Characters

Robert Boyd

The Art League selected Trenton Doyle Hancock as their artist of the year this year. Because the Art League's building was damaged by Hurricane Harvey, Hancock's exhibit was held in the former Rice Gallery.

 
 Trenton Doyle Hancock, Letting, acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 inches, 2015

The opening was an big event--the artistic elite of Houston showed up. Hancock was mobbed by fans.


Trenton Doyle Hancock drawing a dédicace in my copy of the catalog for the show

Among the attendees was artist Bill Davenport. He asked me what I thought about the comics influence on Hancock. I said it was fairly obvious and that Hancock had done comics-like pieces, like Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw which was shown in Hancock's 2014 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

But, I told Bill, I think the main thing that Hancock gets from comics is the idea of characters that he uses over and over again. He has created a mythos inhabited by a group of characters that he draws and paints repeatedly. This is not unlike the mythoi of Marvel and DC comics. Superman and Wonder Woman live in the same "universe", and Spider-Man and the X-Men live in their own separate universe. The people who write and draw these comics must make their stories conform to the rules of those universes and the norms established for those characters. But these characters are quite mutable. A character who is a super-hero can turn bad or change his costume or even change her gender.

So what Hancock and some other contemporary artists do is the same. Hancock has this whole universe of the "Mounds" and the "Vegans", and has his own superhero alter-ego, Torpedo Boy.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Torpedo Boy toy

For Hancock, the idea of making characters involves the whole universe of modern capitalist trademarked characters. That includes making toys of characters; Hancock is a devoted collector of toys.

As I talked to Davenport, we both realized that for most of art history, artists had a bunch of characters they could use over and over. Biblical characters are obvious choices, and mythological characters, and historical figures. What is different about those characters and modern corporate characters is that no one owned Jesus or Zeus. Disney owns Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man. Warner Brothers owns Batman and the Teen Titans. And artist can use these characters once or twice, but if they try to create involve bodies of work using these characters, they'll get legally shut down. Spider-Man is just too valuable to Disney to let Trenton Doyle Hancock or any other artists to do with it whatever they want.

And Disney and other copyright holders have worked mightily to make sure that no one can make their own Mickey Mouse artworks. Prior to 1976, copyrights lasted 28 years and then could be renewed for another 28 years at which time the work would return to the public domain. In 1976, that 56-year term was extended to 75 years. Then in 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the copyright to 95 years. This law was created after a a decade of intense lobbying by Disney. And we can assume that Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain--Disney will always lobby Congress to extend copyright.

So today's artists who want to use characters in their art will need either to do what Hancock did--make up their own mythos--or use characters that are in the public domain by virtue of being quite old: the old standbys (biblical characters, mythological characters, historical figures) or characters from literature or art from the 19th century or before.

All of which begs the question of why artists might want to use characters at all? Most artists in the past 100 years have been more than capable of creating their art without repeatedly using characters. I don't have a theory about this--someone should talk to artists who work with characters what their motivation is. In any case, it's a thing and unfortunately artists can't use Mickey Mouse or Wonder Woman or Captain America, because of copyright laws that are written for the benefit of large media companies.

What You Liked: The Top 10 Pan Posts of 2014

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 Swamplot and 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 published it 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.

What I Didn't Do This Summer

Robert Boyd

What I haven't been doing this summer is writing. I have an excuse--I moved into a new place, which has been a very time-consuming process. But I've also procrastinated. There have been things I fully intended to write about--the amazing Trenton Doyle Hancock show at CAMH, the ginormous Big Show at Lawndale, the great new artists residency in Navasota and much more--that I just never got around to finishing. Usually I feel consumed with guilt if I'm not producing. But this summer, only a little guilt. And that's a little troubling for the future of the blog. After all, I don't get paid to do this--so without guilt, what's my motivation?

But slightly guilty introspection is not the purpose of this post. Just because I've dropped the ball this summer doesn't mean you need to deprive yourself of quality online art commentary. Obviously Glasstire is still going strong, and recently has been pissing people off a lot, which I like. People getting pissed off means people actually care and engage. Houston's art scene can sometimes feel like a warm soup of complacent consensus (with a lot of "off the record" backbiting, natch). But several Glasstire pieces recently have inspired a lot of contentious comments (which can often be pretty deadly, but I think Glasstire monitors its comment sections to weed out the obvious trolls). For example, check out "How Tight Is Texas for Artists" by Christina Rees, which asks "Why would anyone who is truly creative stay in this city or this state if they could live elsewhere?" Bill Davenport hit one out of the park with his two-fer  "Painting on my Planet" and "The Top Ten Painters In Houston", in which Davenport responds to a somewhat puzzling top 10 painters list in the Houston Press. Davenport proposes that that list is from another planet ("Planet A") while he prefers work from "Planet B." Part of me thinks Planet B should have been called "Planet MFA," but his list was not only pretty good, but it inspired a deluge of reader-generated lists.



But everyone who reads The Great God Pan Is Dead already reads Glasstire, right? What else should you be paying attention to? A new project by Houston artist Brian Piana is Spill Some Stuff. Spill Some Stuff is a podcast, which is a form of internet communication I have to admit that I don't like all that much. My problem is that you listen to them thinking you can be doing something else at the same time, but I can't really simultaneously do anything else and pay attention to the podcast. It's too hard for me to divide my attention. But that's me--obviously there are a lot of multi-taskers out there who can work on some project while still actively listening to a podcast. The success of Bad at Sports proves this.

Spill Some Stuff is very new and has had only two podcasts so far--but they are both pretty meaty. The podcasts last about an hour. Piana has promised that Spill Some Stuff won't be exclusively art-focused, but his first two interview subjects, Emily Link and Elaine Bradford, are both well-known members of the Houston art scene.


Emily Link, Steinmann, 2011

The first episode was an interview with Emily Link, and they discuss Link's art as well as her work with Lawndale Art Center, focusing particularly on The Big Show, which was about to open when this interview was conducted. Piana is a little nervous, and he has a tendency to hog the discussion. The word "awesome" pops up too frequently in this interview. But these quibbles aside, it's an impressive debut. Piana, it turns out, has a fantastic radio voice and is a natural radio interviewer. There's never "dead air"--if he talks a little more than his subject, it's in the service of moving things along. It never feels awkward and he's never at a loss for words.


Elaine Bradford, I See You, 2014, ceramic figures and crocheted embroidery threads (from the Big Show at Lawndale)

And his second interview with Elaine Bradford is even better. They discuss her career and recent work, as well as her work with Box 13 Artspace. And practice makes perfect--Piana's interviewing is even better in this second installment than in the first. This is good stuff. I look forward to hearing more.

Another bit of online art commentary I've been consuming is Art vs. Reality, a series of videos written and starring Peter Drew. Peter Drew is a young Australian artist and critic whose previous claim to fame was to be almost kicked out of the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 for doing illegal street art.

His six-part video series, Art vs. Reality, features him taking on the persona of an extremely pompous art critic doing the kind of "explains it all to you" TV show that reminds one a bit of Robert Hughes. It has a satirical edge, but it aims to address real issues--art galleries (using "galleries" in the English sense of any place designed specifically to show art, including museums), art schools, conceptual art, street art, artists as "geniuses" and art critics. Each episode is followed by a mini-episode in which he responds to viewer mail. (In the first episode, he asks for feedback on the role of galleries today--but warns viewers, "By all means, challenge my opinions, but I warn you: my education cost more than a Blue Period Picasso, I've dined with the world's greatest curators and ruined careers of over a thousand artists. To destroy your argument will be my pleasure... And your privilege. So in other words--let's have a healthy debate!"

This series reminds me a bit of the great series Art Thoughtz by Hennessy Youngman, the alter ego of artist Jason Munson. Youngman and Drew both address their viewers as "internet" ("Wassup internet!"). They both address serious issues of art lightly. Their styles are totally different, but their willingness to use humor to engage the art world marks them as related projects. Given the dour seriousness of much of the art world, they're refreshing.

Here is the first episode of Art vs. Reality:

Bill Davenport and his shop, Bill's Junk

Pete Gershon

[When Pete Gershon wrote Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (which we reviewed last week), one chapter dealing with four Houston artists had to be excised for space reasons. Gershon has graciously given us permission to publish the chapter as four separate blog posts on The Great God Pan Is Dead. This is the final post. Please check out the first post about Grace Bashara Green, the second about David David Smalley and the third about Dolan Smith's Museum of the Weird.]


Bill's Junk

“Every shopkeeper is an artist,” proposes Bill Davenport. And while he may not be Salvador Dali or Andy Warhol—both of whom designed store window displays—I can’t help but be impressed with the arrangement of clutter that fills Bill’s Junk, his 11th Street storefront. “Store display is a form of art, and I suppose junk stores have more flexibility than most. The kind of things I deal in are second-hand objects, so as you can see, I have a lot of scope of how I can arrange things.” The walls and shelves are filled with some twenty years’ worth of Davenport’s scrounges from the flea markets, yard sales and trash piles of Houston.

A painting of a goat-headed demon embracing a naked woman as New York City erupts in flames behind them immediately catches the eye. Here’s a tiny block of wood painted to look like an electric range resting on a leather-bound scrapbook stuffed with articles on infectious diseases. Beside it are some unusual rocks, plastic dinosaurs, one of Dolan Smith’s scars, and a twist of sparkly pipe cleaners made by a friend of one of Bill’s pre-teen sons. Its tag reads: “cybernetic organism - $22.”

“Okay, maybe that one’s a bit overpriced,” allows Davenport. “But then again, for a cybernetic organism, it’s not a bad deal.” There are stacks of used CDs and boxes of weird stuffed animals and an array of misshapen ceramics, the forlorn school art projects of decades past. It’s not too far a leap from the display found at Cleveland Turner’s house, a whirlwind of junk with no rhyme or reason to its placement except for one man’s aesthetic instincts.


"Balloons" to "Bill's": Bill's Junk in 2009

It’s become perceived of as something of an art installation within certain circles, owing to Davenport’s background as a sculptor who uses the most modest materials, but that wasn’t the original intent. In 2006, Davenport and his wife, the painter Francesca Fuchs, purchased the 4000-square-foot building at 1125 11th Street. Built back in the 1930s, for some seventy years it functioned as a fleabag flophouse, with a series of what Davenport terms “sad, pathetic businesses” downstairs: a procession of barbers, lunch counters, and most recently, a ramshackle party supply store. The latter’s window painting has been modified, transforming the word “BALLOONS” into “BI LL ‘S”. Davenport himself spent sixteen months renovating the structure from top to bottom, moved his studio into the back, made an apartment for his wife and two boys on the second floor, and pushed his surplus objects into the storefront.

“Sure, people buy things,” he says, “but there’s never been any thought about whether something was saleable. I don’t make any money doing this. I just don’t want this stuff in my studio, so I’ll just put it up here and maybe someone will take it. I’ll tell you what does sell quickly: dead insects. Dead bees, moths, you display them properly and they never last more than a couple of days.”


Bill Davenport and some of his junk for sale

Davenport, who was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1962, picked up art degrees at the University of Massachusetts and Rhode Island School of Design. After graduation he taught a wood shop class at a Quaker school in central Massachusetts but moved to Houston in 1990 when he was invited into the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program. He reaches into a cabinet and produces an example of the kind of sculpture he made at Glassell. It’s made from five small, unpainted scraps of wood, some with angled cuts, glued together.

“I’ve always made things that looked like people’s bad shop projects and then put them into gallery settings,” he says. “People get mad because they’re so badly made.” Shaila Dewan summarized the general attitude toward Davenport’s work in the tagline to her 1999 Houston Press article, "The Antihero: Is Bill Davenport’s art stupid? Yeah. Brilliant? That, too.”

He shows me another project from his time at Glassell. It’s a small wooden box, painted Pepto-Bismol pink, entitled Counter. I imagine how sensual and luxurious the textures of its sloppily applied paint and its badly fitted joints must have looked under bright gallery lights. “It’s very much a conceptual piece. It’s about making the piece, and the desire to make it. The things that I love the best are things where people worked really hard to do something they don’t know how to do, which for me is what all great art is. Sometimes they come up with something the most highly trained artist couldn’t accomplish.”


Yes, everything is really for sale!

To illustrate his point, he points to a yard sale painting hanging in a corner near the ceiling, an unassuming landscape depicting a sailboat on a mountain lake. “I mean, look at old Mr. McKenick here,” Davenport says. “Some of the things he did here, the boat, this tree over here, didn’t really work, or they’re pretty commonplace. But then you get to those mountains in the background, and you’re like, wow, that’s better than just about anything you can imagine.”

Davenport went on to teach classes in sculpture, painting, art history and art appreciation at just about every school in the Houston area, along the way working with painting, crochet and large-scale outdoor sculpture as his preferred mediums. A bin on the curb in front of the store is filled with one of his current sculptural modes—mystery objects, wrapped in newspaper and wound with colorful yarn. A price tag dangles from each, for example: “Object that could bring you luck - $3”.

His work is handled by Houston’s prestigious Inman Gallery and he’s equally well-known for his daily blog updates for the Texas art website of record, Glasstire, for whom he’s written since 2001. When he opened Bill’s Junk in 2008, a steady stream of friends and strangers came to browse. Then one day, Toby Kamps walked in, and asked him if he’d be interested in recreating the store for an exhibit he was curating at the CAMH called No Zoning.

“Up until then it wasn’t an art project,” says Davenport. “I had a lot of fun arranging stuff, yeah, but it wasn’t art. I mean, it was art, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. It was a case of a curator making the art by designating that it was. I had to think really hard about whether I wanted to do it.”

Davenport accepted the invitation, but he admits it was with mixed feelings. “It was a bit of a crisis. You’re an artist. Important curator comes to your studio, and he doesn’t want your art, he wants your junk. What do you do with that?” In this case, he went with the flow, and replicated his shop within the CAMH’s gallery space, selling thrift store art, decorated sea shells and macramé owls to show-goers—in fact, eager buyers emptied out his store three times before the exhibit came down. The process had come full circle. Not only was the collection of cast-off materials art; now so too was the act of its resale. With Bill’s Junk, Davenport was making a sly (and possibly inadvertent) commentary on the art’s commercialization.

“From a critical point of view, you could say his work with Bill’s Junk is an important turning point for this kind of site work,” says architect Cameron Armstrong. “When an artist creates a space like that and then turns the process around, turning the accumulation into a dispersal, and that dispersal becomes its meaning. I think that’s amazing.”

Armstrong says, “the things we’re talking about, this all comes up right out of the soil of Houston.” He shakes his head and adds, “You’re going to have a hard time explaining all of this to outsiders.”

DFW to Houston: We're #1!

Robert Boyd


Our art is better than your art

"RR," a blogger from the DFW area, writes a very succinct post about a trip to Houston he made to check out the Forrest Bess show at the Menil. He made 14 stops altogether to check out art--a crowded day of art viewing. Here are a few highlights:

• #1 stop at Bill Davenport's "Bill's Junk" in the Heights. Always a priority when I go to Houston. 
• #5 stop - Paul Fleming at the most unfriendly gallery in Texas Barbara Davis Gallery followed closely by Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas. I should have skipped this one. I will never step inside this place again.
• #6 stop at one of my favorite galleries, Inman Gallery. You can't go wrong here. Robert Ruello was a pleasant surprise and the first time to see Jim Richard's work in person. Not disappointed.
•  #9 stop - Devin Borden Gallery, we didn't even bother ringing the bell.
• #11 stop - A long time favorite gallery of mine - Betty Moody, the friendlist gallery in Texas representing important artists. Helen Altman (wall) and Lisa Ludwig (table) in the back gallery.

(Note to gallerists: don't be rude. Someone might blog about you.)

The kicker after these 14 stops? RR's conclusion: "This trip proved to me that the best art coming out of Texas right now is from North Texas. But I will try again in the fall."

My first thought was outrage. How dare RR draw such a conclusion after visiting two museums, 11 commercial galleries and Bill Davenport? Maybe the art on view in those places at this time doesn't represent Houston very well. One needs to see what's happening in artist-run spaces, in the smaller, funkier galleries, in the schools, etc.

But then I checked myself--I am totally guilty of the same behavior. Every time I go to Dallas/Fort Worth, I find myself drawing big conclusions about the area based on my brief visit. There is something about DFW that brings this out in me. But the fact is that a brief visit to a place can provide a suggestion of what the place is all about at best.

RR might be right. I was mighty impressed the last time I was in Dallas. And even if he is not right, I like the fact that the age-old rivalry between DFW and Houston continues to be played out even in the arena of art. But I don't think that visiting 14 galleries and museums over the course of a weekend (a day?) gave RR an accurate picture of Houston's art scene.

So RR, here is my proposition. The next time you come down for a visit, contact me. I'll be happy to show you the best of whatever happens to be up.

Pan Recommends for the week of April 18 to April 24

Robert Boyd

Here is some of the art we'll be checking out this weekend.

THURSDAY


Forrest Bess, Dedication to Van Gogh, 1946, Oil on canvas, 15.6" x 17.7"

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible at the Menil Collection, 7 pm (on view through August 18). This is the show I have been waiting for. In addition to a selection of his paintings, it will also incorporate the Robert Gober curated mini-exhibit that originally was seen at the last Whitney Biennial. To get you primed, we recommend this personal remembrance by Bess's last studio assistant, this excellent page devoted to Bess (lots of pictures and a reprint of the incredible Texas Monthly article about Bess), this Facebook page and this episode of Antiques Roadshow.



The 50th Annual Student Exhibition at the Rice Media Center from 6 to 9 pm and in Sewell Hall at the Matchbook Gallery from 8 to midnight. Features film and video at the Media Center, followed by art over at Sewell Hall both up in the studios and in the Matchbox Gallery. Hard to believe that this has been going on for 50 years!



 woodcut print by Josh Bernstein from the exhibit

The First Aid Kit, an boxed edition of prints by Seth Mittag, Nick Barbee, Josh Bernstein, Emily Link, Mike Beradino, Massa Lemu, and Galina Kurlat, at the Emergency Room in Sewell Hall at Rice University, 8 pm. Sales of this portfolio by artists who have had exhibits at the Emergency Room will benefit the space--a cause I wholeheartedly support!

FRIDAY

The SHILO Group, Untitled, 2012. From the series Timoschenko’s Escape

Timoshenko's Escape or the first step to the exhibition on Mars: A performance by The SHILO Group (Vlad Krasnoshchok, Sergiy Lebedynskyy and Vadym Trykoz) at FotoFest, 7–8 pm. I don't know what to expect, but if it involves blurry naked Ukranians on Mars, I'm there!


George McNeil installation at Peveto

GEORGE McNEIL: The Beginnings of NeoExpressionism, 1960 – 1969 at Peveto, 6 pm (on view through June 1). George McNeil (1908-1995) seems to have undergone a similar transformation as Philip Guston--from abstract expressionist in the 40s and 50s to a return to figuration in the 60s forward.

SATURDAY



Houston Indie Book Fest at the Menil Collection, 11 am to 6 pm. Not exactly a visual art event, but one I look forward to every year. And after you check out the books, magazines and zines, you can go see the Forrest Bess show!

FRIDAY TO SUNDAY



The Galveston Driftwood Festival & Best of the Beach orchestrated by Bill Davenport at the Galveston Artist Residency; Friday April 19th, 1pm to 3pm - Media and public preview at GAR; Saturday April 20th, 10am to noon - Adult workshop on driftwood painting, 1pm to 4pm - Children's workshop and crafts, 6pm to 9pm - Opening of Best of the Beach in GAR gallery; Sunday April 21st, 1 to 3pm - Ask the Experts, a team of experts will evaluate different beach finds. Galveston Island's beaches are a magnet for the Gulf Coast's crap, so why not make art out it?

Blogging ARTlies -- December 1994/January 1995

Robert Boyd



Issue four of ARTlies built off the "degree zero" feel of issue three. The design was still mostly functional, but easier on the eyes than the previous issue. They continued to report from outside Houston (Los Angeles, Austin), and they added a couple of artist's projects to the mix--the cover and inside cover were a political piece by Carol Saborowski (about whom I can find no information online), and the center was an insert by a person of group called "Anti-Trust." Neither impressed me too much, but I like that they were included.

Peter Doroshenko returned this issue with two interviews. In the first, he interviewed French curator Jérôme Sans, followed by him and Sans co-interviewing Paul McCarthy. Doroshenko asked Sans what he thinks about Houston, and Sans talked about how the Houston art community is isolated. Given this bait, you'd think that Doroshenko would change the subject, but he doubled down on Houston! I can totally relate--as a city, we seem very self-absorbed. (I'm guilty of it.) It is in critique of this that such institutions as Skydive and Cargo Space came into being.

Also of note was a review of a three-person show at Lawndale called Buttered Side Up, featuring work by Bill Davenport, Giles Lyon and David Aylsworth. The reviewer, Mark Allen, more-or-less liked the show but criticized Lawndale for hosting it! He saw Lawndale as an alternative space and didn't think this show was alternative enough. After all, all of these artists had shown at commercial galleries.

His description of Davenport's work was quite amusing. "Davenport knows that nothing is more boring than having to look at well-made art, so he's saving us the trouble. Some of the work in the show suffers from trying too hard, but few would voice that objection about Bill." Great stuff, and meant in a complimentary way.

The present, I find as I read old issues of ARTlies, is always echoing the past. Davenport wrote a review recently for Glasstire where he praised an artist's work in similar terms, using phrases like "frightening, frippy nihilism" and "aggressively unimpressive." Unfortunately, the artist didn't get it and was quite angry!

Blogging ARTlies -- May-June 1994

Robert Boyd


ARTlies volume 2, May-June 1994

It was FotoFest time and a lot of the material in this issue reflected that. This was the year that FotoFest almost went under when Kodak withdrew its support. The main Fotofest event was delayed until fall, while the satellite shows (already scheduled) were on in the spring. Kelly Loftus saw the bright side of this--that after going to FotoFest, people were too overwhelmed to check out the satellite events.

The issue has a new editor, and a new stated policy of rotating editorship. Eric Schwab takes over as editor this issue, and the feel is quite different. There are a bunch of reviews, all of varying lengths (some as short as one paragraph). There are a lot of new contributors, including Bill Davenport writing a nice piece about a John Cage show at the Menil, Rolywholyover: A Circus for Museum. And there was a letters column, which included one from a guy named Michael C. Troy who wrote, "I couldn't read the Gael Stack article at all. Your fonts must have been invented by the Devil." Indeed, Fiona McGettigan's design is still overwhelming. It invites the reader to not read the magazine. Kind of an ironic approach, no? Seven (!) font designers are credited.  I want to send them my bill for migraine treatment.

The most interesting thing from the perspective of 2013 is that I am only familiar with two of the contributors, Harvey Bott and Bill Davenport. Of course, they are both very vital participants of the Houston art scene to this day. But others, like Donald Calledare (who is a writer and the subject of a review), I had never heard of. Calledare is apparently now in North Carolina, but was for a time part of the Houston art scene and is now, in a sense, part of Houston's art history.

Transitions, Glad and Sad

Robert Boyd

Jeff Millar

 
Jeff Millar and Bill Hands, Tank McNamara, December 1, 2012

If you grew up in Houston in the 70s, you probably were aware of Jeff Millar, The Houston Chronicle's witty movie reviewer. He has died, aged 70. I think he was an influence on me in a small way--my unserious writing style probably has something to do with reading Millar's reviews as a teenager. Millar also was the writer of a very witty comic strip, Tank McNamara (illustrated by Bill Hinds).


Web-based artzine ...might be good is folding. ...might be good had a large readership, from what I have heard, but no reliable source of funding. (Unlike The Great God Pan Is Dead, they paid their contributors,which is probably why they had so many good ones. But expenses must be matched by revenues.) ...might be good was classy and serious, if a little dry. It wasn't there for your entertainment, but for your edification. They wrote about their subjects with rigor and seriousness. And losing ...might be good really sucks.

Idea Fund Winners

 
The Bridge Club received an Idea Fund grant for The Trailer, a mobile performance work

Fortunately there are reasons to be happy, especially if you are one of the Idea Fund recipients. The winners are The Bridge Club – Art and Performance Collaborative (Huntsville); Erin Curtis (Austin); Bill Davenport (Houston); Esteban Delgado (San Antonio); Everything Records / Robert Hodge and Philip Pyle (Houston), Madsen Minax (Houston); Ryan O’Malley, Joe Pena, Dr. Amber Scoon, and Jack Gron (Corpus Christi); Stephanie Saint Sanchez (Houston); Ethel Shipton and Nate Cassie (San Antonio); and Walley Films – Mark Walley and Angela Walley (San Antonio). Some of these winners are quite familiar to me, but most are artists I've never heard of. But the projects sound cool--The Underground Art Tunnel at Retama Park sounds like it will be worth a road trip to Corpus Cristi, and I really want to see Tia Chuck once it gets made. Congrats to all the winners!

PG Contemporary

I was bummed when Peel Gallery closed, but after several months of pop-up galleries, that space is going to be occupied (permanently, we hope) by PG Contemporary. PG Contemporary started small on Milam and recently expanded into a larger space on Milam. But I suspect this opportunity to be on Montrose next to Barbara Davis, Anya Tish and Wade Wilson was too good an opportunity to pass up. She is mounting her first exhibit there, opening tonight at 6 pm.

Texas Contemporary Art Fair is a Texas Fair

Dean Liscum

Whether it's a state fair or a county fair or a contemporary arts fair, in Texas, a fair is a fair. So when I went to that big pole barn on the east side of downtown, I wasn't looking for the best art or even how well the local folks were represented, I was looking for fair fare and with my MeeMaw in tow, I found it.

Right up front they told us like it was, All Sales Final. No swapping (except maybe partners in the VIP lounge), no take backs, and no refunds.


All Sales Final 

At every fair I've ever been to there have been political workers and surveyors who eagerly swoop down on my gullible MeeMaw for a few minutes of her time. This one was no different. Of course, a few minutes of MeeMaw's time was a few minutes of MY time. I doubly resented it because the exploitation of MeeMaw's gullibility was not only eating up my time it was also interfering with my exploitation of her gullibility. Luckily, the Fotofest's Political Bowl Season electronic poll was quick and didn't promise to save anyone's soul ,so it was also free. The vote count was mighty lop-sided for Romney. He had 61 collector votes. Obama only had 147 artist and convention support staff votes and at  a 1:99 ratio, team Obama had a little catching up to do.

 
Brian Piana, Political Bowl Season

For some reason, it ain't a fair without flags. May be it's because most of the peoples walking and gawking and working the booths don't look nothing like the people setting up and serving. They, them that throw fairs, want to reassure everyone that if they got enough money and they want it we will metaphorically wrap it in a flag and slap a price on it.

 
Andrew Schoultz, Made in China (Extreme Melt) and Snake


Skylar Fein, Black Flag for Voltaire (All Murderers are Punished), 2012, acrylic and plaster on wood, 43.5" x 71"

Now, I love me some horses (but not in that Equus kinda way) and so does MeeMaw, so we always gotta swing by the horses. We liked this horse, Ruby, but we thought it could use a little more "meat" on its bones. MeeMaw said it was probably from a fundraiser about abused horses or the artist just ran out of money because bronze is expensive. I told her I didn't think it made out of bronze. She told me to quit back talking and lick it if I doubted her. So I did. Before I could tell her what I discovered, an art fair cop stepped up and asked us not to touch the art. MeeMaw looked him up and down. "You a damn fool." She said and then gave me a look that said do it again or else you will walk your ass to Sugar Land. So I did. "Or LICK the art!" he said and walked away in disgust.

I was little disgusted inside my mouth. The horse was not made of bronze; it was made of rust.

 
Deborah Butterfield, Ruby

Not long after the licking, we stumbled across a beautiful blue horse. While I was thinking about Franz Marc's Large Blue Horse, MeeMaw couldn't quit fingering the stitching on it. Her actions attracted the attention of another art fair cop, but before he could utter a word, she grabbed his pale, thin hand and rubbed it over the stitching. "I haven't felt needle work like that since the 1970s." "You're so right." He chimed in. "I got these plaid pants at Texas Junk and they must be at least 40 years old, but feel the stitching on the inseam." MeeMaw did what the art cop told her to do.


Eric Beltz, Revival Wall

She eventually quit rubbing on the young man's inseam when I promised to find her some quilts or rugs to view. We passed these pictures of automobiles, which I quite like. She said that the paintings were dangerous to impressionable young minds and might influence teenagers to try and imitate those automotive arrangements. Not wanting to get into the perils of arts influence on the impressionable and idiotic, I said, "I think I see the rugs over there."

 
Jeremy Dickinson, Thirteen Rears (with silverside), Twelve Rears (greyhound history), Tramway Station

The rugs were beautiful but not very practical. One was made from packaging tape. MeeMaw was in my face with "What's up with that?" She thought she had me until I simply said, "It's waterproof in case it floods."


Mark Khaisman,Antique Rug 1

MeeMaw then found an even more objectionable piece of art than the "parking dangerously" paintings. It was Eric Beltz word pieces, I welcome the dead into my soul. She exclaimed, "I would not darken the door of a house with that hanging in it." So of course I thought real hard about buying it to hang in my room.

 
Eric Beltz, I welcome the dead into my soul (Revival Wall)

But I couldn't afford it, so we wandered on.

Not to get too OED-deep into the meaning of the word fair, but a fair is market is a garage sale without a garage. The phrase quilt had kick-started MeeMaw's appetite for consumption. When she saw Rice University's booth, she gasped, "Ahhhh! You didn't have to. Gewgaws for MeeMaw." But after 30 seconds of scanning the merchandise, I could she her ambivalence set in. She was thrilled she could afford something at the prestigious art fair. However, she just wasn't sure why she would want to buy what she could afford.


Rice University Gallery 

Elsewheres there were some mighty fine teeth. "Organic gewgaws" with fine stitching, which MeeMaw said that she would have bought for Uncle Buck if she liked him more.



MeeMaw had to shake the dew off her lily, so I took that opportunity to find the holy grail of every fair: the games and the side shows.

I stumbled upon this one game. At first I thought it was a take-off on the build-a-bear theme only for the art fair kid crowd (age 20 to 40, with trust fund attached) of oil barons from Baytown. Wrong. Next, I guessed it was a game in which the object was to knock the crap off the top of these deer heads and win a prize. Problem was I couldn't find a gun or a ball or dart to throw at them. Sans equipment, I was just about to just walk up and bitch slap one of those colorful palm fronds off when one of the booth workers told me the price. Damn! Was I surprised to learn that it was one of those VIP games that cost more than I could get for MeeMaw's Buick LeSabre.


Contemporary Deer 

Disappointed, I walked over to see what was all the fuss at the Glasstire bar. From the excitement, you'd have thought they were giving away spray-paint damaged Picassos. When I got closer, I realized it was just the art world's version of "touch my lizard" for people in business attire. Never have I seen such finely clothed people holding lizards. Only they was using alligators with their mouths taped shut instead of lizards, but it's the same thing unless of course you happen to be the lizard.



I like to touch lizards as much as the next art fair patron. Nevertheless, I passed. I didn't want to have to explain to MeeMaw why I was caressing a crocodile and how that was art or in any way, shape or form related to art. I sidled up to the bar to bar to hob knob with a celebrity du heure. It must have been shift change because no one was there except Bill Davenport. Although he's whip smart and all he don't have any gold teeth or date a Kardashian, so in MeeMaw's book, he don't count.



Time was running out, so I headed straight for the side show section of the art fair. None of the maps or signage pointed to it and they didn't have a crier, but when I turned the corner, there was no doubt in my mind that I had hit the art fair side show. Behold! photos of Basquiat, breasts, and blind folds.


Basquiat photo orgy 


Blind Folds and Breasts 

I stood around ogling the three until a booth worker asked me to quit fogging up the glass on the Basquiat or he'd have me removed from the fair. As I was leaving, a woman approached me and offered to show me what I wanted to see if I'd meet her by the water fountains.

Let me just say art fair types frown on running through their hallowed halls yelling "whoopee!"

I was elated until I got to the water fountains. There wasn't just one water fountain. There were 6, each for separate ethnicity: Muslim, Latin American, African American, Native American, White, Asian American. I was in a conundrum. I wasn't sure which ethnicity she was. Furthermore, I wasn't sure which one I was. After all, my ancestors where sluts. I look white but if those water fountains collect your saliva and then run it through one of those CSI machines, I might be accused of going to the wrong fountain. I waited. I wavered, but finally I wandered off in dismay.

The last thing I needed was MeeMaw to find me at the wrong water fountain with the right girl.

 
Travis Somerville, Well Division
  
Travis Somerville, Well Division

  
Travis Somerville, Well Division

  
Travis Somerville, Well Division

MeeMaw found me staring at some white guy quenching himself at the fountains. "You been staring at him the whole time? It's time to go."

Now it ain't a fair and it ain't over until someone propositions you in the parking lot. As we was walking toward our car, this gawky guy in a white PAN ARTS FAIR t-shirt comes over, blocks my MeeMaws path and says. "Psst. You wanna go to real art fair?"

"We've just come from one. Cost my grandson and famous art blogger $40 a ticket."

He looked at us. "You was robbed. See that building. It's the Embassy Suites. In Room 307 is the Pan Arts Fair. That's a real art fair."

"You mean a whole art fair in one room?" MeeMaw said skeptically.

"Totally. They've even got art in the drawers."

"I'm sure they've got all kinds of MIRACLES in their drawers. And as far as we're concerned, they can keep them there!"

She pushed the young man a side and made a beeline for the car.

But later that evening, I overheard her telling her friend Mabel on sky, "if I didn't have that brat with me, I just might went to look in those drawers."

May be next time MeeMaw. May be next time.