New Criterion, Bomb and other publications. His writing is often epigrammatic. (The long preface by John Elderfield is irritating because it quotes so many of Downes' best lines that the reader is about to read for himself. It's like serving the dessert first.) Writing about Charles Burchfield in 1970, he drops this line: "But although the vanguard is presumed to march in the name of freedom and originality, to some artists its revolutions tend to look distinctly like the palace variety, with built in exclusions as rigid as those of the academic whipping-boy it presupposes." Downes is a brilliant defender of a reactionary aesthetic. And by "brilliant," I mean he is an unusually good writer--the sentence above is a perfect example. He employs humor "the palace variety" and inverts the revolutionary program of modernism. He points out that modernism was invented in the name of freedom from the stultifying conventions of academic painting but had at some point become increasingly rigid and puritanical. And even though we can say we are in a post-modern period, our revolutions still seem to be "of the palace variety." Regardless of how social "social practice" art is, for example, the only people who concern themselves much with it enough to read books about it are art insiders like me.

Downes managed to make me think differently. It wasn't a drastic change; let's just say it made me appreciate Neil Welliver a little more and Barnett Newman a little less. And that's nothing to sneeze at! But more important to me as a committed hedonist was that reading Nature and Art Are Physical was pleasurable. Downes comes out of a literary background--he studied literature before switching to art. This shines through both in his elegant writing style and his erudite use of literary examples as well as artistic examples to explain his arguments. I like that he can easily analogize between different art forms--it's something I sometimes do in my own writing, but never as effectively as Downes does.

For example, he wrote an article about Claude Lorrain. He quoted the great English landscape artist John Constable on Claude, an artist that Constable revered: "Claude's exhilaration and light departed from him when he was between 50 and 60, and then he became a professor of the 'higher walks of art' . . . so difficult it is to be natural." Then Downes recalls that Paul Valéry, in comparing the poet's means to the composer's suggests that a poet uses the constantly shifting and evolving substance of human speech while a composer uses a set of specific sounds, "counted and classified," that are quite distinct from noise. (Keep in mind that Valéry was writing this 100 years ago or so).

So, "if the nature painter, who tries to respond directly to whatever is in view, might be said to resemble the poet in Valéry's comparison, Claude increasingly resembles the composer. His drawing expeditions to the Campagna decreased sharply after the age of 50 . . ." Claude's later works were constructed by looking at elements of his earlier work.

What I love about this small section in a longer piece about Claude is the effortless way Downes brings together three artists (Claude, Constable and Valéry) and three art forms (painting, music and poetry) into a tight and perceptive critical insight.


Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Pan and Syrinx, 1656, graphite, pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white, on brown tinted paper. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen)

Likewise, Downes' essay "Henri Rousseau and the Idea of the Naïve" was a revelation because could connect naïve art (i.e., "outsider" art--the shifting nomenclature of this kind of art was noted by Gary Fine in his book Everyday Genius) to Schiller's essay "Naïve and Sentimental Poetry," where Schiller compares poets who seek nature with poets who are nature. Given that this is a subject of long interest to me (since the 80s when I first saw work by Henry Darger and Adolf Wölflli), I found Downes' long meditation on the subject eye-opening and fresh--or as fresh as a German essay from 1795 can be. But this, not surprisingly, is typical of Downes. He writes in "What the Sixties Meant to Me" that the Hegelian or Marxist idea of dialectical progress was a category error in Modernist theory, and that artists often make their personal breakthroughs by looking into the past instead of the future.

I think you can see the problem here. I'd rather be reading Rackstraw Downes than writing my own reviews. I've heard writing teachers complain that their students don't read enough. That seems counterintuitive to me, since it is reading that has long fed my desire to write. But right now, it is inhibiting that desire. I read something great and it makes me think, why bother? What does my writing add to the world that this thing I'm reading now doesn't already do so much better? And if my motivation for writing is personal satisfaction (or, as I prefer to think of it, pleasure), what if I get more pleasure from something else--like reading other people's work?



And when you go beyond behind art writing--a very narrow genre--the potential for pleasure increases exponentially. After, art writing is writing in service of something else. It isn't written in order to be art. If it achieves that, it's kind of a miracle. Now I want to express a value judgment here. I'm not attempting to define a universal truth--this is a very personal and subjective opinion: novels are the best form of art. They just are. I love all kinds of art, but none has given the intellectual engagement and pleasure that novels have over the course of my life, from the first novels I read (probably the Oz book of L. Frank Baum) to the last novel I read, The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.

The Flamethrowers starts off in a very Hemmingway-esque mode--indeed, there are two equally Hemingway-esque stories being told in alternating chapters. In one, a young woman picks up a motorcycle in Reno and drives it out to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where she attempts a personal speed record. The other story follows an Italian motorcycle soldier in World War I under attack by Germans. This beginning made me think it was going to be a certain kind of novel. I had expectations. It's OK to have expectations and have them filled--generally speaking, that's something I approve of in art. It means I wasn't let down, and frankly that's usually enough. 

But The Flamethrowers pulled the rug out from under me. We never know the protagonist's name--she is called Reno by some of her acquaintances, which fits in with the initial feeling that we might be reading a novel by a hard-boiled descendent of Hemmingway. But instead, the novel sprawls out in unexpected directions, in the art scene of New York in the early to mid 70s; in the radical political scene of the Lower East Side in the late 60s; to the "years of lead" in Italy. Reno is inserted into an art world that for those of us familiar with the history (and the mythology) of the era will recognize. Certain characters and locations are obviously analogs of actual people and places.

And these parts of the novel felt like a true representation of what it was like to be an artist. I don't know if an artist from that period would agree, but the thing is that Kushner convinced me. I am friends of Goodreads and Facebook with someone I've never met but who is married to an old colleague of mine. I hope Peter Landau won't mind me quoting his Goodreads review: "[The Flamethrowers] explores the incendiary actions of artists, the mythologies they create and the damage such creations leave in their wake. [...] I couldn't help but compare and contrast, whether right or wrong, this successful novel with a less successful autobiography I recently read that treads similar themes within the same time and place." I think the book he's talking about is probably Just Kids by Patti Smith, and The Flamethrowers reminds you what a superb writer can do (as opposed to someone who is a really good writer for a rock star).

But again I felt discouraged. Here was a book that was so intricate and harsh that I could never in a lifetime ever hope to match it. She was not engaging in "art writing" like Rackstraw Downes, but she said more about art in The Flamethrowers than I have in writing this blog for five years. Or maybe this is just me feeling down on myself. 

A few days back, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a beautiful tribute to David Carr, the recently deceased New York Times journalist and author of the harrowing The Night of the Gun. Carr had hired Coates for his first reporting job to at the Washington City Paper. Coates talks about Carr's mentorship and his philosophy of journalism--that a story could be about a big subject, but it needs narrative to drive it forward. Oh, I know and Coates knows that Carr didn't invent this. One can think of Willie Morris's Harpers, or many of the best writers for the New Yorker or Esquire. But Coates learned it from Carr and it obviously informs Coates' writing.

The reason I mention it is there is something bloodless about writing a review. Maybe if I was meaner, it'd be more fun. But stories--that's where the real fun is. I think my best posts have been basically first-person narratives: for instance, "The Show is So Over" and "Searching for Forrest Bess." 

What I've concluded is that I don't want to write reviews anymore. So what this means is that the focus of this blog will change somewhat. Posts may get a little longer. They will definitely more based in narrative. I think this may be the way to rekindle my interest in The Great God Pan Is Dead.

Of course, there will probably continue to be reviews by this blogs other contributors. See for example Paul Mullen's review of Mel Chin's show at the Contemporary Art Museum. I hope we'll see many more posts as thoughtful as that one was. But my own writing henceforward will be a little different.

Robert Boyd

I had been at the Asia Society in New York looking at Nam June Paik's robots. My next stop was a place I had never heard of, Pioneer Works Center of Art and Innovation, down in a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Red Hook. I was going to see a show of photos by Mark Hogancamp. I got on the number 4 train on the Upper East Side and took a long ride to downtown Brooklyn. From there, I got on the B61 bus. No subway went anywhere near Red Hook, as far as I could tell. But the bus put me within a few blocks of my destination. It was a long trip--I hoped it would be worth it. It didn't seem like an especially artsy neighborhood at first glance, and I almost walked right past the anonymous red brick building that houses Pioneer Works. The building is on the waterfront, and the area nearby is full of warehouses.


Pioneer Works seen from its courtyard

Pioneer Works seems to try to be everything all at once. Exhibition space? Of course. Residencies? You bet. Classes (ranging from traditional crafts to modern Maker-style classes)? Of course. Residencies for scientists? Why not! A magazine? Yep! A sculpture garden. Actually I'm not sure about the last one--but they had an outdoor space that had sculptures, so maybe so.


Pioneer Works' courtyard/sculpture garden

It's a new space (founded, as far as I can tell, in 2011). The founder and director is a sculptor named Dustin Yellin.Yellin's work reminds me a bit of some work by Paul Kittelson in that he presses two dimensions items between plates of glass to create a 3-dimensional object.

 
Dustin Yellin sculpture

The building was built in 1881. It was a factory for the Pioneer Iron Works, a fabrication company, until the middle of the 20th century. After that it was used for storage.


Pioneer Works interior

Pioneer Works list 19 names with functional positions on its contact page. I don't know if they are all full-time employees or employees at all. Maybe some of them are volunteers. But whatever the case, I suspect that this is a lot fewer people than Pioneer Iron Works employed in its heyday.


Several of Robyn Hasty's photos. She is a member of Pioneer Work's photography program

Art institutions reuse old industrial sites all the time, particularly in the Northeast where a lot of obsolete factory buildings are still standing. The most famous example is the Tate Modern, housed in what had been the Bankside Power Station. In the U.S., two well-known examples are Dia: Beacon, housed in a former Nabisco box printing factory and MassMOCA, which repurposed the former Sprague Electric Company factory.


Adeline De Monseignat, The Eclair Project: The Body, 2013, vintage fur, handblown glass, metal, pillow filler, fabric, nametag, ottoman. This was displayed in the 2nd floor gallery space at Pioneer works.

Not too long ago, the hope of cities was the "creative class," as convincingly theorized in Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class. But the bloom is off that rose, as we've seen in the recent recession. Creative people don't get paid much and are as likely to be exploited now as ever. And we'll never need as many creative people as we once needed factory workers. Those guys stamping out boxes for Nilla Wafers in Beacon and fabricating boilers at Pioneer Iron Works were contributing to an economy that brought more people up from poverty than any other ever did (at least, until China's recent economic opening).

 
Michael Joo, Anemone, 2009, Bronze, patina and enamel paint, steel base, 73 x 50 x 34 inches (hat tip to Bernard Klevickas)

Don't get me wrong. I loved Pioneer Works. Their exhibits, their cool magazine Intercourse, their residencies all seem great. It certainly seems like a better use of the facility than the storage space it was just prior to its becoming an art space. But the conversion of defunct factory spaces into art spaces is a powerful metaphor for the conversion of U.S. cities from places where thousands of people made stuff to places where a few hundred creatives toil, typically for low wages.


Brett Swenson, Strewn, 2014, gypsum cement, found objects, 38" x 102". Displayed in the 2nd floor gallery at Pioneer Works.


Brett Swenson, Strewn (detail), 2014, gypsum cement, found objects, 38" x 102"

Robert Boyd

So I was in New York a couple of weeks ago at Comic Arts Brooklyn, a small festival devoted to art comics. I bought a lot of comics there, among them comics I'd class as minicomics. Minicomics used to be a pretty specific term--it referred to comics produced by folding a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper twice until it was 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". You would trim and staple it and then you had a tiny 8-page pamphlet. So it was a very cheap format for someone to publish their own quickie 8-page comics on a xerox machine.

Of course, artists being artists, this was just the starting point. They played with formats, they added silkscreen covers on cardstock, they published each others' work (moving it from the realm of self-published to small press), they used different printing technologies such as print-on-demand, offset litho, risograph, etc. And, of course, they overlapped with the world of 'zines, so the content wasn't always strictly comics.

Given these caveats, here are a few modern minis.



 Sorry I can't come in on monday i'm really sick (2014) by Jane Mai. This mini was published by an established publisher of high-quality comics, Koyama Press. It seems to consist of diary excerpts from the girl on the cover, along with drawings of her sitting around in her panties depressed. Some of the thoughts are suicidal and self-deprecating. Some are funny, though: "i'll show you mine if you show me yours but also if you give me $1000 and also no". It's the bored thoughts of one person on a somewhat bad day. It works perfectly as a minicomic--you wouldn't want it extended much longer than it is, but for what it is, it feels truthful and revealing.

 

Devil's Slice of Life (2014) by Patrick Crotty. We follow a little devil, Barbatos, as he spends his day playing pranks on humans. This may remind you of many of the activities of the devil in the great Peter Cooke/Dudley Moore movie Bedazzled. In Bedazzled, Peter Cook's Satan character was pranking people to provoke anger, one of the seven deadly sins. In Devil's Slice of Life, Barbatos gets paid for his work. I'd describe it as a cute-brut-style comic--Barbatos (and his victims and fellow devils) are drawn in a deliberately rough style, but it maintains a kind of manga-influenced cuteness. Devil's Slice of Life was printed in three colors on a risograph, which is a popular printing platform for small-press and self-published comics. Crotty is a member of a Dutch artists' studio called Peow Studio. CAB is surprisingly international, which is wonderful.



Lil' Buddies Magazine, issue 1 by Edie Fake. This is a bit of a cheat, because it's not a comic and I didn't get it at CAB. This was by the cash register at Printed Matter, the venerable New York bookstore devoted to artists books, art books, art zines, self-published stuff, etc. Edie Fake is a Chicago cartoonist/performer, but Lil' [sic] Buddies is about found cartoon art--specifically quasi-vernacular anthropomorphized images used in advertising. The examples he and his correspondents have found are excellent.


from Lil' Buddies Magazine, issue 1

These two are not even close to the most insane anthropomorphic cartoon things in Lil' Buddies.



Greys by Olivier Schrauwen (2012). I've reviewed Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen's work before, so I expected to like this, which I did. The narrative here is much more foregrounded than in his other work that I've seen, but there is a degree of distancing and irony that flickers in and out, making you question what you are reading. Of course I see it as fiction (Schrauwen is relating an alien abduction experience), but the deadpan way of telling the story begs the question of whether Schrauwen is trying to create a convincing tale or if he is playing with the form of abduction stories for ironic purposes? And does it matter?



The spread above depicts the future of humanity as depicted by the aliens. Greys was published by Desert Island Comics, the great Brooklyn art comics store. Check it out the next time you're in Williamsburg.



Wastezoid by David Waterhouse. The loser stoner genre has always seemed very American to me, but the brilliant work of Simon Hanselmann proves that it's an international genre. David Waterhouse, from Brighton, England offers up an amusing English take. Especially fun is "Thorven, Invisible Black Metal Bestfriend," in which an unnamed wastezoid takes relationship advice from an imaginary friend spouting phrases like "Resuscitate my dying breeze into the dreams of tangled living corpses behind sigils made of flesh and trees!!" The drawing is rubbery and fun. It appears to be published by Rad Party.



Blindspot no. 3 by Joseph Remnant (2013). This is another comic published by a comic shop--in this case, Kilgore Books in Denver, Colorado. All the stories here are autobiographical (I think), and Joseph portrays himself as a dyspeptic, depressive individual. The comics are well done, and I can take this kind of story in small doses (33 pages is just about right). The stories are solipsistic--mostly Remnant and his thoughts and reactions to the world. Indeed, the one story where he interacts with friends, "Elevator", turns out to be a dream! But the drawing is beautiful, and Remnant constructs his stories well. I found myself enjoying them a lot despite the somewhat grim and depressing subject matter.



Mothership (2014)  and The In Between (2012, I think) by Esther Pearl Watson.Esther Pearl Watson is an artist who deserves a lot more consideration than a drive-by review of some minicomics. Watson is a painter,a cartoonist and an illustrator. But these two works don't slot easily into any of these categories not least because they are both heavily photographic. Mothership seems to conflate mothers (in general) with flying saucers (apparently, flying saucers have an important part in Watson's personal history, but not how you would think). She collages (I think) fuzzy photos of objects that could be UFOs over fairly generic landscapes, while describing the "soaring sisterhood" of the motherships.



The In Between mixes more straight-forward comics narrative with photos. The "in betweens" are places and situations--for her, it's art school (she went back to school to get a MFA at CalArts in 2010), and for her grandfather, it's  a "healthcare facility". I read this in between place as between his life and his death, but I may have been jumping to an overly bleak conclusion.



Combining paintings, comics and photos, this small color zine seems like a "mini-Gesamtkunstwerk," if such a thing could exist. Art school is on her mind--she compares her grandfather's constrained existence to minimal artwork and artwork dealing with nothingness, blankness and the void. But for herself, the opposite seems true. She is inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's "combines," which really were Gesamtkunstwerks.



You come to realize as you read it that a lot of the paintings and photos you have been seeing are parts of Watson's own combine.



Has she continued to make large scale installations? Or was that just an art school detour, a product of being in an in between place? Both Mothership and The In Between are examples of minicomics that are really on the edge of the category, which has never been well-defined anyway. Their existence makes me feel that the form has continued vitality. She sells them on a site called Funchicken.

Robert Boyd



Many rock nerds (such as myself) can easily construct an alternate history of rock music, one that foregrounds hitless acts like the Velvet Underground, Love, Big Star and the Ramones, and erases many of the bands you are likely to hear on a classic rock station (AC/DC, Styx, Journey, Dire Straits, etc.). Partly that's because Big Star (for example) is utterly great and Journey (for example) is utterly dreadful. (And if you disagree, well, that's just your opinion, man!) But it's also because we rock nerds tend to excessively value discovering something for ourselves that wasn't easy to find--bands that were never played on the radio, for example. Classic rock, for us, was a metanarrative imposed by a power structure (as described in part by such books as Hit Men--see, we rock nerds are such nerds that were read books about rock music) that seemed arbitrary and unfair. There is a degree of ressentiment here--that can't be denied. But the idea that a metanarrative or a "grand narrative" is an inescapable (and oppressive) system is an idea that has been the source of many alternate histories and systems--including the rock nerds' alternative history of rock.

Dan Nadel's exhibit, What Nerve!: Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present, collecting together art by H.C. Westermann, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, Ken Price, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Jim Drain, William Copley, Elizabeth Murray, Jack Kirby, Gary Panter and many more, is an equivalent to the rock nerds' challenge to the accepted history of rock. The grand narrative Nadel is challenging is the canonical history of art from the 60s through the 90s. You might think of this history as appropriation and assemblage paralleled by minimalism, post-minimalism transitioning to conceptualism, installation and performance, heavily undergirded by French theory as filtered through Artforum and October. Establishing a counterhistory to that seems like a worthwhile thing to do, right?

Except that in real life, it's really hard to come up with a cohesive history of art during that period. The idea that there actually is a metanarrative to be in opposition to seems suspect, especially in 2014. This is because the period covered in this exhibit was one in which in which Modernism went off the rails and a thousand flowers bloomed. Modernism was a real metanarrative that was slain (or at least crippled) by Post-Modernism, which is to say by the myriad challenges from many directions to its seeming hegemony. Art history was reclaimed and reframed as women, members of racial minorities, formerly colonized people, and LGBT people asked why art history and Modernism in particular seemed so white, so European/North American and so male? Specifically they were asking if the ideological underpinnings of Modernism, which hitherto had seemed so neutral and formal, masked hidden sexist and racist tendencies.

Compared to issues like those, the ones addressed by Nadel's exhibit seem far less consequential. And I hate the defensive title, What Nerve! The desire to showcase the work of overlooked or undervalued artists is a laudable one, but this title suggests that there was an elite NYC cabal looking down their noses at these provincial artists, saying "How dare they do this?" and holding them back. When an exhibit includes work by Mike Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Ken Price and Peter Saul, this is a questionable premise.


Jim Falconer, Morbid Sunshine by a Miner Artist, 1966, oil on canvas, 78 x 78 1/4. Falconer was a member of the Hairy Who.

Nadel in his introduction writes, "With the recognition of modernism as the dominant art mode and the critical emphasis on theory, artists who were unable or unwilling to adopt to crisp rationales found themselves at loose ends." I think this can be reasonably said in regard to, say, the Hairy Who, a group of Chicago artists whose manic figurative work is a major part of the show, but is it true of Forcefield, the late 90s collective of RISD art students? They may have been rebellious, but not against Modernism, which was a corpse by the time they became active.


Forcefield (Jim Drain, Mat Brinkman, Ara Peterson and Leif Goldberg), various costumes and objects, 200-2002

Judith Tannenbaum, in her essay for the catalog "Outside the Looking Glass," writes more directly: "By bringing [the artists in What Nerve!] together, we hope to right this wrong, and to flesh out a history of representational art that has largely been submerged by the canon of Minimal and Conceptual art to which it runs parallel in the second half of the twentieth century." One can certainly say that these artists haven't been given their due (although with Mike Kelley and Elizabeth Murray, that is patently untrue), and that alone is a good reason to put them in an exhibit. And to say that they represent a certain tendency running through the past few decades is reasonable. But to posit an alternative art history that exists against the accepted narrative is an over-reach. For one thing, it ignores many figurative artists who were very successful, respected, etc., from the 60s forward. For example, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, John Wesley, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Wayne Theibaud, Philip Guston, Neil Jenney, Malcolm Morley, Ida Applebroog, Jean-Michell Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Leon Golub, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Robert Colescott, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Raymond Pettibon and Kiki Smith. Tannenbaum at least makes a nod to them--and to the general pluralism of art starting in the 60s (undermining her own argument about the "canon"). (Ironically, when I saw What Nerve! at RISD, there was a small but choice exhibit called She: Picturing women at the turn of the 21st century up at Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery, featuring figurative art by Glenn Brown, George Condo, John Currin, Yayoi Kusama, Chris Ofili, Jenny Saville, Lisa Yuskavage and others.)


Jack Kirby, Tribes Trilogy 3, 1976, ink and Dr. Martin's dyes on board, 15 x 20 inches

So if forming a counternarrative to canonical art history isn't a reasonable organizing principle for this show, what is? The work in it appears to have a family relationship, after all. The obvious connection is a kind of cartoon figuration. This is a little more specific than figuration generally. There are elements of caricature in much of the work. There is a good deal of humor. There are direct references to comic strips, comic books, magazine cartoons and animated cartoons. And many of the included artists--Mat Brinkman (of Forcefield), Gary Panter and of course, Jack Kirby--have significant bodies of comics art under their belts. Kirby, of course, is known primarily as a comics artist--Nadel includes in this show nearly all of his "wall art." I wish they had made this--cartoon figuration--the explicit theme of the show. It would have been a smaller statement than the counternarrative to art history idea, but one much more defensible and, to me, more interesting.

The other organizing principal could be "the obsessions of Dan Nadel." Nadel is an editor, publisher and curator. I first became aware of him in 2000 or so when I saw the first issue of his beautiful squarebound journal The Ganzfeld. The Ganzfeld dealt with comics in a new way. It looked at the intersection of comics and art. And within its pages were articles and features on many of the people in this exhibit--Peter Saul, the Hairy Who, Gary Panter, members of Forcefield and maybe some I'm missing. Nadel spun this magazine into a publishing concern, PictureBox (2000 to 2014), which published many art catalogs and comics featuring the artists in this show, including Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973-1977 and Gary Panter, a massive two volume retrospective in book form. As a curator, he has put together shows by Jack Kirby and Hairy Who member Karl Wirsum. And he edited two books of overlooked and underappreciated comics--a counternarrative to the accepted history of comics, if you will-- called Art in Time and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969. What Nerve! brings together a lot of artists who have long been objects of fascination for Nadel as well as the idea of an alternate to the canon.

Whether you see this show as dealing with cartoon figuration or if you see it as a gathering of several of Nadel's artistic obsessions, the stated thesis in the catalog doesn't really hold water. Does the mean this is a bad exhibit? No, it just means that you should take its claims, and some of the claims made for it (for instance in the review "Here Is Your Nasty, Glorious, Freewheeling Alternative History Of American Art" by Priscilla Frank), with a grain of salt. Concentrate instead on the art itself. And to be fair, the big claims are only a small part of the scholarship in the catalog--mostly the essays deal with the specific artists and collectives and their work. They are, for the most part, informative, useful and entertaining.


Peter Saul, Dogpatch, 1961, crayon and collage on paper

It was pure pleasure to see early work by Peter Saul. Dogpatch is quite early, before his style tightened up. You can see some expressionist brushstrokes, which would mostly disappear from his painting later. It reminds me a bit of Richard Diebenkorn and Larry Rivers.

 
Peter Saul, Man in Electric Chair, 1966, styrofoam coated with plastic and enamel, 55 x 24 x 42 inches.

Saul's large sculpture, Man in Electric Chair is like a living underground comix image, but the textures and patterns in the paint feel ahead of their time. This is the kind of artwork I think of when I use the phrase "cartoon figuration." Whether Saul was consciously influenced by cartoons or comics, it's impossible to see Man in Electric Chair without thinking about them.


Kenneth Price, Red, 1961, ceramic, paint, wood, 14 7/8 x 17 x 16 3/16

Saul was lumped in with several other artists, including Kenneth Price, in a group called the Funk artists. Unlike the Hairy Who, Destroy All Monsters and Forcefield, these artists didn't call themselves Funk artists. It was the coinage of curator Peter Selz who showed a group of Bay Area artists in a show of the same name at the UC Berkeley museum in 1967. The catalog essay by Nicole Rudick relates the amusing history of the term, including the rejection of it by many of the artists to whom Selz applied it.

But is easy to see a visual relationship between the works. Even though Kenneth Price was never a figurative artist (which begs the question of why he's in the show except one never needs an excuse to include Kenneth Price in an art show), his curvy, colorful ceramics have a cartoony presence that relates them to other "funk" artists like Robert Hudson and Peter Saul.


Robert Arneson, Typewriter, 1965, earthenware with glaze, paint, 6 1/8 x 11 3/8 x 12 1/2 inches

One of the great things about seeing What Nerve! is that I got to see many works I had only seen in photos before, like Typewriter by Robert Arneson. At a time when his peers (including Ken Price) were making work that was sleek and minimal, Arneson was mining a deliberately grungy aesthetic. In a way, he is close stylistically to assemblagists like Wallace Berman, George Herms and Ed Kienholz despite his use of ceramics.

 
Jim Nutt, Now! Hairy Who Makes You Smell Good poster, 1968, offset lithograph, 21 1/4 x 16 5/8 inches

The Hairy Who were more self-directed and self-defined. Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Suellen Rocca, Jim Falconer and Art Green had been classmates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They proposed a show to Don Baum, director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and he suggested that they add Karl Wirsum to the line up because Wirsum's work seemed similar to what they were doing. It turned out to be a perfect fit--the six artists worked closely together and forged a collective identity for a few years. Not that the work was collective--for the most part, they did solo work. But some aspects were collaborative--the comic-book-style catalogs they produced and the design of the shows.

 
Jim Nutt, Wow, 1968, acrylic on plexiglass, 30 x 25 inches

I have a special affection for the Hairy Who. When I was an undergrad in the early 80s taking an "art since the 1940s" art history class, the professor showed a single slide of Jim Nutt's work one day as representative of what was happening in Chicago. (I think he may have also showed Roger Brown and Ed Paschke.) It immediately grabbed me, and I wrote my paper for the class on the group, scrounging up information from old art magazines. In the early 80s when I wrote that paper they were still underrated, but since that time they have been rediscovered and reevaluated. Nutt always had success as a painter, but recently we've seen major gallery exhibits in New York for Karl Wirsum and Gladys Nilsson, as well as museum shows. Still it's nice to see some of the art from the original group of shows gathered together, as well as the ephemera (posters, comics) that accompanied the original Hairy Who exhibits.

 
Karl Wirsum, Baseball Girl, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 39 x 31 inches

When I wrote that paper back in the early 80s, I fell in love with the above image (reproduced quite small in the glossy pages of a mid-sixties art magazine) by Karl Wirsum. Unlike his later work, in which human figures become quite monstrous, Baseball Girl is an appealing and erotic image.


Karl Wirsum, Gilateen, 1968, oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches

More typical of where Wirsum's art would go is Gilateen from 1968. The way Wirsum outlines flat areas of color may remind viewers of comic books, but the images themselves seem completely original. They have more the idea of a cartoon rather than a specific reference to a comics or cartoon image. And they anticipate what cartoonists from the 80s to the present would be doing. Wirsum was an artist who fell through the cracks for a while before being rediscovered, but it's easy to see why his work was dismissed (wrongly, I might add!). It seemed wacky and low brow and adolescent and just not serious. I think the lack of apparent seriousness was what kept many of these artists from getting their due. Maybe 60s and 70s-era critics like Michael Fried or Rosalind Krauss have exceptional senses of humor in private, but their public critical posture was dead serious. But as we've seen (and will continue to see), much of the art in What Nerve! was meant to be funny. And "funny" was hard for certain important critics to process.


Art Green, Double Exposure, 1969, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches.

In retrospect, much of the work of the Hairy Who appears dated. There is something inherently "60s" about Art Green's work, particularly paintings like Double Exposure. But the psychedelic colors and juxtapositions shouldn't prevent us from enjoying it today any more than they do with work by, say, James Rosenquist, whose work Green reminds me of.


Gladys Nilsson, Phantom Plus, 1966, watercolor on paper, 21 5/8 x 14 1/2.

Gladys Nilsson's soft forms remind me of any number of somewhat psychedelic 60s-era cartoons, ranging from Tom Wilson's Ziggy or the Heinz Edelmann-designed movie, Yellow Submarine. Her choice of watercolor is unusual for its time and lends her work a somewhat whimsical air. (Her more recent work, some of which is on view through December 6 at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, has more sharp edges.)


H.C. Westermann, See America First plate 8, 1968, 18 lithographs, 21 3/4 x 30 inches each.

The Hairy Who were from Chicago, which had a long tradition of figuration while New York artists and critics championed abstraction. New York tastemakers seemed disdainful of the Second City's art scene; Chicago said "so what?" and went its own way. What appeals to me about this local history is that there is a continuity--older artists influenced and taught younger artists. I think this kind of lineage can be found in any sufficiently large and robust local scene. What Nerve! featured not only the Hairy Who, but three other artists with roots in the Chicago scene, including H.C. Westermann (above). Westermann is best known for his three-dimensional works, but See America First, a cheeky series of satirical lithographs, is quite nice. It shows Westermann, a blue-collar war veteran, approaching the somewhat more genteel territory of Saul Steinberg.


Christina Ramberg, Probed Cinch, 1971, acrylic on masonite in painted artist's frame, 13 x 13 inches.

Christina Ramberg was one artist in the show with whom I was almost completely unfamiliar. The name was familiar--it is often mentioned when people write of Chicago artists of the 60s and 70s (along with Philip Hanson and Roger Brown). Like Hanson and Brown, it has an appealing combination of precision and mystery. In the three paintings included in the show, we see these women's bodies in somewhat old-fashioned lingerie but no faces (facelessness was also a feature of most of Brown's paintings). The viewer is pushed right up close to these bodies.


Elizabeth Murray, Truth, Justice and the Comics #1, 1990, oil on canvas on wood, 50 x 53 x 4 inches.

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago and studied at the School of the Art Institute in the late fifties and early sixties. She seems to have picked up some of that town's attitude toward figuration and humor. She spent most of her career in New York, and that fact might account for her relative success compared to many of the Chicago artists. She got lumped in with the neo-expressionists in the late 70s and 80s, which was apt. But she avoided most of those painters' bombast and pretension. One thing she is well known for are her elaborate shaped canvases, such as Truth, Justice and the Comics #1 above. Her work always has a slightly grungy, hand-made physicality. Her work, like Philip Guston's, embodied a kind of expressionist approach to cartoon figuration. It recalled in its way the old comics of the 20s and 30s like Barney Google and the Bungle Family--comics that, to paraphrase Robert Crumb, smelled of boiled cabbage. Her own tough Chicago childhood (which included periods of homelessness) might have fed into that, but her work never feels morose. In any case, she doesn't qualify as overlooked artist like Christina Ramberg might--I just saw an enormous Elizabeth Murray hanging over the ticket table on the ground floor of MOMA two weeks ago.


Cary Loren, Jim Shaw as a Spaceman, God's Oasis, 1975/2011, photograph, 24 x 20 inches.

Destroy All Monsters was a band/commune in Ann Arbor in the mid-70s. It consisted of four members, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley.  Kelley and Shaw left to study and CalArts and became very well-known contemporary artists. Indeed, Kelley is considered one of the key artists of his age.

The four of them did a lot of art while they lived together but perhaps more important is that they embodied their art in the way they lived. Their house, God's Oasis, was mostly a reflection of Jim Shaw's scuzzy collection of the lowest-brow pop culture possible.


Mike Kelley (foreground) and Jim Shaw in Shaw's bedroom at God's Oasis.

I was amused to come across the photo of Kelley in Shaw's bedroom standing by Shaw's comic spinner rack. You can see a copy of Katy Keene, a comic that featured paper dolls for its titular model protagonist, in the bottom left. The one time I met Mike Kelley was during the 90s at San Diego Comic-Con. He had just come from the auction, clutching his prize and grinning with pleasure. I asked him what he got, and he pulled out an original Bill Woggon Katy Keene paper doll page. In other words, the things that obsessed them as undergraduate weirdos continued to be an important part of their work as mature artists. For Kelley, it was abjection, as seen in his quasi-sexual installations and performances using well-used stuffed animals. It was also almost worshipful depictions of Kandor, the bottled city from Krypton in old Superman comics. For Shaw, it was his endless explorations of adolescence and cults. It all started here.


Mike Kelley, Political Cartoon (In the Clutches of Evil), 1976/2011, pigment print on paper, 32 x 45 3/4 inches

But that doesn't mean that the work done by these four artists in God's Oasis was all that good. Kelley's underground comix-influenced Political Cartoon, for example, looks like the work of an ambitious, snarky college student, but doesn't compare in power with Kelley's mature work.


Niagara, The Key, 1974, watercolor on paper, 17 x 14 inches.

The same is true of Niagara's drawings and watercolors, which was among the least interesting art in the show. The life they lead at God's Oasis and in the "band" Destroy All Monsters (which at the time existed to deliberately annoy its listener/victims by making godawful noise) was the real art--art as life. What we have left in this exhibit are relics of that life, but they are far less interesting than the personal accounts in the catalog by Cary Loren and Niagara. (After Kelley and Shaw headed west, Destroy All Monsters became more of a "real" rock band.)


Forcefield, Slice Print, 2001, silkscreen print

Forcefield was similar to Destroy All Monsters in that it was a collective, a band, and a group of people whose life was as much a work of art as was their music, graphic art and costumes. But compared to Destroy All Monsters, the relics of Forcefield's existence are much more interesting. Forcefield consisted of four members, Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, Mat Brinkman and Lief Goldberg. Drain, Brinkman and Goldberg lived with several other artists in Providence, Rhode Island, in a warehouse structure they called Fort Thunder. Fort Thunder was packed with stuff--even the high ceiling was hung with random garbage. The walls were all made of slapped-together plywood, and every inch was covered with drawings, graffiti, stickers and glued-objects. The artists who lived there had bands (in addition to Forcefield there was Lightning Bolt), put on shows for other bands, made costumes, had a silk-screen studio (Fort Thunder silkscreens are highly prized), produced comics, etc.

Nadel could have chosen any aspect of Fort Thunder to include in this show, but chose Forcefield, which was perhaps the most focused part of the sprawling activities associated with Fort Thunder. But what is ironic is that he includes this band/performance group in a show devoted to figurative art. Outside of their Forcefield work, Leif Goldberg and Mat Brinkman have done tons of figurative work in drawings, comics and animation. Drain and Peterson's non Forcefield work has been mostly abstract and installation-based. The only aspect of Forcefield that could be considered figurative (and this stretches the term) are the knit costumes they made.

 
Forcefield (Jim Drain, Mat Brinkman, Ara Peterson and Leif Goldberg), various costumes and objects, 200-2002

But even if calling them "figurative" stretches the definition of the word, so what? They're amazing. Initially the costumes were pieced together out of old afghans found in local thrift stores, but when Jim Drain joined, he started knitting them from scratch. (Knitting has remained a part of Drain's artistic practice.) The patterns and the way they cover the wearer's face give them an alien, slightly threatening appearance, but the fact that they're knit makes them simultaneously seem cozy and inviting. 


Jack Kirby, Dream Machine, 1970-1975, ink and watercolor on board, 18 x 52 inches.

In 2003, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston mounted a show called Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art. It was notable in that among 34 artists included in the show (which included Elizabeth Murray and Peter Saul), only one had actually produced comics. Thankfully, What Nerve! avoids this. Perhaps Nadel's most radical curatorial move is to include several works by Jack Kirby. Kirby wasn't a fine artist who dabbled with comics on the side. He was a lifelong comics practitioner who did a small number of stand-alone painted artworks. Nadel collects almost all of them. They each reflect Kirby's unique techno-psychedelia that characterizes some of his finest comic book work.


Jack Kirby, Dream Machine detail, 1970-1975, ink and watercolor on board, 18 x 52 inches.
 
This is the key to the exhibit in my view--the idea of cartoon figuration and its possibilities. Unlike much Pop Art which was holding a kind of mirror to pop culture (and comics and cartoons were a part of that), these artists were attempting to work within that vocabulary--and were willing to show that that vocabulary permits a wide variety of expression. Jack Kirby, working for hire in what was widely considered one of the cheapest, most low-brow forms of pop culture, came up with a highly personal form of expression.

It's not about "influence" (as in Splat Bang Pow!) or appropriation--it's ultimately about expression. That's what connects all the artists in What Nerve!, whether they practiced any sort of cartoon figuration or not. And despite the somewhat overblown claims made for the art here, the work here adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. It's an interesting, unexpected show.

What Nerve! runs at the RISD through January 4, 2015.


Gary Panter, Austin Corbin from the series The Near Extinction and Salvation of the American Buffalo, 1981, acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches.


Jim Drain, untitled (bench), 2010, powder coated stainless steel and aluminum. These weren't part of the exhibit--they were right outside the gallery. 


William Copley, The Seven Year Itch, 1973, acrylic on linen, 58 x 45 inches.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

To admit a visitor, Bas Poulos must take the time to unlock his security gate, which means that despite all the granite counter-top town homes that surround his house and studio, West 23rd street has yet to shed its criminal element. On one of my visits, Poulos told me about the Cadillac Escalante parked by a neighbor’s guest which was found the next morning on concrete blocks without wheels. I pity the misguided dumbass who does bust in on Poulos, because despite his age (b. 1941), the artist appears to have the strength for which his Peloponnesian ancestors are known, a physical attribute solidly backed up by literary tradition. It was Thucydides I think who estimated one Spartan was the equivalent of several Greeks from another region, and there’s consensus among the ancient writers that the original inhabitants of Arcadia were so undeniably tough they were born of the soil, ate acorns and existed before the moon.

The brilliant scholar H.D.F. Kitto said that talk is the breath of life to Greeks, which Poulos amended to “to tell a story,” so I must tell the story about Poulos’ Peloponnesian Uncle Pano. In 1938 Poulos’ grandmother summonsed her son, Poulos’ father, back to their Greek village from America because she had found him a wife, but when his father met the woman to whom his marriage had been arranged, he refused to marry, and then committed the sin marrying another woman from a different village, who would become Poulos’ mother. This was not how things were done. The rejected woman’s relatives voiced outrage, which led to a meeting to discuss the insult. It was Poulos’ father’s cousin, Uncle Pano, who settled things. “Uncle Pano was tough,” Poulos said, “he was much older when I knew him, but as a younger man in the early forties he had been part of the Nazi resistance and did things like ambush German convoys, and he was so fearless they called him the Jackal. Uncle Pano told the woman’s family that my father had indeed disrespected tradition by rejecting her, and then bringing his new wife into the village. But my father, the Jackal told them, would be leaving in a few days, while he on the other hand would be there the rest of his life, so anyone who fucked with my father would have to answer to him.”

When I saw his “Mycenaean Bridge” series, I knew I would write about Poulos. Here were deliciously colored landscapes comprised of Bronze Age objects that were part of a network of ancient roads built for chariots. With this art I could relive visits to Mycenaean archaeological sites, and bore people on the topic of Agamemnon. What could be more fun? But it turned out Poulos was uninterested in the arts’ Mycenaean and Homeric significance. “I am interested in the symbolism of bridges,” he explained. Bridges connect two land masses, which symbolizes my personal history, as a Greek American with links to the Greek landscape. The paintings represent my walking across these bridges.”

Bronze Age Mycenaean bridges are rare, but Hellenic stone bridges made for seasonal crossing of river beds and gorges are plentiful in the Peloponnese, and Poulos discovered over thirty of them within one day‘s distance from his home in the village of Karies. Figuring he might be the only American to return to his ancestral home and artistically capture these bridges, the director of Sparta’s Koumantareios Art Gallery who is organizing an upcoming exhibition encouraged him to try to learn the bridges’ names and ages by way of documentation. “The bridges were seasonal,” Poulos said, “not for cars, but for shepherds and goat herds. My Greek was good enough to ask the old men in cafés and gas stations about the location of their village’s stone bridge, and of course they all had different answers, and argued, over location, over how many arches, if it had collapsed, and more than once I found myself parked on some blind road curve, or behind an olive grove with my rent car searching for the bridge. A few times villagers offered to take me to the bridge their father showed them when they were kids, but try to arrange a time and date, no damn way. Once near Dimitsana I was able to find the bridge because I heard the sound of the gorge water. I eventually told the Sparta curator, look, I’m an artist, not an art historian or archaeologist.”


Basilios Poulos, Arcadia Vista A of the 'Greek Landscape Series', 2012/13, Acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60"

If Poulos’ bridge series got my attention, his “Greek Landscape” and “South Carolina Landscape” series silenced me. The seductive colors in these paintings bring home Matisse’s statement that his “beautiful blues, reds, and yellows were meant to stir the sensual depths in men.” Essentially, Poulos’ pictorial sensibility approximates a central tenet of modernism which favors an unforgettable visual experience over representational accuracy, and distances the image from objective reality by use of emphatic color and irregular form. Poulos’ announcement of his March 14 exhibition Journey into Landscape at Houston Baptist University made me want to know more about him and his art, which led to several lengthy studio visits in which I learned the following:

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: It was fun to learn in Robert Boyd’s December 2014 post that you photographed yourself in front of Jackson Pollock’s The Deep. I studied that painting when I wrote about it in 2007.

Bas Poulos: It’s a great painting, and I like to think it played a part in my coming here, and I’ll tell you how. When I came to Houston in 1975 as “artist in residence” at Rice University, and in 1978 would accept a tenure track position, I was unsure about the job. This was at the time of my Guggenheim fellowship and I had a studio in Manhattan, and I was showing with Andre Emmerich gallery, and Clement Greenberg had praised my work, so naturally I had reservations about leaving. Then I saw Pollock’s The Deep at MFAH and it convinced me Houston wasn’t the boonies, and it was okay for me to leave New York and all the activities and museums. Later that painting ended up in the Pompidou center as a gift to France in honor of John de Menil, and I’ve visited it many times in Paris, and documented my trips to see it with my camera. I consider it a masterpiece, although many of the critics disliked Pollock’s late paintings, I think it was a wonderful period.

VBA: To hell with commentary. How refreshing to interact with art made solely for the purpose of being viewed. I liken it to an act of piety. What interesting variation in the degree of abstraction among your landscapes. In some paintings the bridge is unrecognizable, or completely hidden in foliage, and in others it is recognizably distorted. Arguably, where you annihilate the object, there is greater impact.

BP: The “Lost Bridges” series illustrates that. Its bridge arches are removed from nature through abstraction, because as you know I have no desire to accurately reproduce the object.

VBA: On one of my visits you showed me a photograph of a wooded area in South Carolina that captured sunlight cast against tree trunks and across the ground. That photo provided insight into your process, especially when seen transferred to charcoal line drawing on canvas, and preliminarily blocked in with wide swatches of acrylic, which by the way made me think of stained glass.

BP: That’s a photograph of my family’s land in Columbia, South Carolina. You know Picasso said he observed the landscape then entered his studio. I take it one step further and walk the landscape, which allows me to see how the light filters through foliage, branches, and leaves, hits trees and the ground plane and how shadows are cast by tree clusters, so my beginning impulse is observation. From the photo or sketch I create the armature or structure of the painting, the drawing and blocked in colors, then arrange for cohesiveness. I’m not creating a portrait of the landscape, but a visual experience. It’s the same with bridges, the patterns of stones in the arches form the drawing armatures for color that works in opposition to organic shapes of the foliage. I’m not interested in documenting the bridge, just taking from it for the painting’s armature, which with color and luminosity factored in, are crucial elements of the visual experience. Braque did this with his Cubist paintings of the L’Estaque viaduct, and I actually painted several ancient viaducts I found in Greece.

VBA: Sensual color and luminosity do not exclude the use of black, which in your art helps to define form. In some areas black isolate patches of color, and throughout it compliments and enhances color.

BP: You see that. One color represents the bridge, another the sun behind it, another tree silhouettes, and I use black to help define the landscape, for instance this fallen tree trunk in this diptych, but like Ad Reinhardt, you can add red to black to make a warm black, or add blue to black to make a cool black, notice none of these black tones are the same in this South Carolina landscape. The swatches of yellow in this painting were inspired by how sunlight appeared to me in the wetlands, you sense the color yellow where water reflects light. So I use drawing and Fauve-like color to describe the structure of the landscape, drawing is armature that supports the color. Color is the primary element of my abstract sensibility, along with the idea of luminosity and time of day.


Basilios Poulos, "Bright Day" Congaree River Basin of the 'Carolina Landscape Series'. (Diptych) 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 48" x 72"

VBA: Several times we’ve discussed the influence of Derain’s “L’Estaque” landscapes, particularly the small one in MOMA which you admire. Derain does a devilish thing in that passage with the bridge arch. It’s a miserably drawn object, crudely executed, but its colors are incomparably exuberant.

BP: The Derains are important, and the smaller landscape in the Museum of Modern Art is possibly a better painting than The Turning Road, L’Estaque in the MFAH’s Beck collection.

VBA: Rather than record nature Derain sought to create images that were timeless and enduring. In my opinion, your 2014 Window to the Landscape (Homage to Pierre Bonnard) fits that category. The painting’s spatial compression is unexpected, and its colors resonate.

BP: I painted Window to the Landscape in 2014, at the same time I began painting landscapes with abstracted human figures. I intended the painting as homage to Pierre Bonnard. I saw several Bonnard retrospectives, and was moved by his depictions of Marthe nude in the bathtub or on the bed, and particularly by the paintings of windows opening to the landscape, which of course Matisse did as well. Bonnard presents his window within the context of the interior, but mine has no direct reference to the interior or exterior. Unlike Bonnard’s depiction of the interior with table and still life objects, mine is abstract, interior and exterior spaces are indistinguishable. I constructed an abstract architecture which includes the interesting concept of a frame within a frame which isolates the flat area of green in the center to represent the landscape beyond the window. Some will laugh at me for linking myself to these giants.

VBA: Only sanctimonious dimwits. You’re honoring Bonnard.

BP: Yes, honoring.


Basilios Poulos, Window to the Landscape (Homage to Pierre Bonnard), 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 48"x60"

VBA: Many people still remember the painting you exhibited thirty years ago in Fresh Paint: The Houston School which was critically praised by Thomas McEvilley in Artforum as one of the exhibition’s best. That was no intensely colored, spatially ambiguous landscape.

BP: That’s correct. At that time I painted color field abstraction in the vein of Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan, and Helen Frankenthaler. I was engaged in this kind of art for a very long time, had many exhibitions, in fact for a time I worked with four galleries simultaneously, showing regularly in Houston, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta, while teaching full time at Rice. I was young, and felt powerful then, but eventually realized I could not sustain it, primarily because abstraction has to be supported with critical theory, and I realized my theory was based on nature, that I was a landscape painter.

VBA: Tell us about your shift into figuration after color field abstraction.

BP: Although I never gave up the idea of the expressive use of color, color as the vehicle for expression, in about 1987 I abandoned color field abstraction, its formalist attitude, stopped painting on canvas, and started painting on wood. I had been looking at Byzantine art, and visiting monasteries in Greece. I would walk in and tell the monks I’m a Greek artist and I want to see the old icons, and they wouldn’t hesitate to take me into their treasuries, and just like that hand me a valuable icon. So I began working with figuration, using iridescent and metallic pigments, a framing device, some in diptych format, I painted icons until about 2005, 2006, and then had to re-invent myself again.

VBA: Did the monks serve raki?

BP: It’s tradition. They welcome visitors by serving raki or a cool glass of water, and a loukoumi which is a Turkish delight.

VBA: I love that about you Greeks. I remember being served raki the instant I entered a village market. And you probably don’t remember the day I found you searching for loukoumi so you could properly greet visitors from the Columbia Museum of Art who were coming to your studio.

BP: My art is in their permanent collection. They were coming to Houston to see their museum’s “Monet” in MFAH’s Monet “Seine” exhibition, and planned to visit my studio after.


Basilios Poulos, Two Figures in the Landscape, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

VBA: Bas, your figuration in the form of disordered representation of nature is quite unified. Viewed collectively, the Greek and South Carolina landscapes form a continuum with the other subject matter, the icons, and architectural scenes of Greek classical temple columns and theaters that are abstracted to the point of non recognition. They concur with the superbly colored “Three Graces” and “Dance” series of female nudes, which though classically posed are intensely erotic due to stylized rendering of hips and breasts, and also link to your displaced odalisques, black stocking floozies, and various torsos and body fragments. It’s my judgment that the entire figurative corpus looks ahead to the new paintings of nudes abstractly hidden in the landscape.

BP: An artist can’t stand still. I had to move ahead after the landscapes, to making figures in landscapes. Cezanne did that. More than once he revisited his “Bathers.”

VBA: There are cornerstones of modernism that are so familiar, I sometimes misremember them. Our talks inspired me to look again at Cezanne’s nudes, and I found myself startled by the blue and green contours he employed to corrupt the figures, and disembody those lovely nudes.

BP: I’m also inspired by the German Expressionist Kirchner ’s Three Bathers of 1913, a memorable painting of nudes in landscape. And Picasso created cubist-style figures in landscapes, particularly the one in the Picasso Museum from 1908 which I saw about 12 years ago. You know it’s only 28 inches wide. Compositionally, it has a nude reclining, and another standing inconspicuously near the trees; stylistically the figures are practically unreadable, with facial features abstractly eliminated. Picasso drew with the brush you know, compared to Matisse who painted with it.

VBA: What happened to the woman your father refused to marry.

BP: I actually saw her. One summer, I’m in the village of Karies, in the plateia near the giant sycamore tree near the café tables and chairs, and I look up and see Uncle Pano the Jackal opening his eye widely to give me a signal, so I go over and he asks me if I want to meet the woman who almost became my mother. I wasn’t so sure about meeting her, but told him I certainly wanted to see her, so he pointed to a plump old lady sitting with the old men. It turned out that after the rejection her family sent her to another village near Githio where she married and had a family, so the day I saw her she must have returned to our village to visit her family.

VBA: Is there anything else you want readers to know?

BP: Remember that my show at Houston Baptist University Contemporary Art Gallery opens on March 14 and runs through April 15. I will exhibit fourteen or so works, ones that are purely landscapes to represents the beginning of my landscapes, and one from the “Arcadia Vista” series which was recently shown in Greece and Turkey. I’m also showing two tapestries that represent the end of my work with the Greek landscape. A bulk of the HBU show will be “South Carolina” landscapes because these represent the end of my work with landscapes, including a diptych. And I will also show the painting we talked about, Window to the Landscape,” inspired by Bonnard. There’s something else I want to say. Since retiring from teaching at Rice in 2008, I have returned to being just a simple artist who likes to travel. That’s what I am. In fact that’s the title I want for this interview! Virginia, I’m just a simple Greek American artist, who travels.

Betsy Huete

In place of The Brandon is a new gallery, spearheaded by artist Lynne McCabe, called She Works Flexible. The gallery opened with its inaugural show entitled Sensational Landscape on January 13, which includes artists Erika Lynne Hanson and Cat Clifford and will run until April 3.

But reflective of McCabe’s personal artistic practice, She Works Flexible extends beyond the traditional gallery model, reaching its tendrils into generating publications, hosting an online collection, and facilitating a unique pedagogical approach called Flex School.

Flex School kicked off this past month with a series of lectures—although he would call them “conversations”—by philosopher Joshua Lawrence. The first of three Flex School sessions happened on February 12, where Lawrence spent most of the time giving a crash course on Immanuel Kant and Kant’s relation to the sublime.


Cat Clifford (from sheworksflexible.com)

It’s clear by labeling the school sessions as conversations that both Lawrence and McCabe wanted the classes to operate more in a seminar format than a lecture, but by and large these classes were lectures, as they should be. It seems that, through all the classes I’ve attended in my years of college and beyond, that the word “lecture” is some kind of taboo, as if the person giving the lecture is terrified of coming across as boring. The first session Lawrence seemed just that, nervous and worried that his small class of twenty or so people would quickly get that glazed-over, get-me-the-hell-out-of-here look on their faces. In retrospect I could understand how he would have felt that way—the class was dead silent for most of the first class, and the question and answer session afterward felt unnatural and forced. But I don’t think that the vast majority of the class was bored; in fact, it seemed quite the opposite. The information was enthralling, and Lawrence, in a congenial and generous delivery, laid all of it out in an understandable, digestible way. But it was also a lot, and it was easy to see that everybody’s brains were full, and that they were just quietly trying to process it all.


Erika Lynne Hanson (from sheworksflexible.com)

So if these classes are actually just lectures, then what makes Flex School’s pedagogy different than, say, any other public lecture in Houston? After all, the Menil, Glassell, and numerous other institutions provide similar educational programming. What makes Flex School interesting, and totally different, is the divergent subject matter. While the Menil and Glassell will generally bring in artists, curators, or art historians to discuss art, Flex School covers topics that are tangentially related to artists: we aren’t looking at or discussing art per se, but we are engaging with and learning about other kinds of information that artists are generally interested in, subjects that although may not be directly art-related, still crop up in many artists’ works. No, perhaps most artists do not deal with all the ins and outs of Immanuel Kant and his philosophical works, but the questions that Kant and other philosophers engaged with in respect to the beautiful, the sublime, and the uncanny are things that most artists, in one way or another, are interested in. Flex School is kind of like Cabinet Magazine, but a school, and free.

By the third session, the number of people in the class had whittled down quite a bit, but the atmosphere felt more comfortable, the students looked a lot less overwhelmed and bombarded with information, and the class generally felt more like the “conversation” that Lawrence and McCabe were after in the first place. The class also felt more varied: while it seemed to start out with more art people, the class this time felt split between art and philosophy people. This is perhaps the most fruitful aspect of Flex School, the comingling of different kinds of thinkers and makers.

Joshua Lawrence’s sessions at Flex School occurred on February 12, 19, and 26, at She Works Flexible.

Robert Boyd

Devon Britt-Darby posted the following comment on Facebook today: "The Menil Collection's reinstallation of its modern and contemporary galleries is earth-shatteringly amazing. I don't think they've ever looked that good." He wrote this about an hour ago. Twenty minutes ago, as I write this, something or someone caused a Cy Twombly sculpture, Untitled (1954), to fall over. John Hovig was there and texted me this: "Just 5m ago someone knocked over the old cy twombly sculpture in the newly-rearranged modern gallery. I think someone fell. I heard it, loud crash, but didn't see it. But I see it lying on the ground." He took this photo of the damage. It don't look good.


Cy Twombly, untitled, 1954 (on the floor in the background). Photo by John Hovig.

Robert Boyd

Hey, buckaroos, it's Hunting Prize time again, and they have uploaded photos of all the finalists to Facebook. In the past, Hunting has had controversy because of its prohibition of any art that anyone might possibly find offensive. A lesser controversy, but one that bubbles up most years, is that it seems to discriminate against abstract painting (although that complaint surely was silenced by last year's winner, Winston Lee Mascarenhas). But lending credence to this theory is that with this year's finalists, abstract paintings are vastly outnumbered by figurative paintings. That said, we don't know what the general pool of entrants was. Maybe this ratio of figurative to abstract among the finalists reflects what they received from artists entering the contest. Without more knowledge of the first round entrants and of the criteria by which they were judged, I am reluctant to say that the Hunting judges have a bias against abstract painting per se.

Below are a few pictures that caught my eye. Many of these works are by artists I already admire a lot, but the pieces that intrigue me most are the ones by people I've never heard of or are, at best, only slightly familiar with. I love coming across work like that, which is why I like open-call events like the Hunting Prize and the Big Show.


Alice Leora Briggs, Puesto, 2014, sgraffito drawing with acrylic ink and gesso on panel diptych: each panel 18 x 24 inches

Dean Liscum reviewed Alice Leora Briggs' work back in 2012.


Fernando Ramirez, Clouds

I haven't seen that many Fernando Ramirez pieces, but I have liked all the ones I have seen. They have a fearful edge that reminds me a bit of artists as diverse as Vince Locke and Brian Chippendale. But will the Hunting judges go for art that looks like it could serve as the cover of a death metal album? I doubt it, but who knows?



Gina Gwen Palacios, Abel's Lot, 2014, Oil on pane,l 37" x 36"

I was completely unfamiliar with Gina Gwen Palacios, but I liked the way the bleak landscape Abel's Lot collapses in the middle. It suggests sudden violence in a small town, like in a novel by Jim Thompson or Cormac McCarthy.



Harvey Johnson, Didn't It Rain

I'm glad I saw this Harvey Johnson image because it reminds me I need to take a road trip to Beaumont to see Harvey Johnson: A Triple Middle Passage at AMSET. His work is always great. (Why do we have to go to Beaumont to see solo museum exhibits by so many Houston artists?)


 Heather Bause, Honeycomb

I was surprised to learn that this drippy painterly abstraction is by Heather Bause, whose previous work has been pretty hard-edge in my experience.But looking at her recent work on her website shows that this is a direction she's moved into, and I have to say I like it a lot.


Jimmy Houston, Trailblazer

Every now and then I will see a piece by Jimmy Houston in a group show or during Art Crawl. But his work is generally not the kind of work you see in local galleries--illustrational, cartoony, "low brow," etc. But I like his work quite a bit and this particular Disney-crossed-with-steampunk image tickled me. Sure it's illustrational--and I like good illustrations.


Laura Lark, Arena

This is an unusual Laura Lark piece. If done using her typical stipple technique, it must have been rather tedious to create--it's so dark and dense.  I can't tell if it's a collage or if she just drew the male hand projecting from the woman's chest, but that combined with the darkness of the image and the bad surveillance photo quality give Arena a slightly sinister feeling.


Lindy Chambers, Party Animals

I loved Lindy Chambers' use of bold flat colors with clean outlines in Party Animals--it's like a cross between Patrick Caulfield and Hergé. She recently had a show at d.m. allison, which I liked but which also seemed a little heavy on the surreal/pop elements. By eschewing that stuff, this painting is much stronger. It's my favorite of all the finalists for the Hunting.


Matt Messinger, Sperm Whale

I have a silk-screen of three sperm whales by Matt Messinger printed on ledger paper from Dean's Easy Credit (which Messinger presumably acquired from Jim Pirtle). In my print, the whales are the usual black variety, but in this painting he goes for a singular white whale, perhaps a descendent from Moby Dick himself.


Mira Hnatyshyn, Mortal Immortal

I'm not sure what it is about these two monks (?) and their fans that appeals to me. It seems quite a bit different than the work I saw in Mira Hnatyshyn's studio in San Antonio a few years back.  Her work generally reminds me a bit of Larry Rivers--but not this elegant piece.


Seth Alverson, Useless Foot

This is the kind of grotesque work we've come to expect from Seth Alverson. But I also wonder if it's an homage to the foot paintings of his friend (and previous Hunting Prize winner) Lane Hagood. Whatever its inspiration, it's one damn ugly thing. I can't turn away. I love it. (I should disclose that I own a painting by Alverson.)


Terry Crump, Savannah Bridge

A few years ago, I saw a painting by Terry Crump at the Big Show at Lawndale that I really liked. With his splashy, non-local pastel colors, his work feels like the lite-beer version of Matisse. I guess that at best sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I like Savannah Bridge a lot. It's pretty, and while sometimes I love ugly (as mentioned above), pretty's OK with me, too. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

There's much more. Check out Hunting's Facebook page to see them all.