Most Popular Pan Posts of 2011

by Robert Boyd

I write posts, Dean Liscum writes posts, but we never have any idea in advance whether they will catch on with readers. You people are ciphers! Anyway, here are the most popular 2011 posts based on page views:

1) A Matter of Wit at Fotofest. Readers came for the nudity but I hope they left delighted with these wacky, surreal photos.

2) A Letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. I can take no credit whatsoever for this animated version of a well-known encouraging letter from the famous conceptual artist to the famous post-minimal artist. It was animated by Levni Yilmaz, and it really caught on with readers, probably because of its good humor and optimism.



still from Waste Land

3) Vik Muñiz's Waste Land. This was a review of the Oscar-nominated documentary. Read the review then watch it on Netflix!

4) Mysterious North Houston Art Colony Discovered. This was my first (of three) post about Itchy Acres up in Independence Heights. It got a link from Swamplot, the ever-popular real-estate blog, whose readers (including me) delight in finding new and unusual things in out-of-the-way Houston neighborhoods.

5) The LapDance Scholarship (NSFW). This one, about and artist/stripper who funds other artists through her erotic dancing, caught on partly because of those four magic letters NSFW, but also because I posted links on various Iowa and University of Iowa Reddits. I hope some readers got the message about how Emily Moran Barwick grants challenged the very idea of grants--it forced grant recipients to know exactly how their grants were being paid for (which is not the usual case).

6) Is The Houston Chronicle's Art Critic Trying to Get Himself Fired? This was the first of several posts on the saga of Devon Britt-Darby, where he comes out as a once-and-future gay prostitute and former meth addict. This is an ongoing story, and you can follow it on Britt-Darby's blog, Reliable Narratives.

7) Urban Animals by Merrie Wright. There's a great Shonen Knife album called "Rock Animals" which has a song on it ironically about animals made of concrete in a local playground. Maybe people had the same cognitive dissonance here--Wright's art had nothing to do with the beloved 1980s roller-skating gang in Houston, but was actually about animals in urban environments, evolving new strategies of camouflage.

8) Howard the Duck is an Orphan Now...Gene Colan, 1926-2011. This was an obituary of the artist most associated with the comic character Howard the Duck.



Francis Giampietro, "Thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissolvable by the annihilation of one of us!", reconstituted refrigerator, pressure treated wood, furniture leather, ice and pvc, 2011

9) Every Year More MFAs Are Loosed On Houston. This was my review of the 2011 University of Houston MFA class, but it also was a think piece on what happened to previous year's MFAs.

10) Diana Al-Hadid, Cordy Ryman and Jennifer Riley at Peel. Three out-of-town artists showed at Peel (which primarily shows out-of-towners). Al-Hadid and Ryman in particular are up-and-comers. This review is not too different from my other reviews, so I have no idea why it was so popular.

All I can judge by this is that readers like the following--nudity, sex workers, videos, and artists who aren't from Houston. So for 2012, expect a lot more posts featuring videos of international art stars cavorting with naked prostitutes. That should push my page views high enough to start running ads!

Now one final "most popular" post. It's from 2010, but it was the most popular post in 2011 and is my all-time most popular post: Age of Consent. It's a discussion of the movie Age of Consent, about an Australian artist who moves out to a remote beach to try to get new inspiration. It's based on a novel of the same name by an extremely interesting Australian artist/writer named Norman Lindsay. So why is this old post so popular? Imagine the following words in a Google search: "Helen Mirren" and "naked".

Diana Al-Hadid, Cordy Ryman and Jennifer Riley at Peel

I never know what to think of Peel. On one hand, it's a jewelry store (kind of). And jewelry is something that not only doesn't interest me, but also something which I instinctively feel doesn't overlap with any of my interests. This probably reflects my fundamental dude-ness. I've never worn an earring or necklace or bracelet. I only slip on my class ring for alumni functions. I guess what I'm saying is that my personal indifference to jewelry is probably blinding me to the fact that many people who are deeply interested in jewelry are also deeply interested in art. And Peel seems to have made it a mission to reach people who are deeply interested in both.

The current show, "Nowness," is all art. It was curated by Lea Weingarten, who is probably better known by her married name, Lea Fastow. She spent a year in prison for Enron-related crimes. I am inclined to feel as Obama did when asked about Michael Vick--people who have paid their debt to society deserve a second chance. That said, when I went to the Peel Gallery website and clicked on the link under her name, I got a "Malicious Web Site Blocked" message. The name of her website is contemporaryconnoisseur (dot) com, and I don't suggest you visit it--Norton Safe Web identified it as having 18 computer threats. I still want to believe Lea Weingarten is a reformed member of society, but she really needs to clean up her website which is attempts to download malicious code into the computers of people who visit it. Not cool.

Anyway, the art is the important thing. I enjoyed two of the thee artists here. The best was Diana Al-Hadid.


Diana Al-Hadid, untitled, xerox transfer, conte, shellac, 2008

Her pieces in this show all resemble this--ghostly grey shapes fully of swirling texture. When I saw them, I thought of rubbings from nature--where you take a piece of paper and a soft lead pencil and place it on a tree's bark or a large rock, and rub the paper with the pencil to capture the pattern of texture of the bark or stone. The scale of these drawings tells me that they can't be actual rubbings, but given that they were made partly with xerox, they could be a composite of rubbings, or one rubbing blown up large.

The textures relate the drawings to her sculptures (none of which are in this show, alas), which have highly textured surfaces. Of course, one also thinks of Max Ernst's "frottages"--rubbings--that he used as elements in his paintings. But Al-Hadid's work has a different feel than the often apocalyptic frottage paintings of Ernst. These drawings are spectral and feel like images that can't quite be perceived.


Cody Ryman, Bars and Stripes, acrylic, enamel, wood and fiberglass mesh on Gator board, 2009

Cody Ryman's work is like a cargo cult version of minimalism or color field painting. So you get a little Frank Stella (above), a little Larry Poons (below) and so on.


Cordy Ryman, Nelma Stamp, acrylic, enamel and ink on wood, 2010

Of course, a Frank Stella painting is a highly crafted object made of extremely durable materials. Ryman, on the other hand, glued wood to Gatorboard--which is a kind of heavy-duty polystyrene foam material. Everything about his versions of minimalism is designed to undercut minimalism's austere authority. He's like Frank Stella's hillbilly cousin, constructing items exclusively out of the junk pile in the back yard. It's a parody, essentially, and I find it pretty amusing.


Cordy Ryman, Frosted Corner, acrylic and enamel on wood, 2008

I mean, who wouldn't like a Dan Flavin sculpture where the fluorescent tube had been replaced by Pop-Tarts? That said, this work seems to have nowhere to go. You have a laugh and move on. In this regard, these paintings are quite unlike the haunting drawings of Al-Hadid.


Jennifer Riley, Modernissimo, oil on canvas, 2010

Jennifer Riley also seems to be making a pastiche of early modernist abstraction. But her's is not really all that amusing. I feel like she wants her paintings to be wacky and playful but only achieves dryness. Weirdly enough, her work reminds me of the work of cartoonist/painter Mary Fleener, who refers to her own style as "cubismo" (!). But Fleener's work has a barbaric energy that these lifeless paintings utterly lack. This kind of energy is also present in Ryman's nutty work--placing it in the same room as Riley's paintings was probably a bad idea.