Big Five Oh, part 2: Frieze

Robert Boyd

After we went to Cutlog, my nephew Ford and I had some lunch and then headed over towards 34th Street and the East River. This is where Frieze's water taxis were docking, and also where we would be meeting my friends LM and DC. LM and DC are two collectors who I have known for a long time (before they were art collectors, in fact). LM had secured four passes for Frieze on Thursday, which was a "preview" day. LM and DC are quite serious art collectors who represent a class of collector one rarely hears about. We usually read about the Steven Cohen type of art collector--the hedge fund guys, the Russian oligarchs, the titans of industry, etc. But people who spend four or maybe five figures for a piece of art are much more common. It's these collectors I know. For LM and DC, Frieze was mostly about looking around (as Frieze art tends to be very high-ticket work), LM did buy work at Pulse, and DC came very close doing so as well.

LM and DC look remarkably different--LM wears a supremely casual uniform of shorts, Tshirt and ever-present messenger bag. DC came from his work that day in a tailored suit and he favors custom-made shirts. Their tastes are different, too. They noted over the course of the next couple of days that neither of them had a single artist in common in their collections (although as we shall see, this may change). But as collectors, they approach work in a very similar way--they are deliberate and thoughtful. They think a very long time before committing. They do the research they need to feel comfortable with their purchases. If you are an artist, this is the kind of person you should want as a collector.


LM and DC at Frieze

As for me, my income puts me mostly in the looky-loo category. I collect work I love when I can, which is rarely. I didn't expect to buy any art at these fairs. (As it happened, I did end up buying a piece of art--but not at Frieze.) For me, Frieze was like a vast, uncurated museum of contemporary art. There are so many pieces that I found myself looking for two or three pieces that have some superficial similarity that I can declare to be a trend. As it turns out, you can make lots of "fake trend" groupings with the art at Frieze. It's hard to be completely original. Here are some of the "trends" I saw at Frieze.

Belts



Monica Bonvicini, Belts Couch, 2004, black leather men's belts, iron, fabric, parquet, 21 2/3 x 63 x 78 3/4 inches at Johan König


Mathieu Mercier, Untitled (Belt), 2013, Leather belt, plexiglass box, plinth, 62.9 x 13.3 x 13.3 inches at Mehdi Chouakri

Two isn't enough to be a trend, but still I was struck by the fact that there were two separate belt sculptures.

Elaborate Sculptures of Disposable Containers


Jürgen Drescher, Moving Box Freestanding 1, 2012, aluminum cast, 41 3/4 x 17 1/2 x 14 inches at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen


Andreas Lolis, Untitled, 2013, marble, 10 x 72 x 64 cm at The Breeder


Andreas Lolis, Untitled (detail), 2013, marble, 10 x 72 x 64 cm at The Breeder



Robert Whitman, Garbage Bag, 1964/2013, installation of 2013 transferred reconstruction: original 16 mm film loop to DVD, color, silent. "Pioneer" supermarket bag, portable miniprojector with memory stick, frosted plexiglass lens, fiberglass cast, media pedestal, 16 x 12 x 6.5 inches at Air de Paris

I admit that Robert Whitman's Garbage Bag is not really like Andreas Lolis's piece and Jürgen Drescher's moving box, both of which sculpt garbage out of fine, permanent materials (marble and aluminum respectively). But I really liked Garbage Bag, so I include it here. As an aside, if you're a collector, how do you keep Garbage Bag? Paper bags are not exactly known for their permanence. This is an issue I will return to later.

Political Art

Political art is never really a "trend," but is instead a constant. There is always someone doing it. But you expect to see it in non-profit spaces, not in giant indoor art markets like Frieze. Galerie Lelong decided to do a whole booth full of "political art," which amused me greatly. I mean, it wasn't like they were using this art to make a political statement (some of the art referred to political situations from long in the past). For them, "political art" was just a programmatic decision. It could have been "minimal art" or "Brazilian art" (they were, in fact, also showing a lot of Brazilian art).


Leon Golub, The Assassin, 1972, acrylic on Belgian linen, 92 x 57 inches


Nancy Spero, South Africa, 1981, handprinting and typewriter collage on paper, 26.5 x 40.5 inches


Nancy Spero, Argentina, 1981, handprinting and typewriter collage on paper, 26.5 x 40.5 inches

So naturally they included pieces by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, whose expressionist political works are classic.s


Cildo Meireles, Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970, suite of six black and white photographs, 4.75 x 7 inches each

Cildo Meireles's piece, Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, comes from a time when Brazil was under an increasingly harsh military dictatorship (although one that left artists alone, for the most part, perhaps recognizing their utter impotence as far as politics goes). The title is excellent: Tiradentes was a Brazilian independence plotter who was captured and hanged in 1792. He is a national hero and one whose name the military dictatorship couldn't really outlaw (unlike figures like, for example, Che Guevarra).


Yoko Ono, Imagine No Fracking at Galerie Lelong

Yoko Ono, with a little help from her dead hubby, took a bold stand and commanded us to imagine no fracking. So I did: I imagined us importing huge amounts of liquified natural gas from Middle Eastern despots; I imagined natural gas costing $13 per thousand cubic feet (instead of about $4.50) and poor people suffering in the cold because they couldn't afford to heat their homes; I imagined thousands of working-class American roughnecks and roustabouts out of work. I also imagined how funny it would be if this piece were shown at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair or the Houston Fine Art Fair.

But real politics did surprisingly intrude into the proceedings at Frieze. Frieze has made itself infamous for using only non-union labor, which in a heavily union town like New York is quite a ballsy move. (Ironically, the art fairs at Brown Convention Center in Houston both use union labor.) Normally this fact doesn't seem to bother the exhibitors and certainly doesn't bother the rich glitterati in attendance. But artists might be a little annoyed, and one of them, Andrea Bowers, spoke out.



Two copies of the letters were posted next to huge blowups of pro-socialist/union political cartoons from the 19th century by Walter Crane.



Her other artwork seemed to have a political edge as well.


Andrea Bowers at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

But to me, work like this at Frieze is just another high-end consumer product. Her letter, on the other hand, addresses a political situation that has to do directly with Frieze. You can't be at Frieze, see this letter, and say you support the unions because just by being there you are supporting Frieze management. This letter forces you to realize your own complicity--and therefore to take a side. Compare this to Yoko Ono's Imagine No Fracking, which requires nothing of the viewer. The Frieze visitor can say, "Oh, yes, I am against fracking," because it cost him nothing. Fracking is something that some people do in some distant parts of flyover country. But when Andrea Bowers calls attention to a bad policy by Frieze, she's talking about the guy whose job it was to mop this spill up.



I found that hard to ignore, but I don't know about the average Frieze-goer.

Porn

But more of a trend was art that seemed related to pornography. This was work that took pornographic imagery (whether it was already existing or made up by the artist is not always clear)and transformed it in some way to make it art. None of the transformations were minimal--this wasn't just someone putting a pornographic video into a gallery and making it art through the act of recontextualizing it. These pieces were substantially, visually changed.


Thomas Ruff, chromogenic print with Diasec at David Zwirner


Thomas Ruff, chromogenic print with Diasec

Like these huge blurry photos by Thomas Ruff. They were all called "nudes" followed by a four digit alphanumeric code. According to a really thoughtful review in The Guardian by Geoff Dyer, they were taken from pornographic websites. Dyer points out, "Ruff's decision to call these pictures Nudes encourages us to see them as part of – conceivably as culmination of and commentary on – a major tradition in western art that has cloaked itself in any number of religious, mythological, aesthetic and moral guises." And I think this can be said of all the porn-related work at Frieze.


Johannes Kahrs, Untitled (kliene freundin), 2008, oil on canvas, 167 x 107 cm at Xeno X

With photos, the line between porn and art is blurry. After all, almost all porn is lens based. (And I would add that very little if any porn is painted in oil paints, a medium which at this point in history is in the exclusive domain of "art"). So how do we look at this piece by Johannes Kahrs? Oil painting of a nude woman=art. Legs spread for a beaver shot=porn. The ambiguity is delicious, and his painting technique is superb.


Richard Prince, untitled, 2012, ink jet and acrylic on canvas, 63 1/4 x 50 1/8 inches at Sadie Coles

Richard Prince plays up the ambiguity by reusing an older pornographic image. Pornography+time lessens the impact of porn. Nostalgia turns something that was furtive and shameful in its time into something completely acceptable and even fun. (Bettie Page, for example.)



Kendell Geers, Mouthing off, 1993, 9 TV sets and 9 dvds, steel shelves at Galerie Rodolphe Jansssen

South African artist Kendell Geers had several pieces at Frieze, including Mouthing off. But only Mouthing off dealt with porn. Each screen showed kaleidescopic images that only revealed themselves to be porn after close examination. Which I did. I pointed this piece out to DC and he declared that he found it "disturbing." It a piece of art can get a rise out of someone, I guess it has accomplished something.


Nicole Eisenman at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Sometimes it's just the pose that recalls pornography. This crudely depicted figure by Nicole Eisenman is showing us her asshole--as so many porn photos do. I liked that she depicted the asshole as a little asterisk shape. It reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole in Breakfast of Champions.


John Wesley, untitled, 2011-2012, acrylic n canvas, 52 3/4 x 31 3/4 inches at Matthew Marks

John Wesley had a series of nude paintings at Matthew Marks which while not "hard core" were obviously meant to look like pornographic pictures. The woman above posing suggestively witht he intend of showing off her breasts. (But what makes the picture very erotic is the wedding ring.)

Vinyl Records

I don't think vinyl record art is really a trend, but who knows? In an era where it is supremely easy for artists to make recordings and play them through digital devices, there is something about any artwork that involves a vinyl record that makes me take notice (Michael A. Morris's A Gentle Mind Confused, for example).


Renata Lucas, Longplay at A Gentil Carioca

Renata Lucas is a Brazilian artist who specializes in "architectural interventions." And to display Longplay requires an architectural intervention of a very physical sort--a turntable has to be installed into the floor with a wall on top of it. This is one of those works that is a challenge to a clollector, because not only does she buy the work, she has to build a wall for it. But since I'm not building a wall, I had the option to just enjoy it--which I did. (And let me add here that her Rip de Janeiro gallery, A Gentil Carioca, has the best website I've ever seen for a gallery. Apparently Ernesto Neto is one of the gallery's owners.)


Jack Goldstien, untitled at Galerie Buchholz

I really want to listen to a record called The Quivering Earth.


Jack Early, Jack Early's Ear Candy Machine, 2009, lacquered wood, 1920s Victrola horn, turntable, vinyl record, plexi, black lights. 8 original tracks, all songs by Jack Early "with a little help from his friends" at McCaffrey Fine Art

This was part of a huge Jack Early extravaganza, including two giant installations.


Jack Early, Jack Early's Ear Candy Machine, 2009, lacquered wood, 1920s Victrola horn, turntable, vinyl record, plexi, black lights. 8 original tracks, all songs by Jack Early "with a little help from his friends" at McCaffrey Fine Art


Jack Early, Jack Early's Ear Candy Machine, 2009, lacquered wood, 1920s Victrola horn, turntable, vinyl record, plexi, black lights. 8 original tracks, all songs by Jack Early "with a little help from his friends" at McCaffrey Fine Art


Jack Early, Paul (John Is the One That Is Dead, Actually), 2011, light green paint, wood, poster board and plexi, 82 x 24 x 33 inches

I will admit that this made me laugh.


Jack Early, Linda McCartney (What Do You Call a Dog with Wings), 2011, pink paint, wood, poster board and plexi, 48 x 24 x 16 inches

But I wondered what collector would really want to own (much less display) such mean-spirited works like Paul and Linda McCartney. Still, they made me laugh! (The Linda McCartney joke was one that I heard back in the 70s--even then I felt guilty for laughing at at.)


Jack Early, WWJD, cross, foorprints, clouds, original audio track: Hey Jesus, 2012, printed Lexasm lights, plywood, muslin, lentils, printed cotton

Ultimately, it seems like Early has become enamored with certain aspects of 70s pop culture, but can't refrain from making fun of it. I was amused briefly, but it seems like very transitory stuff. That said, I couldn't hear the songs in the loud crowd--maybe they have merit.

How Do You Display and Conserve These Pieces?

OK, I'm veering away from trends to something that was repeatedly on my mind at Frieze, artworks that would be a challenge to own. I've touched on this a bit with the Robert Whitman and Renata Lucas. And obviously, if we think of the art world as a whole, lots of pieces of art are temporary and not really meant to be conserved. They aren't meant to be collected. There may be some collectible residue--photographic documentation, for example. But to me, it's surprising to see such pieces at Frieze, which I think of (naively?) as a bazaar for selling very valuable collectible merchandise to well-heeled collectors, right? So how do you collect this piece by Chadwick Rantanen?


Chadwick Rantanen, untitled at the Standard


Chadwick Rantanen, untitled at the Standard

This installation by Chadwick Rantanen consists of plastic bins filled with water with thin films of oil (oil paint?) floating on them. The film ends up making very intriguing designs, which I assume are mostly random. Definitely an interesting and thought provoking piece. Obviously it can't be transported. If you were a collector, you'd have to have it recreated in your space. But how long does it last? How long can you have oil floating in water? What happens to the design over time?


Tony Feher, (Singer of Many), 2008, 31 glass bottled with screw caps, water, food color and painted wood shelf, 8.25 x 108.5 x 3.5 inches at Sikkema Jenkins

And with Tony Feher, I've often wondered how long does food color last? I assume it's organic and can therefore probably rot or get moldy. Maybe decay is prevented (or at least delayed) by virture of being in a closed bottle.


Foreground: Joseph Grigely, We Need a Drinking Song, 2012, crystal urethane, 75 x 55 x 55 cm. Background: Carsten Höller, The Smoke of the Melon, 1994, watermelon, pipe, 30 x 30 x 35 cm

We Need a Drinking Song by Joseph Grigely will probably last for centuries if taken care of, but Carsten Höller's The Smoke of the Melon is made with a real watermelon, which will go bad. So if you're a collector who owns this, do you just replace the melon every now and then?

Houston Artists

Another thing I'm on the lookout for at these places are any artists from Houston. At any given time, I suppose, there are some artists from Houston who have managed to flicker across the consciousness of the art market. These are the ones whose work one would be most likely to see at Frieze. This time around, it was Trenton Doyle Hancock and Mark Flood, both of whom have had big gallery shows in New York in the past year.


 Mark Flood at Stuart Shave

This Mark Flood is pretty but also pretty typical. I saw better examples a week later in Austin at Russell Etchen's show of work from his personal collection.


Trenton Doyle Hancock (clockwise from upper right): Red Head, 2013. acrylic and mixed media on canvas; The Veil, 2013, acrylic and mixed media on canvas; It's Between You and the Dark What Happened in Central Park, 2013, acrylic and mixed media on canvas at James Cohan Gallery

James Cohan Gallery brought quite a bit of Trenton Doyle Hancock, which was very nice to see.

What did LM and DC like? Their tastes, as mentioned, are not identical. LM expressed admiration for some video work, which I'm pretty sure is not to DC's taste. But both of them like Andreas Gursky.


LM and I discuss Gursky


Andreas Gursky at Sprüth Magers


Andreas Gursky at Sprüth Magers

These photos of reflections on water were pure magic.

We were there for 6 hours. Then for some crazy reason, we decided to walk to Harlem. Here's what the Frieze tent on Randall Island looks like from the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.

Pan Recommends for the week of May 23 to May 29

Robert Boyd

Houston's art world is taking the long weekend off for the most part. (I'll be using this time to check out a few shows I've missed. Or I'll go to the beach.) But there is never a completely art-free weekend in Houston. Here are a few things happening this weekend that we're interested in.

THURSDAY


Hollis Frampton, still from Critical Mass

An Aurora Picture Show Open Screen Night Double Header: One Second Film Festival and Hollis Frampton Films, 7:30. A film festival of one-second films (don't expect a lot of characterization and plot) from TCU, curated by Nick Bontrager, and a selection of 16 mm films from the pioneering avant garde filmmaker, Hollis Frampton.

FRIDAY

 
a heroic Hello Kitty by Erik Martinez

The Mouthless-Kat: Hello Kitty & Friends! featuring Alex Barber, Alice Le, Andrea Rodriguez, Blue130, Blue Rooster Customs, Browncoat, Catfish, Enma Castro, Erik Martinez, John Paul Luna, Katsola, Lisa Chow, Lizbeth Ortiz, Lizzette Gonzalez, Nesreen Hussain Alawami, Sophia Rose Luna and Veronica Vega at East End Studio Gallery. Art has many time-tested subjects that always work--Jesus, naked ladies, bluebonnets, etc. Hello Kitty is the latest (and greatest?) candidate for eternal artistic muse.

SATURDAY


Joëlle Verstraeten monoprint

Joëlle Verstraeten: Allegro, Moderato at Gallery Jatad, 3–6 pm, (runs May 25 through June 27). Somehow, Gallery Jatad opened without me hearing about it. This gallery specializes in African and contemporary art (I hope that means they will also show African contemporary art), and is run by the husband and wife team of Lisa Qualls (an artist we've reviewed before) and African art specialist Matt Scheiner.



Call it Street Art, Call it Fine Art, Call it What You Know with Anat Ronen, Lee Washington, Michael C. Rodriguez, Dual, Skeez181, Deck WGF, Sebastien “MR. D” Boileau, The Death Head, Eyesore, Empire I.N.S., Daniel Anguilu, Ana María, ACK!, Tatum One, Angel Quesada, Sode, Vizie and KC Ortiz at Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 7 pm. A big show of street art is an excellent way to kick off summer, don't you think?

Landeros Pleads Guilty

Robert Boyd


Uriel Landeros, in jail for being a malicious idiot

Uriel Landeros, who spray-painted a stencil on Picasso's Woman in  a Red Armchair at the Menil last year, has pleaded guilty to vandalizing the painting. As part of his plea deal, he will be sentenced to two years in prison, of which he has already served five months. I have to say that this does not seem like a very good plea deal on the face of it. The DA dropped the criminal mischief charge and kept the vandalism charge--his sentence could have been longer. But let's face it--the DA didn't have much incentive to cut a good deal because Landeros had 1) been video-taped in the act, 2) bragged about his crime in a statement posted on YouTube.

All this information comes from an article in the Houston Chronicle. The article does not mention restitution to the Menil for costs incurred. I assume that Landeros couldn't pay it in any case, but it seems like he should be required to make some kind of monetary restitution.

As for Landeros' post-prison life, I have only one suggestion: stay away from moronic exploitative hucksters like James Perez.

I hope that this is the last Uriel Landeros post for a long, long time. If you are interested in background on this case, see these earlier posts:

• Landeros spraypainting the Picasso
• Landeros' risible justification for his act
• Landeros and James Perez confront the haters on Facebook
• James Perez exhibits Landeros
• Perez vs Landeros
• Landeros turns himself in

The idiot in the act

Continuum's Live Art Series - Night 4 (NSFW)

Dean Liscum

By the Fourth night of Continuum's Live Art Series, it was very clear to me that these shows don't have a theme. There is a show. There are artists. Performances happen. Nonetheless, themes emerge if for no other reason than we are pattern recognition machines eager to find rhythm and commonality in even the most random phenomena. In CLAS 4, I found the theme to be physical minimalism, a "muscle dance" if you will, a term which I gleefully and un-apologetically stole from Ms. Y.E. Torres. A majority of the performances seemed to be devoid of narrative drama, but replete with physical tension.

As is my habit, I was running a little late and I literally stepped into the evening's opening performance, In Remembrance of Me by Joshua Yates. He was quietly kneeling in the center of six concentric circles of broken (one could say disassembled) cinder blocks. He continued to meditate\pray while I jockeyed for a position upstairs at Avant Garden.

Without saying a word, Yates picked up a cinder block. He held it close to his face, close enough to smell, close enough to kiss and mouth words to it. Perhaps blessing. Perhaps cursing. Perhaps comforting. Perhaps scolding. Then he placed the fragment in a white nylon bag, re-positioned his body every so slightly in a counter-clockwise direction to toward the next fragment. Repeated the ritual. He performed the same process for each rock in the circle.

 
Joshua Yates amid the 6 rings of disassembled cinder blocks


Sniff? Lick? Kiss? Bless?
 
Once he'd gathered all the rocks in the circle into the bag, he stood up, twisted the top of the bag closed, and then thrust it over his head. He held it for 15 may be 20 seconds.





Then he knelt in the center of the circle and repeated the process. With each circle, the fragments increased in size and the bag grew substantially heavier. At first, what was trivial--the hoisting of the bag and holding it up to the light--became non-trivial, became challenging.





A feat of effortless ritual became a feat of physical strength and endurance. The offering was uncertain. The tension was palpable. Would he lift it? Drop it? Fall? Collapse.


Holding 5 rings of cinder block overhead


Attempting to hoist all 6 rings of cinder block 

After the final circle of fragments had been gathered and the bag was secured closed, Yates struggled to lift the bundle.



Sweat beaded on his face. He breathed deeply, heavily, grunted, dropped the bag heavily. A small cloud of cinder block dust exploded from the bag. Redoubling his effort, he crouched deeper, struggled vigorously, and dropped it again. He tried a few more times, failing each time and then walked off leaving the bag in the middle of the stage.


The end of Remembrance of Me 

At the conclusion of Yates piece, we filed past the bag of cinder blocks and up the stair to the attic to observe Manola Maldonado's performance, Tea Party. In the darkened attic, Maldonado stood dressed in a frilly short dress holding a green ball over head with unwound magnetic tape attached to her and still connected to their cassettes. She lowered the ball and walked in a small circle dragging the tapes behind her. Then she sat on a blanket among strawberry short cakes, tea, and dolls. La-la singing, she goes through the motions of hosting a tea party and then she dumps powdered sugar over everything.


Manola being mother at tea time 

The dim lighting, the cramped setting, the props, the costuming gave the piece a hallucinatory Alice-and-Wonderland feel, which was obviously intentional. Where the piece lost me was in the connections among the magnetic tape beginning, the tea party middle, and the powdered sugar end.


powdered sugar makes everything better 

My small mind was unable to connect them in any other way than slightly surreal blend. And may be that's as far as I was supposed to.

Into the light and back to the second floor, we went. Jade performed Questions of a Victim. It began with her crouched on the floor in the manner of a child, writing. After a minute or two of intense scribbling, she approached the audience and asked, "Why are they so mean?" Not indicating who they were and thus leaving us to ponder if we were "they" or she was they or they were "they" as we all self-righteously suspected of everyone else but of course we.

She then put on a black shirt and approached the audience again. "Why won't they leave me alone? Shut up!"


Jade 

Next she donned a white shirt and started singing quietly John Lennon's "Imagine". "Imagine all the people..." and then wordlessly hummed the melody.


Jade donning a white shirt, transforming into OK 

Until she stopped and then half-shouted, "Don't let anyone bring you down. Look at me, I turned out OK." Finally, she laughed in a manner that indicated that her character was anything but OK. But, we already knew that and turned away as was expected.

Next up was Jonatan Lopez performing My Filthy Self. Dressed in sunglass, a white t-shirt, and jeans, he started out strutting down the middle of the room (think Tom Cruise in Risky Business) on an improvised paper runway.


Shame Swagger or Shame Strut? 


kneeling...but not in prayer 

At the end of the runway were two jars of paint: one with red paint and one with black. He knelt between the jars, removed his sunglasses and t-shirt, neatly placed them on the paper, and painted his mouth black.



Next, Lopez removed his pants and lay them out to form a silhouette of a body.



Then he took the black paint brush and began to paint his genitals: black dick, black ball sack.



Once you paint it black... Lopez took his time. Meticulous and thorough, he obviously wanted to give the audience time to observe and reflect.



Black dicked and black balled (I can't help of thinking of Al Jolson...Jade's performance in CLAS 2), he then grabbed the jar of red paint and attempted to pour it on his ass. I'm assuming he was aiming for his asshole (and all the weighted metaphors that it carries).



Lopez then proceeded to pour the red paint on the clothing silhouette at the crotch and near the heart and neck.



Once he'd stained red himself and the clothing to his satisfaction, he picked up a sign board that read "Take my picture" and hung it from his neck with a cord. The board had a hole at crotch level and he stuck his black dick and balls through the hole.



Finally, he circumnavigated the room so that anyone wanting to photograph his filthy self could.
I'm not a psychologist or a psychotherapist, but I don't think that you needed to be to understand this piece. At least symbolically for this performance, it was safe to assume that Black = bad, Red = Blood (and not in a good way), genitalia = self. Lopez showed his shame, so to speak, and the act played our as cathartic for the artist but it was not transferable, at least not for me. His shame was not my shame. (And I've got plenty of shame.) The piece didn't draw me into it to share in his shame or its absolution. It simply showed it to me and gave me and the rest of the audience the opportunity to Instagram it.

As if on cue, Jana Whatley appeared in a black top and black tights and performed Steps through the remnants of Lopez's performance. It consisted of her walking backward in progression of two steps backward, one step forward. It was subtle, quiet, consistent, almost comic in its physical simplicity. In contrast to Lopez's performance, the minimalism served as a palette cleanser.



Whatley walked the second floor, two step backwards and one step forward, and then proceeded downstairs past Koomah performing his durational piece, Waiting. Koomah stood in a full length sleeveless black dress and black veil. Noiseless and still. Audience members late to the show walked past him one by one with the same apprehension that you have in a haunted house, anticipating something and yet not knowing exactly what or when. Their individual but similar reactions amusingly hypnotized me.


Koomah Waiting 

"Hello?..." David Collins voice broke Koomah's spell. He stumbled into the performance space wearing bubble wrap and a grimace and nothing else. Then fell to the floor and began rolling around, possibly flailing, but it's hard to flail freely when encased in bubble wrap. His hand, holding a cell phone, was wrapped to his ear. As he continued to talk to the phone, it became clear that he had called a suicide prevention/crisis hotline.


It's a bird, it's a plane...


It's David Collins in the latest in bubble wrap fashion

Through a humorous monologue we learned that his character

• is 50
• is depressed
• is incompetent at suicide (plenty of kerosene but no match)
• quit his lucrative job (would rather die than work for Chevron)
• is depressed by his mortality and it's possibly killing him
• is currently doing a performance art piece
• is indignant that his councilor is in Bangalore and that his existential crisis has been outsourced lives in a commune, and
• concludes that he should talk to people and may be they could help (as opposed to a call center worker who would probably prefer to diagnose his printer error but didn't make a high enough score on that test to work for that company).

Then Collins took his own advice and he talked to the crowd asking them to strip him naked and pop the bubbles.


Note to self: dress in bubble wrap if you want beautiful people to strip you naked. 

And they did. I'm not sure they found meaning in the act, but they got to bare skin.

Once Collins had been stripped and all his bubbles popped, Koomah placed a chair in the middle of the room and Jonatan Lopez sat in it. In this piece called Transference, Lopez sat and thought of a painful memory. Hopefully, it was the one that inspired him to paint his dick black in My Filthy Self because I don't think he's done working through that stuff. Koomah then knelt behind Lopez for about a minute. Then Koomah moved in front of Lopez, reached out and touched his face.


Here, my inner pentacostal minister was saying, "Give me your shame brother Jonatan" 

With his eyes closed, Koomah then tilted his face towards Lopez's and breathed deeply until he suddenly let go and walked away.


And here I felt like yelling "Out demon! Out!" 

As you might have gathered from my photo captions, I understood the concept but I didn't feel it. To be fair to Koomah, I've been to waaaaayyyyy too many charismatic church services (I call them "freak out for Jesus" sessions) for this subtle form of transference to have an effect on me. I also don't know if it worked for Lopez or even if it was supposed to or what that would have looked like. The audience, however, seemed accepting of the ambiguity.

Jonatan moved himself and the chair out of the performance area and then Sway Youngston unceremoniously dumped three bags of leaves on the floor. She did it with impunity and she could because they were locally sourced from the Montrose, the Heights, and a communal living space entitled Urth House.


Sway laying down the leaves 

She then cleared a circular space in the middle of the pile and began her piece entitled, What's Left? She then arranged on the floor a bunch of clay spirit animals that audience members had been invited to make when they entered the bar.


Clearing a space 

She plucked one up and asked "Whose spirit animal is this?" A man claimed it and she asked him to come into the circle. She lay on her back, placed a 2' x 2' plywood square on her torso, placed the spirit animal on the square, and instructed him to smash his spirit animal with a plastic hammer. He did. First with a tentative swing, then with a more forceful one.


Caution: Spirit animal slayer at work 

Youngston repeated this process with several more spirit animals and their creators until there was a sizable lump of clay on the board.


Spirit crushing spans genders. 

Then she gathered the clay from the board on stomach, and molded it to her face until it was completely covered. Breathing heavily, she searched for the hammer with her hands. After she found it, she struck her belly, hard. Once. Twice. Five times.


Sway covered in spirit animal remains 

Next, she took the handle of the hammer and inserted it into her mouth. (I'm hesitant to use a religious or politically biased description here, but if I use a pornographic one, # 1. One will comment about it and # 2. Everyone will know exactly what I'm talking about.) Basically, she deep-throated the hammer handle and held it there for half a minute or a full minute. Finally, she turned to the side and spit it out.


Sway swallowing the spirit animal slayer 

What's left but to interpret the piece as one about spirit crushing. And not the corporate/geo-political/material world (a favorite scapegoat in a culture that simultaneously insists on personal autonomy) crushing our spirit, but we (I'll join the audience for this one) volunteering to and then gleefully or at least willingly crushing our own spirits. At the end, I was uneasy with the piece but not sure why. Was it a little too easy or a little too close to home?

At that point, it was intermission and with all the shame and spirit crushing that I'd endured, I needed a drink to lift my spirits. I headed down to the bar and almost walked into the arms of Shanon Adams performing one of the durational pieces. I'll christen it Ballet d' Ugs, because I lack imagination and she was wearing Ug boots as she proceeded to dance through out the bar.


Ninja? No. Shanon Adams

Adams moved through the bar gracefully. Her movements were deliberate, hinting at an overall choreography.



Nevertheless, she flowed around drunk patrons and unbalanced art reviewers with too much equipment as if our movements had been anticipated and incorporated into the piece.

In bars, I often stumble upon people, but never so gracefully. I'm guessing some of my fellow patrons there for a drink instead of the performance art had the same experience.

Another durational performance that I encountered during the intermission was Neil Ellis Orts' Tell Me Where It Hurts. Dressed in a blue Lycra body suit complete with hood and mask, he approached bar patrons and audience members with a sharpee and invited them to "map their pain." He instructed me to locate the place on his body that corresponded to a place on my body where I experienced pain, circle the area, and then to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10.


Neal selling Pain Mapping 

The piece was inspired by a story he heard on NPR about a woman who told people about her cancer. This process attempted to take this communication one step further, to physically map it, to make it that much more real.


Pain Mapping was very popular. 

While I mapped my pain, two audience member were recruited to duct tape the stairs. Not completely, but enough. One drew a yellow line of duct tape up the stairs and another drew a pink line. Neither were told the purpose of their tape lines. Then the artist Hilary Scullane attempted to navigate the stairs with her hands in constant contact with the yellow line, her feet with the pink one.

Duct tape guide lines 

Scullane began at the bottom of the stairs and worked her way up. Avant Garden being Avant Garden, she had to navigate around the bar patrons who either didn't know she was performing or didn't care.


Scullane commences 

The piece references a Bruce Nauman performance, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner. (I asked. I'm that clueless.) But it extends it.



In Scullane's orchestration, the act of "walking the tape" becomes acrobatic and gymnastic.



Like Yates' piece, and Whatley's, it is minimal, non-narrative.





And yet, it is also extremely evocative because at the end, you don't just understand the piece, you can directly relate to it, and feel it.

Next, I got nailed by Nikki Thornton performing her piece, Nail Me. In this performance, Nikki donned a nail spiked bikini top and shorts and then shook, shimmied, and scraped along the wall, along the stair banister, against the mirror...


Nikki Thornton and her doppelganger ( photo by Hilary Scullane)

...the bar, and the patrons, of which I was one. The visual and tactile aspects of the piece were obvious and a little scary to some of the non-audience bar patrons. I saw at least one guy take a very big, intentional step away from Nikki as she slither-scraped from the stairs.


Me nailing the butt bump with Nikki Thornton ( photo by Hilary Scullane) 

The piece also had a subtle aural component that was barely audible. However, if you concentrated, or were near enough to participate in it, you could hear the nails on glass, on wood, and on fabric.
Having been nailed, it was time head up stairs for the final series of performance. The first one was an untitled piece by David Graeve. It started with him standing in the middle of the floor facing a woman. They were holding hands and wearing safety goggles and protective ear muffs. Between them was a large red plastic balloon/sack. A third person flipped on an electric pump and the balloon began to inflate.


Performance art foreplay 

As the balloon began to inflate it pushed the two artists apart. They struggled to move closer.



They struggled to embrace. Sometimes enveloped in the red plastic. Sometimes suspended by it appearing to ride it, appearing to hump it.



The success of their endeavor played out in cycles at times their mouths, their bodies were inches apart. At other times, they struggled to hold on to each other and you had a sense that one might lose its grip and going flying into the audience.



Ultimately the piece came to an end. (whether because of a Continuum-based time limit or per Graeve, it wasn't clear.) They wrestled to a stalemate without a climatic embrace or disbursing or casting away.

The metaphor for relationships seemed obvious enough, but how one interpreted the metaphor was another matter. Other than being a generic symbol for a divisive entity, what did the plastic red balloon represent? Society? Household debt/financial ruin (being in the red)? The role of petrochemical byproducts (it was plastic and this is Houston) in the relationship/bedroom? (I'm leaving you for my vibrator. It doesn't whine as much and it makes more money.) A red herring, literally (dietary restrictions drive us apart) and metaphorically? An over inflated concept of love? A red sports car?

I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if Graeve intended for the audience to determine that with any certainty. Regardless, participating in the performance and making it work, like a relationship, looked exhausting.

Y.E. Torres was next with Muscle Dance. I first encountered Torres at a belly dancing performance. So, mentally (that is because I have a small rather intransigent mind) I classify her as a belly dancer which is limiting in all the wrong stereotypical ways.



First of all, she doesn't have a belly. Second, although she incorporates belly dancing moves, along with classical ballet and modern dance moves, in her performances in a way that ballet and modern dancers don't, her performance lies outside the genre of belly dancing.

Third, she choreographs her pieces to non-traditional belly dancing music.



In Muscle Dance, the soundtrack consisted of mouth noises, electronic pops, synthetic minimalism. Her movements were equally slow, graceful, and intentional.





Like all dance-centric performances, it's just something you have to experience. (Unfortunately, I can't find a video of it I can share.)

Shifting from non-verbal, elegiac to the prosaic, Julia Claire Wallace took the stage and announced that she wanted a revolution. She signaled to the audience to gather around her in her kindly, unassuming Mr. Roger's style. We flocked around her like obedient school children. "I want a revolution." She declared and they echoed. "Say it like you mean it." They repeated it louder because bigger is better and louder passes for conviction. (This is Texas after all). A woman, Kira, began to drum on a table. Lead by Wallace, we chanted/sang "I want change." The performance morphed into a spontaneous revolution song that built and then ended. Was that it? Was that revolutionary to you? Apparently, in Ms. Wallace's neighborhood it was.


Julie Claire Wallace, the "Mr. Rogers" of Houston performance art 

Wallace again...I meant to photograph the drummer, but revolutions are not conducive to photography.

In the final act of the evening, Jajah Gray took the floor and made a makeshift alter. It consisted of cards, books, three glasses of water, cloths (scarfs/shawls/do rags/bandannas).


Jajah making an altar 

He asked the audience "Can you imagine a world so clean and pure?" He then emptied his pockets of money. Coins spilled on to the floor, bounced, rolled. Gray stomped a beat with his feet. The audience picked it up.



Gray performed and held a yoga bridge until I thought he'd collapse. Instead, he began dancing and vaulting over the altar. After a few passes, he partially deconstructed the altar and offered parts to the audience while singing query, "Can you imagine a world so clean and pure?" The audience joined in. A dog, that had been silently present for all the performances, suddenly barked. Gray started the crowd foot stomping and then began singing, in what I don't think was English. (But it was late, I'd had a few drinks, and had been nailed, so I'm not testifying to any of this.)



Gray drank from 1 of the 3 glasses of water, shouted, and then the performance ended.


Jajah ends 

 To me, Grays performances, similar to Y.E. Torres, are lyrical and mystical. The intention was not always clear and segments didn't always cohere but there was the physicality of them and the oblique content created ample space for me to get comfortable in them.

The evening of performances over, I headed downstairs in to Julia Claire Wallace durational performance Dirt Massage.


Julie Claire Wallace in Dirt Massage
 
After standing for 4+ hours, I could have used a massage. Nevertheless, she wasn't giving she was receiving. The handwritten sign by her side read, "I truly need a massage."



Hilary Scullane fulfilling wishes Wallace provided the dirt and the massage oil. The audience was expected to provide the labor. A couple of Continuum members applied oil liberally and pressed and pushed the dirt into Wallace's back, shoulders, arms, legs.



I took a turn making mud pies on Wallace's back and then kneading, rubbing, and pressing it into her flesh.



Relaxing for her. Raw, minimal, perhaps even infantile for us. And yet, satisfying in the way that the most successful performances of the evening were. Minimal and primal and direct.