Pan Video Parade

Robert Boyd

The world's laziest blog posts are those where a blogger just post a bunch of videos he found elsewhere on the web. This is one of those posts.



Kyle Chayka calls this bit from Portlandia  a sketch on conceptual art, but I'd say it's more about "participatory art" (I realize this is a hair-splitting distinction). He points out how he loves how there are wall labels for all the pieces. My favorite line is the very last one.

Arts InSight is a show on PBS about Houston art. You can see a lot of it on YouTube videos that are posted to their site, if you miss it on TV.  Here are a few:



The Art Guys talk about their work. I liked this one because it seemed like they were trying to make the work accessible to someone who maybe knows nothing about conceptual art or performance art.



Many readers are pretty familiar with the story of John and Dominique de Menil, but this short video lays it out in a succinct way, with lots of video of their Phillip Johnson-designed house.

And finally, a video that appeared on Glasstire just yesterday! (Yes, I'm totally shameless.) It's from the Nasher Sculpture Center up in Dallas (just saw the Ken Price retrospective there--fantastic!). It's for a project called Xchange, celebrating the Nasher's tenth birthday (X = 10, geddit?).



Xchange will put art all over town in public spaces. The artists include a few internationally famous names like Alfredo Jaar and and Ugo Rondinone, but Houston and Dallas are resented with the inclusion of Rick Lowe, Vicki Meek and the Good/Bad Art Collective. I think in keeping with Nasher family tradition, the 10 pieces should all be sited at shopping malls.

The Weird Impulse of Collectors to Pretend to be Artists

I read a really great travel book about Texas years ago. I can't remember the title or author (which kills me, because I would love to reread it). I bought it in London in the late 80s, and it was by an English writer. He made really funny, astute observations about Texas in the 80s. For example, he was at a party in Dallas, and mentioning some behavior he had witnessed earlier, one of the guests said to him, "In Dallas, the guy who collects the art is more important than the artist."

This observation really shouldn't be limited to Dallas. In the context of the book, it was about the crassness of Dallas, the naked worship of wealth that typified Dallas. But really, is Houston or anyplace in America all that different? Especially now when we have the widest gap between rich and everyone else that we have had since the gilded age.

Anyway, what got me thinking about this stuff this morning was this hilarious post on Hyperallergic.

A not-unexpected surprise awaits visitors to the Miami-based Rubell Family Collection’s website. Scion of collector royalty and son of Don and Mera, Jason Rubell is releasing a catalogue of a show memorializing the works he collected from ages 13 to 21, an illustrious and mature body of art that Jason also gathered into a senior thesis exhibition in college. Pay attention folks, this is a lesson in narcissism that’s likely to go unparalleled in the art world for a little while. [...]

To call this conflict of interest would be ridiculous because we’re dealing with a wholly private collection. Rubell can do what he wants. I’m just calling it stupid and self-obsessed. Are we supposed to believe Rubell’s posing his early “collecting work” as some kind of curatorial accomplishment? This catalogue is self-mythologizing in the worst way. And worse yet, a (Thomas Ruff?) portrait of the collector as a young man is the only thing to grace the cover of the volume.

This is a catalog memorializing Rubell's precocious brilliance as a teenage art collector? Astonishing. I hope Holland Chaney will have enough class to avoid this kind of thing 25 years from now.

That said, there is an impulse among collectors that I am personally very well aware of--the tendency to take pride in one's collection; to view it as a reflection of one's own self-worth. And this is true of any kind of collector--stamp collectors, comics book collectors, collectors of glass insulators--anything really. The only difference between the Jason Rubells of the world and a dude with a truly awesome barb wire collection is that the Rubell types have huge amounts of money to promote their collections. Some do so in ways that are hard to criticize (the Menils, for example, were civic minded exemplars of noblesse oblige), and some--like Jason Rubell--do it in ways that make them the target of ridicule by bloggers and other poor people.

Note on Jim Love: From Now On

 
Jim Love: From Now On
This big book is a retrospective of the work of sculptor Jim Love. Love (1927-2005) was one of Houston's first modern artists, and his biography is a major part of the art history of Houston. This is a subject that interests me greatly (as regular readers know). In the sixties, Mad Magazine published a piece called something like "Incredibly Short Books." The titles were along the lines of "The Humility of Mohammed Ali" and "Great Military Victories of the Italian Army." On the face of it, "The Art History of Houston" would be such a book.

But I am fascinated with this history, largely because I'm here and can witness it happening. But also, because I like seeing how art history unfolds in "provincial" locations, outside the art capitals. And what is interesting about looking at art in these places is to see how it evolved in its own unique way (always, though, in a kind of dialogue with the art capitals). That's why I am fascinated with the history of the Ferus Gallery and the evolution of art in L.A. during the sixties. I am very interested in Soviet non-comformist art for the same reason. (I also happen to like the art of both places quite a lot.) I'm not suggesting Houston artists have achieved what the L.A. artists of the 60s or the non-conformist artists did, but the story of Houston's art is still interesting.

Love was one of the earliest modern artists in Houston. Love went to Baylor and fell in with the theater crowd. He started building theater sets, and eventually met Jermayne MacAgy. She hired him to be a "museum technician" at the nascent Contemporary Arts Museum in 1956. (MacAgy is a key figure in the history of art in Houston. She was hired to come to Houston by the great catalyst of art in Houston, Dominique De Menil.) It was only after he started working in the museum that Love started making art by welding bits of junk together. That was, more or less, his career until he died.

He was lumped in with the assemblagists early on, but his art isn't like Rauschenberg or Kienholz. The artist he most resembles is H.C. Westermann (from another "provincial" art city, Chicago). But Love was a lesser artist. There aren't great depths in his work, nor was he as formally inventive as his peers in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. His work has a kind of sweet childlike quality, reflected in his subject matter--flowers, jacks, teddy bears.

As a Rice student, I saw his sculpture "Paul Bunyan Bouquet #2" on campus often (it was, and as far as I know still is, in the Lovett College courtyard). I always thought it was kind of ridiculous. I've mellowed towards it as I've gotten older. I can enjoy the charms of Love's work now. His work is visible all over Houston. (I'll try to take photos of some of the public work, and add their locations to my art map.)

This book has great photos of most of Love's work. The essays and timeline that accompany the photos give you a good idea of where Love came from and his place in the local scene. The Mel Chin piece is an especially interesting tribute.