The People's Choices

by Robert Boyd

Before we dive into the results of my public survey of the best of Houston's art scene in 2011, let me talk a bit about the poll. First of all, there were a total of 65 respondents--thank you all. On one hand, 65 is great. On the other hand, I think it represents just a fraction of the total number of people in Houston who have an opinion on what their favorite art exhibits were. I wish I had further reach.

Additionally, with 65 respondents, it is fairly easy to game the results. I believe this has happened--not maliciously, but by virtue of friends of certain artists and galleries voting for those artists and galleries. Let me reiterate--there is nothing wrong with this. If my friend had a great show and I loved it, voting for it is perfectly legitimate. And if I were an artist who had a show in 2011, I would have linked to the poll on my Facebook page and let my friends know.

And even if there wasn't that level of deliberate action, the fact is that The Great God Pan is Dead is read by a certain constituency. I'd call it the Joanna/Art Palace/Box 13 constituency (and perhaps add to it the Nau-Haus/PG Contemporary constituency), and artists valued by these constituencies did very well. And deservedly so! But I mention this because I believe that if I had gotten 200 respondents or 500 respondents, the results would have been substantially different. In a way, this poll reveals more about The Great God Pan Is Dead and its readership than it does about Houston's art as a whole. So be it. It's my first try at this and while I'm sure I'll get better at it as the years go on, I'm quite pleased with the results.

Best Art Exhibits in 2011

What was interesting here was the voting was highly spread out. There was in no way a consensus. With so many good choices, respondents voted across the map. Still, there was a victor:
Seth Alverson at Art Palace with nine votes. (Big applause!)

Seth Alverson, Chair, Chair II, oil on canvas, 2009-2011

Just to demonstrate how broad the votes were scattered, there was a three-way tie for 2nd place (with seven votes each):
Lane Hagood, The Museum of Eterna at the Joanna
Kenn Coplan, Ultimate Kenn at Nau-haus Art Space
group exhibit, Pan y Circos at PG Contemporary (the "friends of Robert Boyd faction" really came through!)

And in third place, there was a six-way tie with  six votes each:
Charles LeDray, workworkworkworkworkwork at the MFAH
Francis Giampietro & Jeremy DePrez, The Power of Negative Feedback at Lawndale
Mark Flood at Cardoza Gallery
Marvin Zindler, Bayou City Noir at the Museum of Printing History
Upside Down: Arctic Realities at the Menil
Vija Celmins: Television + Disaster, 1964-9166 at the Menil

Of this entire list, the biggest surprises were what didn't make it to six or more votes, but among the winners, the most pleasant surprise for me was the quirky Marvin Zindler photo show at the Museum of Printing History.


Best Performance Art in 2011

This category was a little trickier, I thought, because of the transitory nature of performance. You had to be there to even really identify the piece, much less form some kind of personal judgment. The big winner, however, was:
Cody Ledvina, Gawd parents: I am real at BOX 13 (with 15 votes!)

Cody Ledvina's performance Gawd parents: I am real

There was a tie for second place with six votes each:
Dennis Harper and Friends, iPageant at the Joanna
Jim Woodring, Demonstration of Nibbus Maximus at Walpurgis Afternoon at Lawndale

And third place with four votes goes to:
The Bridge Club, Natural Resources at Lawndale

Most Significant Local Art-Related Events of 2011

This was my catch-all category where the events that shaped the ecology of the local art scene could be ranked. And the number one event with 16 votes was:
The Texas Contemporary Art Fair

Jason Willaford, Out of Site - Out of Sight, chrome plated oil barrels, 2010 at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair


Number two with 12 votes was:
The Houston Fine Art Fair

The fact that these two art fairs were ranked one and two shows how important respondents felt about art fairs coming to Houston. And it was important. Arturo Palacio told me that more people stopped by his booth at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair that went into his gallery all year. With attendance numbers of 10,000 batted around--most of whom were from Houston and vicinity--this was a big deal for all the local galleries that attended, as well as for the out-of-town galleries.

Coming in at third with 11 votes was:
Devon Britt-Darby vs The Art Guys

This category was my way of encapsulating a variety of events--the Menil acquiring the tree that the Art Guys married, Britt's coverage of that in the Chronicle, his counterperformance in marrying gallerina Reese Darby (and changing his name to Devon Britt-Darby), his confession of his former life as a meth-addicted male prostitute, his annotated road-trip (financed by being a male escort), and his firing from the Houston Chronicle. Certainly it got a lot of people talking.


Thanks everyone who voted, and happy new year!

Robert Boyd's Best of 2011

by Robert Boyd

There were lots of enjoyable exhibits and performances this year. It's really hard to choose the best--it's even hard to choose my favorites because they keep changing. Ask me in three months, and my list might be different. That said, below are my list of my 10 favorite 2011 exhibits in Houston as of December 21, 2011 (plus a long list of honorable mentions). The shows below are not listed in any sort of ranked order. Each was excellent in its own way.



John Wood and Paul Harrison, video stills

John Wood and Paul Harrison, Answers to Questions at CAMH. I don't dislike video art, but sometimes I find it tedious to look at in a museum or gallery setting. It is a credit both to these hilarious but deadpan videos and to the CAMH's exhibit design that I sat for hours and watched Wood and Harrison's videos.


Charles LeDray, Hole, fabric, thread, plastic, wood, metal, 19 1/4 x 13 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches, 1998

Charles LeDray, workworkworkworkworkwork at MFA. A Houston art world figure called this show "disgusting." But I loved it. It thought it was rich and beautifully wrought. The empty suits spoke of absence--which as they were made at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s is appropriate. The little sculptures and tableaux appeal to me in a visceral way. I visited this show several times.



Havel-Ruck Projects, Torrent at the Houston Permitting Center

Houston Permitting Center. This will be the subject of a post in the next few days. Not all art happens in galleries or museums. In this case, Studio Red took an old warehouse and turned it into a fairly fantastic city building. But what gets it on the top 10 is the art by Dick Wray, Serena Lin Bush, Jesse Sifuentes, Kaneem Smith, Geoff Winningham, Metalab Studio, Havel-Ruck Projects, Agnes Welsh Eyster, GONZO 247 and artist/curator Mary Margaret Hansen. It's like there was another museum in Houston that you never heard of.


Man Bartlett puts a price on your dreams at Skydive

Man Bartlett #24hclerk at Skydive. For a 24-hour period, you could Tweet your dreams to Man Bartlett. He would ponder your dream for a couple of minutes, then announce its price. He would set a price gun to that price and put a label with that price on a large piece of white paper on the wall. (Meanwhile, Nancy Douthey sat off to the side transcribing the proceedings on an old electric typewriter.) A camera captured the action live on Bartlett's website. I loved this idea and enjoyed dipping in from time to time during the day as he kept on pricing dreams from around the world. I came to see him in person at Skydive at the very beginning of the performance and the very end.



Exurb, Input/Output at the Joanna

Exurb, Input/Output at the Joanna. This was a large, multichannel digital/analog sound sculpture by Exurb, a five person collective. It was loud and weird and I loved it. Yet another example of technological art, I loved that it employed both archaic analog electronics with cutting edge software.



Mark Flood, Another Painting, fluorescent paint

Mark Flood at Cardoza Gallery. For years I had wanted to see Flood's art, but he had no gallery in Houston. So while people in Berlin and New York could see his work, I could only see jpegs. Until this show. And it not only lived up to my expectations, it blew them away.


Larassa Kabel, Any Minute Now, Bay, colored pencil on paper, 2011.

Larassa Kabal at Peel Gallery. How Peel Gallery found this relatively obscure Iowa artist, I don't know. But these beautifully rendered life-size drawings of horses falling are not likely to be forgotton once you've seen them. Unnerving yet beautiful, this was a small show with a large impact.


Jeremy DePrez, 5 out of 194 Countries I Have Never Been To, oil and acrylic on canvas with country selection assistance by http://www.randomcountry.com, 2011

33rd School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition at the Blaffer. Some of my favorite artists in town got their MFAs this year--Francis Giampietro, Britt Ragsdale, Emily Peacock, and Jeremy DePrez. Seeing them all together showing some of their best work (along with excellent work by other grads) was terrific. 


Natural Resources by The Bridge Club

The Bridge Club, Natural Resources at Lawndale. While the idea behind this performance seemed a little obvious, that was beside the point. What mattered was the staging--the identical costumes of the four performers, the hyper-deliberate, slow movements of each performer, the low lighting, the glass jars. It was a dream-like, hypnotic performance, and I fell in love with Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills (or at least fell in love with their characters) as I watched.


Lane Hagood, Detourned Bust, mass-produced statuary, foam, acrylic paint, 2010

Lane Hagood, The Museum of Eterna at the Joanna. I've been a fan of Hagood's since I first saw his work at Gallery 1724. This show was like a museum, with each room dedicated to a different artist who all happened to be Lane Hagood. This Fernando Pessoa-like strategy worked brilliantly--it allowed him to try wildly different approaches to working. This show reinforced Hagood's literary side. As a bookish guy myself, I love that Hagood is a bookworm.

When I look at this list, I can see it says a lot more about me and my tastes than anything else. I don't claim to have an absolute conception of "good art." I'm not Clement Greenberg, and thank god for that. I'm more of a follower of Thomas McEvilley, who thinks the best you can hope for is an educated personal taste. I think  we saw that with the best shows as chosen by the Houston art community. Between their top six list and my top 10, there was only one overlapping choice. This is not to say everyone's opinion is equal, but even among people who know a lot about art and who have well-developed tastes, there is little consensus.

Next up--Honorable Mentions, shows I liked a lot but that didn't make the top 10. and the Worst Shows of 2011.

Dishonorable Mention--Houston Art Scenesters' Least Favorites of 2011

by Robert Boyd

Lots of folks in the Houston art scene selected their favorite shows/performances/whatevahs for Pan--so many that it took five blog posts just to list them all (you can read them here, here, here, here and here). But of the 14 who responded, only three offered up their "worst of Houston," and two of them requested anonymity. I can understand this--writing (and thinking) about things you don't like is often not as fun as doing it for things you like. I think this is one reason that there are more good reviews than bad reviews. But I think it's important to express the negative as well as the positive. Otherwise, we exist in an uncritical environment, a kind of pollyannish boosterism. No one is held to account. Critical dialogue is completely one-sided. So listed below are the worst of Houston, as chosen by Jim Pirtle and two anonymous local artists.

The attack on the Art Guy's tree. Jim Pirtle selected this without comment, but I wasn't sure if he saw it as the best or worst of Houston? I asked him to clarify, and he sent the following: "the killing of the art guys tree at the Menil. [Was that the best event or the worst?] more in the surreal category that a work of was so clearly misunderstood as commenting on gay marriage and that the piece was so controversial...and said sad things about the Menil.... and shocked me almost like book burning but by what I consider to be the most enlightened...and if art is about thinking the saga of that tree is conceptual agony" Nuff said!


Darke Gallery "If you didn't get to Austin to see the Texas Biennial." An anonymous respondent wrote "the principal of this was the worst. Lazy curating/zero curating, crazy title, overall tacky." Brutal. (That said, I thought the Darke Gallery had some fine shows--I especially liked the Kathy Kelley show.)


Mark Wagner's Gale Bill was on view at the Houston Fine Art Fair, symbolizing all the money whirling around the joint

The Houston Fine Art Fair. Here's what one respondent had to say: "Ugh. Just... man. So overblown and all-around awful." Weirdly enough, this was the only mention of either of the art fairs by the respondents to my polls.


Workworkworkworkwork by Charles LeDray at MFAH. One of my respondents really didn't like this show: "Charles LeDray work work disgusted me. I'm not interested in his tedious OCD-related doll clothes and I don't think they're art." (For a somewhat different take--mine--read this.)



Walter de Maria, Trilogies at the Menil. The same respondent also loathed de Maria's show. "Walter de Maria was epic fail...a 25 cent idea with a million dollar budget."

George Gittoes, Witness to War at the Station Museum. That correspondent completed his own trilogy of vituperation by writing, "But the worst ...The Station's endless survey of propaganda posing as art hit a new low with the Witness To War: George Gittoes. If this is the left, color me totalitarian."

That's all from the Houston art community (at least the ones who answered my questions). Next up, my own personal favorites (and most disliked).

Slightly Used Links

by Robert Boyd


illustration from Hands Up! or Enemy no. 1 by Rifkat Shayfutdinovich Bagautdinov, 1971

Hands up! I love these illustrations by Rifkat Shayfutdinovich Bagautdinov from a 1971 Soviet YA novel, Hands Up! or Enemy no. 1. (50 Watts)

What's up with museum guards? Theodore Bale is a local critic who is unfortunately not nearly as prolific as I personally would like. I liked this piece on the Stan VanDerBeek and Charles LeDray shows (at the CAMH and MFAH respectively). I agree with him strongly about the staging of the LeDray exhibit (as I wrote earlier this year), but what I like best were his interactions with the guards, including one who told him "not to point at [the] object." (Texas, a Concept)

The Wall Street Journal's art coverage sucks. That's the short version of this piece by Ben Davis. Some zingers: "You have to at least try to connect with the art of the present if you want people making art in the present to care about what you are saying. Taken as a whole package, the WSJ gives off the impression of being a paper that understands why people might buy contemporary art — just not why people might like it." And the conclusion: "Of all of the outrages within Rupert Murdoch's far-flung empire, letting the Wall Street Journal's art pages slide into irrelevance because it chimes with a sort of conservative worldview is probably a relatively minor one. But, you know, it is still one of them." ("How Conservative Ideology Stunted the Wall Street Journal's Art Coverage" by Ben Davis, ArtInfo)

I thought only comic book artists got treated this bad. Have you ever heard of DegreeArt.com? They are "an innovative company selling, commissioning and renting the finest artwork created by the students and recent graduates emerging from the most prestigious art establishments," (according to their website). They aim their services at art students and recent graduates (i.e., hungry suckers). I became aware of them after reading this post. They have some of the harshest terms I have ever read:

 By submitting any material to us, you automatically grant DegreeArt.com the royalty-free, perpetual, exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, modify, edit, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such material (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. You also acknowledge that DegreeArt.com is not obliged to publish any material submitted by you on any DegreeArt.com publication.

Jeez, that is actually worse than the work-for-hire terms that Jack Kirby and other comics artists slaved under for decades at Marvel and DC. Art students--never agree to any terms like this, ever. (Cathedral of Shit)


a Mondrian-inspired hat by Philip Colbert

Women should not dress as urinals, probably. Many of the clothes designed by Philip Colbert are knock-offs of famous art. Including a dress based on Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. The Mondrian hat is nice, though. (The Rodrik Band)


Fountain dress by Philip Colbert


Gabrielle Bell, panel from her 26th Daily Comic, 2011


Making me feel bad for thinking that Jaume Plensa's sculptures were kitschy. I really hate those Jaume Plensa "Tolerance" dudes over on Allen Parkway, and I'm not alone. I'll admit that Echo in Madison Square Park in New York is slightly less obnoxious, but still. But there is always another side of the story! (Lucky by Gabrielle Bell)

XXS: Charles LeDray at the MFAH

by Robert Boyd



Charles LeDray, Untitled (Suit with a small suit cut from it), fabric, thread,plastic, metal wood, paint, 28 1/2 x 12 x 3 inches, 2000

There is a problem with discussing Charles LeDray's work and illustrating it with photos. Untitled is a perfect example of this problem. LeDray has taken a suit (really a sportscoat, trousers, a dress-shirt and tie) and cut a tiny homunculus-version of the suit. Clever, no? Except what you can't tell from this photo is that the original suit is itself tiny--only a very, very small person indeed could ever wear it. LeDray has taken a tiny, hand-made suit and fabricated an even tinier, hand-made suit from it.



Mark Hogancamp, image from Marwencol

In the documentary film Marwencol, Mark Hogancamp, who was attacked in 2000 and suffered brain damage, creates a tiny World War II Belgian village (inhabited with foot-high dolls) as a kind of self-designed therapy. Part of this therapy involves Hogancamp taking some of his characters for a walk each day--dragging them behind him in a scale-model Jeep. In the storyline that Hogancamp has constructed for the town of Marwencol, a character representing himself is captured and tortured by the Gestapo. And this tortured character likewise drags a scale model Jeep behind him as part of his own therapy. This ever-shrinking reproduction made me think of LeDray's Untitled. And even though Hogancamp is fundamentally an outsider artist and LeDray has been exhibiting in galleries since the early 90s, I find the work similar. Both have fairly limited formal educations in art. Both have created art out of materials that might be considered feminine--dolls in Hogancamp's case, sewn materials in LeDray's case. (Hogancamp also sews costumes for the inhabitants of Marwencol.) Both artists are men, but their work could be considered feminine. Except it's not that simple, is it? Marwencol is a village of soldiers, and LeDray is sewing men's suits. (Hogancamp identifies as heterosexual, but is a cross-dresser with a fondness for women's shoes.)



Charles LeDray, Hole, fabric, thread, plastic, wood, metal, 19 1/4 x 13 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches, 1998

Even the scale of LeDray's work feminizes it. It is anti-monumental. I compare him to Hogancamp because it gives me a small handhold onto understanding the work, which I love. Gender is a part of it, but the urge to create something small--a small world, even, is also part of it. With both artists, I think of people who build small cities or buildings. Model railroad enthusiasts, for example, or doll house fanciers. There is, in some , a desire to reproduce the world in a small but highly accurate scale. There is usually an idealizing effect. The model railroad enthusiast creates a kind of ideal village for his train to pass through. Marwencol is kind of a paradise--albeit one always threatened by war. These scale models are private utopias.

LeDray is idealizes to an extent, but he also destroys his own handiwork in weird, humorous ways. He reminds me of the vaudevillian funny-men who would take scissors to the straight man's tie. But here, LeDray is both the joker and straight-man. He painstakingly makes these beautiful, tiny clothes, then wrecks them.



Charles LeDray, Torn Suit, fabric, thread, wood, metal, plastic, animal horn, acrylic paint, 29 1/4 x 13 x 3 1/4 inches, 1997-98



Charles LeDray, Untitled (Bust), fabric, thread, wood, metal, plastic, , acrylic, 4 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 2 inches, 1995

Despite the images I have just shown you, most of the tiny clothes displayed in this exhibit are not torn or cut up. Instead, LeDray has made a variety of clothes in more-or-less perfect condition. Most, but not all, are men's clothes. At some point, just making the clothes was not enough, it seems. Like Hogancamp, like the model railroad and doll house enthusiasts, LeDray decided to create a scenario, a scale-model environment, one that was meaningful to him: a men's clothing store.



Charles LeDray, Mens Suits (detail), fabric, thread, embroidery floss, batting, nylon cord, leather, leatherette, vinyl, carpet, wood, wood stain, shellac, polyurethane, paint, glue, nails, metal, metal patina, metal piping, staples, screws, paper, contact paper, cardboard, Eucaboard, plasticine clay, epoxy resin, epoxy die, Plexiglass, "Crackle Ice" styrene plastic, compact fluorescent light bulbs, light fixtures, electrical cord, dust, dimensions variable, 2006-09

Walking in to see this three-part installation is an astonishing experience. The first sensation you have is like that of walking into Legoland--delight at seeing something familiar recreated on a small scale. The attention to detail is amazing (as it is in all LeDray's work--nothing feels partially finished, nothing is a sketch or a  proposition).



Charles LeDray, Mens Suits (detail), fabric, thread, embroidery floss, batting, nylon cord, leather, leatherette, vinyl, carpet, wood, wood stain, shellac, polyurethane, paint, glue, nails, metal, metal patina, metal piping, staples, screws, paper, contact paper, cardboard, Eucaboard, plasticine clay, epoxy resin, epoxy die, Plexiglass, "Crackle Ice" styrene plastic, compact fluorescent light bulbs, light fixtures, electrical cord, dust, dimensions variable, 2006-09

This photo gives you an idea of the scale of it. In fact, as a viewer, you stand above the drop ceiling and lighting fixtures. LeDray's attention to detail is so great that he has even depicted the top of the drop ceiling realistically--it is covered with tiny scale-model dust bunnies.

So what is one to make of this tableau? We all bring our own associations to art. When I first saw it in New York last December, my reaction was--oh, very clever. But not much else. Seeing it again here in Houston, it made me think of my favorite clothing store, Harold's, which is closing down after 60 years. It actually now seems like a monument to a vanishing institution--a store where you buy a suit. After all, who wears suits all that much anymore? And here's where that play of masculine/feminine becomes delightfully confused. A place like this is historically a refuge for men; it's like the barber shop or the cigar store. Indeed, I'm reminded of Stuart Davis's 1932 mural at Rockefeller Center, Men Without Women.



Stuart Davis, Men Without Women, 1932

I have to tell you--buying a suit in a department store like Nordstroms is a very different experience than buying it in a men's clothing store. Maybe that's the simple meaning here--an homage to a vanishing institution. Again, there is a kind of utopian nostalgia in the project of making small-scale environments. Of all the things LeDray could have made, he picked a men's clothing shop.

Except that's not all. This is a three-part piece. The elegant store in the first part. Then in another part, you see what looks like the back room of a dry-cleaners. So in part one, you buy the suit and in part two, you use the suit. The third part is a thrift store--you have discarded the suit. The three spaces LeDray creates tell the life story of a suit, excluding the very beginning (manufacturing) and the very end (discarding as unwearable rags).

Anti-monumentality is a big aspect of LeDray's work, obviously. In some pieces in the show, he carries this to a logical extreme. The opposite of one big thing is a lot of little things.



Chales LeDray, Milk and Honey, 2000 vessels: glazed porcelain, glass, wood

Each of the tiny vases and teapots in Milk and Honey is an inch or two high. (And this is one of four similar works in the show.) Throughout his work, LeDray seems to be undercutting a masculinist aspect of Modernism. He rejects the big heroic piece--the enormous paintings of the abstract expressionists (and many artists since), the giant steel monuments of Mark Di Suvero, Richard Serra and others. Works that seems to say, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

This is never LeDray's message. If anything, he replaces hubris with homeliness. Like Shelley in the "Ozymandias," LeDray sometimes makes a point of reminding us of the vanity of our ambitions. Indeed, some of his works are vanitas sculptures.



Charles LeDray, Orrery, human bone, wood, glass, 2997

I was particularly struck by this one. This tiny orrery is carved from human bone, under a glass bell jar. An orrery is a now obsolete object, a mechanical model of the solar system. They reflected the flowering of human knowledge about the universe that began in the Renaissance and continued through the Enlightenment. But as those Dutch vanitas painters knew, all this wisdom was no match for death.

I've seen this exhibit twice--once at the Whitney in New York, and once at the MFAH in Houston. In the Whitney, it was displayed in fairly intimate galleries. At the MFAH, it was exhibited in the huge mezzanine space of the Law building. This space was designed by the great master of high modernist monumentality, Mies van der Rohe. And it's perfect for large artworks, but it seems to overwhelm LeDray's diminutive work. This show would have been better served in another part of the museum.But this is a small complaint, and certainly should not prevent you from seeing one of the most exciting exhibits in Houston this year.