Today I am discussing The Outlaw Bible of American Art
Showing posts with label Forrest Bess. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Forrest Bess. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2020
Robert Boyd's Book Report: The Outlaw Bible of American Art
Monday, March 30, 2020
Archive Art
Robert Boyd
Just before coronavirus shut everything down, I went to San Antonio for Novel Ideas, Blue Star Contemporary's art book fair. The keynote speaker was Julie Ault, who had been a member of the art collective Group Material from 1979 to 1996. Group Material is probably best known for the AIDS Timeline produced in 1990. They produced research-based artwork, usually very political. Listening to Ault speak got me thinking about this kind of art. I've seen examples of it many times over the years, but for whatever reason, Ault prompted me to think of it as a specific genre of art. A kind of art that doesn't, as far as I know, have a name. I've been calling it "archive art" in my mind, but if any of you know an already existing name, please let me know.
I stumbled across a workable definition while reading America Starts Here, a big art book about the work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. It's been on my "to-read" shelf for a long time, and this quarantine moment seemed like a good moment to crack it open. The first essay is by Bill Arning, written before he moved to Houston to become director of the Contemporary Art Museum. In it, he wrote:
In 2012, artist Robert Gober produced a notable example of archive art for the Whitney Biennial. He created a mini-exhibit of work by Forrest Bess. The archive part of came in vitrines devoted to Betty Parsons (Bess's gallerist) and John Money, a researcher who studied sexuality and who corresponded with Bess. This doesn't exactly fit into the approach outlined by Arning, except maybe 1) and 4). But it did require original research on Gober's part. This micro-exhibition was expanded into a major solo exhibition by the Menil Museum. Gober is not typically an archive artist--he is best known as a maker of intriguing, enigmatic objects. But he totally stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park in this project.
Two years later, the Biennial had another notable piece of archive art, The Gregory Battcock Archive by Joseph Grigely. Grigely serendipitously discovered a bunch of Battcock's papers in the building where he had his studio in 1992. Battcock was an art critic who appeared in several Andy Warhol films over the years and was the subject of a notable Alice Neel painting. He was murdered in 1980; the murder remains unsolved. In his statement about the work, Grigely describes the archive as a kind of portrait of Battson: "A document is both a material artifact and a node within a network of human relations. We both draw and draw out Battcock from these relations--the artists he talked with, the critics he argued with, the meals he shared, the students he taught, and the tricks with whom he had sex--they are all here, some with names, some with pseudonyms." I remember being fascinated by The Gregory Battcock Archive when I saw it at the Biennial--it was perhaps where the idea of "archive art" first lodged itself in my mind as a distinct category. That said, the problem with such art is that it doesn't have much visual interest. I'd much rather see an Alice Neel painting.
Alice Neel, David Bourdan and Gregory Battcock, 1970
The lack of visual pleasure is the biggest failing with this genre of art. But Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler are exceptions to this airless approach. The work they did fits into Arning's schema while also being visually beautiful.
Carrie Schneider, installation at the CAMH, 2014
One local artist who has long engaged in this kind of artwork is Carrie Marie Schneider. Her exhibition, Incommensurate Mapping, at the CAMH in 2014 was a perfect example. She studied the CAMH's archives and used them to critique the CAMH in an amusingly subversive way. I wrote about this exhibit at length when it came out in two posts for this blog.
There have been other notable examples of this kind of art (loosely defined) in Houston. For example, City Council Meeting, a semi-theatrical piece of participatory artwork put on by Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay under the auspices of DiverseWorks at the El Dorado Ballroom in 2012, or Liz Magic Laser's Tell Me What You Want to Hear at DiverseWorks in 2012. Or Ericson and Zeigler's Red House (1979) and several other projects from the same time in Houston, as well as an installation at DiverseWorks in 1987. Obviously, DiverseWorks has been a major venue for this genre of art for several decades.
For me, this work sometimes is remarkably good. The idea of researching and presenting one's research has a natural appeal to a bookish person like me. It depends on how well the artwork is constructed and how much the artists' obsessions line up with my own. In the case of The Gregory Battcock Archive and Incommensurate Mapping, they worked for me very well indeed.
Just before coronavirus shut everything down, I went to San Antonio for Novel Ideas, Blue Star Contemporary's art book fair. The keynote speaker was Julie Ault, who had been a member of the art collective Group Material from 1979 to 1996. Group Material is probably best known for the AIDS Timeline produced in 1990. They produced research-based artwork, usually very political. Listening to Ault speak got me thinking about this kind of art. I've seen examples of it many times over the years, but for whatever reason, Ault prompted me to think of it as a specific genre of art. A kind of art that doesn't, as far as I know, have a name. I've been calling it "archive art" in my mind, but if any of you know an already existing name, please let me know.
I stumbled across a workable definition while reading America Starts Here, a big art book about the work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. It's been on my "to-read" shelf for a long time, and this quarantine moment seemed like a good moment to crack it open. The first essay is by Bill Arning, written before he moved to Houston to become director of the Contemporary Art Museum. In it, he wrote:
The list of strategies Ericson and Ziegler used to make artworks seemed very unusual at the time, though today's young artists regularly employ these methods, which include the following: 1) Researching arcane areas of knowledge and pursuing a passion for the aura of the archive; 2) Using mapping and other similar ways of schematizing life; 3) Creating a system that dictates all significant visual decisions about a work's presentation; 4) Employing found elements rather than causing something new to be made; 5) Viewing the entire country as a text to be read, engaged and decoded; 6) Using natural materials, like stone, leaves, and water, as they are inflected or coded by culture; 7) Critically engaging decoration and architecture for what they reveal about society; 8) Using Americana as topic, material, or motif; 9) Engaging cultural institutions, museums, and monuments, such as the Supreme Court, libraries, and universities; 10) Investigating governmental decisions about urban space and making them public; 11) Collecting and collating found language, which can subsequently function as a kind of found poetry; 12) Using the practical business decisions of others as a structuring device for works; 13) Designing projects that exist in multiple states, each of which creates meaning; from the first research to the final use of materials; 14) Insertting delays into a process that unnaturally extends the in-between period of a simple task such as landscaping or cleaning, rendering otherwise invisible processes conspicuous and examinable; 15) Allowing works to disappear through transformation, making them cease to be "art" and instead begin to fulfill a useful function; 16) Cooperating with people outside the specific disciplines of the art world in a way that gives them a non-artistic way to participate; 17) Choosing to work with each other as collaborators.That is quite a list! And really, I think the totality of this list only applies to Ericson and Zeigler. But I think big portions of the list apply to many of the artists who create "archive art," like Group Material.
In 2012, artist Robert Gober produced a notable example of archive art for the Whitney Biennial. He created a mini-exhibit of work by Forrest Bess. The archive part of came in vitrines devoted to Betty Parsons (Bess's gallerist) and John Money, a researcher who studied sexuality and who corresponded with Bess. This doesn't exactly fit into the approach outlined by Arning, except maybe 1) and 4). But it did require original research on Gober's part. This micro-exhibition was expanded into a major solo exhibition by the Menil Museum. Gober is not typically an archive artist--he is best known as a maker of intriguing, enigmatic objects. But he totally stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park in this project.
Two years later, the Biennial had another notable piece of archive art, The Gregory Battcock Archive by Joseph Grigely. Grigely serendipitously discovered a bunch of Battcock's papers in the building where he had his studio in 1992. Battcock was an art critic who appeared in several Andy Warhol films over the years and was the subject of a notable Alice Neel painting. He was murdered in 1980; the murder remains unsolved. In his statement about the work, Grigely describes the archive as a kind of portrait of Battson: "A document is both a material artifact and a node within a network of human relations. We both draw and draw out Battcock from these relations--the artists he talked with, the critics he argued with, the meals he shared, the students he taught, and the tricks with whom he had sex--they are all here, some with names, some with pseudonyms." I remember being fascinated by The Gregory Battcock Archive when I saw it at the Biennial--it was perhaps where the idea of "archive art" first lodged itself in my mind as a distinct category. That said, the problem with such art is that it doesn't have much visual interest. I'd much rather see an Alice Neel painting.
Alice Neel, David Bourdan and Gregory Battcock, 1970
The lack of visual pleasure is the biggest failing with this genre of art. But Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler are exceptions to this airless approach. The work they did fits into Arning's schema while also being visually beautiful.
Carrie Schneider, installation at the CAMH, 2014
One local artist who has long engaged in this kind of artwork is Carrie Marie Schneider. Her exhibition, Incommensurate Mapping, at the CAMH in 2014 was a perfect example. She studied the CAMH's archives and used them to critique the CAMH in an amusingly subversive way. I wrote about this exhibit at length when it came out in two posts for this blog.
There have been other notable examples of this kind of art (loosely defined) in Houston. For example, City Council Meeting, a semi-theatrical piece of participatory artwork put on by Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay under the auspices of DiverseWorks at the El Dorado Ballroom in 2012, or Liz Magic Laser's Tell Me What You Want to Hear at DiverseWorks in 2012. Or Ericson and Zeigler's Red House (1979) and several other projects from the same time in Houston, as well as an installation at DiverseWorks in 1987. Obviously, DiverseWorks has been a major venue for this genre of art for several decades.
For me, this work sometimes is remarkably good. The idea of researching and presenting one's research has a natural appeal to a bookish person like me. It depends on how well the artwork is constructed and how much the artists' obsessions line up with my own. In the case of The Gregory Battcock Archive and Incommensurate Mapping, they worked for me very well indeed.
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Finding Forrest Bess
Robert Boyd
I've always wanted to have hard copies of some of the writing I have done for this blog. So I decided to do it myself.
I chose to update and collect my three pieces about artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977) from 2013 into a pamphlet. I've been thinking about this for a year or so. Then last year, I curated an exhibit at the Galveston Artist Residency. One of the things we did was to produce a catalog for the show in the form of a zine that contained a long interview with artist Scott Gilbert and a list of the pieces of art in the exhibit. The zine was produced by Dan Schmahl, who designed it and printed it on his risograph printer.
I loved how the True Artist Tales catalog came out. And I also liked Wake, a zine that Schmahl contributed to and printed. And Binder, a zine produced by the Galveston Artist Residency. I recommend both. So I asked Schmahl if he would design and print 100 copies of my pamphlet.
You can see the result above--that is the entire print run. You can order a copy for a mere $6.50 through my online store.
I've always wanted to have hard copies of some of the writing I have done for this blog. So I decided to do it myself.
I chose to update and collect my three pieces about artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977) from 2013 into a pamphlet. I've been thinking about this for a year or so. Then last year, I curated an exhibit at the Galveston Artist Residency. One of the things we did was to produce a catalog for the show in the form of a zine that contained a long interview with artist Scott Gilbert and a list of the pieces of art in the exhibit. The zine was produced by Dan Schmahl, who designed it and printed it on his risograph printer.
I loved how the True Artist Tales catalog came out. And I also liked Wake, a zine that Schmahl contributed to and printed. And Binder, a zine produced by the Galveston Artist Residency. I recommend both. So I asked Schmahl if he would design and print 100 copies of my pamphlet.
You can see the result above--that is the entire print run. You can order a copy for a mere $6.50 through my online store.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
The Pan Review of Books: Midcentury Modern Art in Texas
Robert Boyd
I remember reading Robert Hughes on how when he was a young man in Australia, he and his friends would have passionate discussions about the latest developments in modern art based on two inch tall black and white photos in Art News. It wasn't quite as bad in Texas--one could take a trip to New York from Texas more easily than you could from Australia, after all, but let's face it: Texas was far, culturally and physically, from the cultural capitals of the world where modernism was forged. Of course, you can't keep a thing like modernism secret. Word leaks out to the provinces and artists get inspired to try their hands at it. Midcentury Modern Art in Texas
by Katie Robinson Edwards tells the story of how modern art came to Texas.
She tells the story in two ways. First, she describes "scenes"--groups of artists in one location who knew each other and had similar interests and influences. While art in Texas could be seen as a continuity, especially as artists get teaching jobs and teach subsequent generations, and that wouldn't be a wrong way to view it. But the thing was, until about the 1960s or so, it was hard for modernist art to sustain itself in Texas. So these scenes popped up, flourished for a while, and died away. Beyond looking at scenes, she looks at individual artists, particularly those who transcended any scene or who were otherwise so singular, they couldn't be slotted in one place or another.
Forrest Bess, untitled (No. 5), 1949, oil on canvas, 10 x 12 7/8 inches
Forrest Bess (1911-1977) seems like the obvious example of the lone artist, not part of any scene. After all, he painted his best-known work while living in a shack at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou accessible only by boat and miles from the nearest paved road. But he spent some time in Houston and knew other young modernists there. Ola McNeill Davidson (1884-1976) started a gallery in 1938 called Our Little Gallery, where she taught young artists, including Forrest Bess, Robert Preusser, Frank Delejska, Gene Charlton and Carden Bailey--some of the earliest modernist painters in Houston.
But the astonishing thing is that Davidson wasn't Houston's first modernist painter--that distinction belongs to a woman born in 1859 (!) named Emma Richardson Cherry. Based on the reproductions of her work I've seen, she wasn't a very good painter, but she wasn't completely dire. But she is important because she was always eager to know what was new in the world of art and to bring it to wherever she happened to be living. She moved to Houston in 1896, but frequently visited Europe. She saw the Salon d'Automne exhibit twice, but the book doesn't specify which years. However, she did see very early works of cubism there, which gives one an idea of the time frame. Cherry became a member of the Société Anonyme, Inc., the organization formed by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray for the purpose of propagating modern art in America. It was a perfect organization for Cherry as that had been her mission for years. And Davidson was a protégé of Cherry.
Robert O. Preusser, untitled (Stars and Circles), 1937-38, oil on Masonite, 20 x 30 inches
Of Davidson's students, Forrest Bess is the one most likely to be remembered in the art history textbooks. But perhaps the most successful in life was Robert O. Preusser (1919-1992). He saw an early exhibit of abstract art at the MFAH in 1938 and it was a life-changing experience. He studied at the MFAH's school (now the Glassell School) and continued his education in Chicago and Los Angeles, before returning to teach at the MFAH school. But Preusser's story reflects what happened with many Texas artists over the years. In 1954, he took a teaching job at MIT, where he remained for over 30 years. There simply were more opportunities for Texas artists outside of Texas than in Texas. So artists like Gene Charlton, Carden Bailey, Bill Bomar, Myron Stout, whose untitled (number 3, 1954) is on the cover of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas, and other artists felt they had to leave Texas. With this book, Edwards demonstrates that Texas was not a lifeless desert of art in the first half of the 20th century. But it was still pretty dry.
Alexandre Hogue, Erosion No. 2--Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, oil on canvas, 44 x 56 inches
While Houston was an outpost of modernism, Dallas belonged mostly to the American Scene painters, who were doing mostly realist work. The two leaders of the Dallas scene were Alexandre Hogue and Jerry Bywaters, both uneven painters capable of greatness. Bywaters went on to become director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and Dallas never became a center for modernism in Texas in the way Houston and, surprisingly enough, Fort Worth were. Still, if your city's two greatest 20th century artists are Bywaters and Hogue, you aren't doing too bad.
Bror Utter, untitled, July 1952, oil on canvas, 30 x 18 inches
Fort Worth is the site of two separate artistic scenes or groupings. A group of artists that came to be called the Fort Worth Circle rejected the regionalism of Bywaters and Hogue for modernism and abstraction. They were painters and printmakers; the core group included Bill Bomar (1919-1990) and Bror Utter (1913-1993). But after a bright moment in the 50s, the Fort Worth Circle was disbanded in 1958 and its artists dispersed. Some of the artists were gay, and I suspect that that motivated some of them to move to slightly friendlier climes than Texas. The next scene grew up around sculptor Charles Williams' (1918-1966) studio. Edwards writes:
Toni LaSelle, Study for Puritan, 1947, oil on canvas, 12 x 14 inches
Edwards discusses other scenes that popped up in places like Austin and Denton, where Toni LaSelle (1902-2002) taught. These scenes were fed by the fact that there were universities there that needed art teachers as post-high school education in Texas expanded. Higher education was (and still is) an important was for artists to make a living as well as a site for them to congregate and trade ideas.
The last chapter on Houston was especially meaningful because some of the artists discussed are people I know who are still alive and productive, including Richard Stout (b. 1934), Henri Gadbois (b. 1930), Leila McConnel (b. 1927) and the woman who taught me to paint, Stella Sullivan (b. 1924). But I was disappointed in the section on John Biggers (1924-2001) and the TSU scene. It's hard to slot Biggers' work in because it is figurative in a time of abstraction, but his work is informed by modernism, as is Carroll Simms. And given the amount of attention given to the Dallas Regionalists, Biggers and the TSU scene seems shortchanged. I would have liked to see more of his art and read more about his career. This all seems ironic since Edwards complains elsewhere in the book that early Texas modernism was almost exclusively produced by white artists.Biggers is a major exception to this depressing rule.
The book closes with a long section of artists biographies and selected exhibitions, making it a useful reference book in addition to being an important history.
I have a feeling a book like this could be written about any region of the country. Modernism was obviously centered in major metropolitan centers like New York and Paris, but it captured the imaginations of a few pioneering spirits like Emma Richardson Cherry, who took it back to wherever they came from. I think it's unfortunate that we don't generally value these regional art histories, particularly when regional scenes occasionally toss up uncategorizable geniuses like Forrest Bess who are hard to slot into canonical art history. But I also feel it's important for art students from a particular location to get some idea of the art history beneath their feet. We need to reclaim "provincial" as a badge of honor--particularly as we now live in a connected, networked world where the art world no longer has a center.
I remember reading Robert Hughes on how when he was a young man in Australia, he and his friends would have passionate discussions about the latest developments in modern art based on two inch tall black and white photos in Art News. It wasn't quite as bad in Texas--one could take a trip to New York from Texas more easily than you could from Australia, after all, but let's face it: Texas was far, culturally and physically, from the cultural capitals of the world where modernism was forged. Of course, you can't keep a thing like modernism secret. Word leaks out to the provinces and artists get inspired to try their hands at it. Midcentury Modern Art in Texas
by Katie Robinson Edwards tells the story of how modern art came to Texas.She tells the story in two ways. First, she describes "scenes"--groups of artists in one location who knew each other and had similar interests and influences. While art in Texas could be seen as a continuity, especially as artists get teaching jobs and teach subsequent generations, and that wouldn't be a wrong way to view it. But the thing was, until about the 1960s or so, it was hard for modernist art to sustain itself in Texas. So these scenes popped up, flourished for a while, and died away. Beyond looking at scenes, she looks at individual artists, particularly those who transcended any scene or who were otherwise so singular, they couldn't be slotted in one place or another.
Forrest Bess, untitled (No. 5), 1949, oil on canvas, 10 x 12 7/8 inches
Forrest Bess (1911-1977) seems like the obvious example of the lone artist, not part of any scene. After all, he painted his best-known work while living in a shack at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou accessible only by boat and miles from the nearest paved road. But he spent some time in Houston and knew other young modernists there. Ola McNeill Davidson (1884-1976) started a gallery in 1938 called Our Little Gallery, where she taught young artists, including Forrest Bess, Robert Preusser, Frank Delejska, Gene Charlton and Carden Bailey--some of the earliest modernist painters in Houston.
But the astonishing thing is that Davidson wasn't Houston's first modernist painter--that distinction belongs to a woman born in 1859 (!) named Emma Richardson Cherry. Based on the reproductions of her work I've seen, she wasn't a very good painter, but she wasn't completely dire. But she is important because she was always eager to know what was new in the world of art and to bring it to wherever she happened to be living. She moved to Houston in 1896, but frequently visited Europe. She saw the Salon d'Automne exhibit twice, but the book doesn't specify which years. However, she did see very early works of cubism there, which gives one an idea of the time frame. Cherry became a member of the Société Anonyme, Inc., the organization formed by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray for the purpose of propagating modern art in America. It was a perfect organization for Cherry as that had been her mission for years. And Davidson was a protégé of Cherry.
Robert O. Preusser, untitled (Stars and Circles), 1937-38, oil on Masonite, 20 x 30 inches
Of Davidson's students, Forrest Bess is the one most likely to be remembered in the art history textbooks. But perhaps the most successful in life was Robert O. Preusser (1919-1992). He saw an early exhibit of abstract art at the MFAH in 1938 and it was a life-changing experience. He studied at the MFAH's school (now the Glassell School) and continued his education in Chicago and Los Angeles, before returning to teach at the MFAH school. But Preusser's story reflects what happened with many Texas artists over the years. In 1954, he took a teaching job at MIT, where he remained for over 30 years. There simply were more opportunities for Texas artists outside of Texas than in Texas. So artists like Gene Charlton, Carden Bailey, Bill Bomar, Myron Stout, whose untitled (number 3, 1954) is on the cover of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas, and other artists felt they had to leave Texas. With this book, Edwards demonstrates that Texas was not a lifeless desert of art in the first half of the 20th century. But it was still pretty dry.
Alexandre Hogue, Erosion No. 2--Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936, oil on canvas, 44 x 56 inches
While Houston was an outpost of modernism, Dallas belonged mostly to the American Scene painters, who were doing mostly realist work. The two leaders of the Dallas scene were Alexandre Hogue and Jerry Bywaters, both uneven painters capable of greatness. Bywaters went on to become director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and Dallas never became a center for modernism in Texas in the way Houston and, surprisingly enough, Fort Worth were. Still, if your city's two greatest 20th century artists are Bywaters and Hogue, you aren't doing too bad.
Bror Utter, untitled, July 1952, oil on canvas, 30 x 18 inches
Fort Worth is the site of two separate artistic scenes or groupings. A group of artists that came to be called the Fort Worth Circle rejected the regionalism of Bywaters and Hogue for modernism and abstraction. They were painters and printmakers; the core group included Bill Bomar (1919-1990) and Bror Utter (1913-1993). But after a bright moment in the 50s, the Fort Worth Circle was disbanded in 1958 and its artists dispersed. Some of the artists were gay, and I suspect that that motivated some of them to move to slightly friendlier climes than Texas. The next scene grew up around sculptor Charles Williams' (1918-1966) studio. Edwards writes:
If late-1940s Fort Worth modernism was marked by sophisticated, occasionally cross-dressing soirées at Flora and Dickson Reeder's house, the mid-1950s and 1960s revolved around the martini-drinking macho "salon" at the sculptor Charles Williams's home and studio.I wish she had written more about this--what were the social scenes like? Where did artists meet and hang out? A lot of this kind of information is mentioned in passing, and Edwards understandably wants to spend more space talking about the art. But I get the feeling that these gathering places were critical in sustaining these scenes in various cities. In any case, this newer Forth Worth scene attracted younger artists like Roy Fridge, Jack Boynton and Jim Love (the last two more commonly associated with Houston).
Toni LaSelle, Study for Puritan, 1947, oil on canvas, 12 x 14 inches
Edwards discusses other scenes that popped up in places like Austin and Denton, where Toni LaSelle (1902-2002) taught. These scenes were fed by the fact that there were universities there that needed art teachers as post-high school education in Texas expanded. Higher education was (and still is) an important was for artists to make a living as well as a site for them to congregate and trade ideas.
The last chapter on Houston was especially meaningful because some of the artists discussed are people I know who are still alive and productive, including Richard Stout (b. 1934), Henri Gadbois (b. 1930), Leila McConnel (b. 1927) and the woman who taught me to paint, Stella Sullivan (b. 1924). But I was disappointed in the section on John Biggers (1924-2001) and the TSU scene. It's hard to slot Biggers' work in because it is figurative in a time of abstraction, but his work is informed by modernism, as is Carroll Simms. And given the amount of attention given to the Dallas Regionalists, Biggers and the TSU scene seems shortchanged. I would have liked to see more of his art and read more about his career. This all seems ironic since Edwards complains elsewhere in the book that early Texas modernism was almost exclusively produced by white artists.Biggers is a major exception to this depressing rule.
The book closes with a long section of artists biographies and selected exhibitions, making it a useful reference book in addition to being an important history.
I have a feeling a book like this could be written about any region of the country. Modernism was obviously centered in major metropolitan centers like New York and Paris, but it captured the imaginations of a few pioneering spirits like Emma Richardson Cherry, who took it back to wherever they came from. I think it's unfortunate that we don't generally value these regional art histories, particularly when regional scenes occasionally toss up uncategorizable geniuses like Forrest Bess who are hard to slot into canonical art history. But I also feel it's important for art students from a particular location to get some idea of the art history beneath their feet. We need to reclaim "provincial" as a badge of honor--particularly as we now live in a connected, networked world where the art world no longer has a center.
Monday, January 13, 2014
2013: A Highly Personal Top 10 List
Robert Boyd
Usually top 10 lists are about one type of thing. Top 10 movies, top 10 books, etc. In the past we've run best-of lists for visual art and performance art. This year, I decided to follow Griel Marcus's example and just list anything I wanted, regardless of genre. This blog is still an art blog, however, so art dominates the list. But it's not all art exhibits. These are exhibits, books, comics, etc., that appealed to me mightily this year.
The list is not in any particular order. There are many items on the "honorable mention" list that could easily have gone in the top 10 list if I thought about it long enough. And these items reflect both my own taste, idiosyncratic as it may be, and what I had access to. (I'm always impressed by critics who seem to have, for example, seen every movie released in a given year. But I'm an amateur part-time art critic, and I know I missed some great exhibits in the past year.) So the way to view this list is not as a top 10 list but rather as a list of things that I considered good in 2013.
Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliot and Robert Gober (The Menil) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle
by Chuck Smith (powerHouse Books)
It was a Forrest Bess year for me this year. The Menil put together a fine exhibit, which included within it an exhibit originally curated by Robert Gober for the Whitney Biennial. I suspect that the exhibit was what prompted Chuck Smith to turn his 1999 documetary into a book. The documentary is good, but the book is so much better--including complete texts of many Forrest Bess letters and tons of photographs. For me, the exhibit and the book inspired three posts that I'm proud of--first a review of the show, then a recounting of legendary newspaperman Sig Byrd's visit with Bess, and finally an account of my attempt to find the location of Bess's long-gone shack on East Matagorda Bay.
12 Events by the Art Guys
The Art Guys have been a partnership for 30 years. This year, they decided to step away from the baroque style of their more recent projects and do 12 "simple" events. Some involved endurance (walking the length of Little York, the longest street in Houston; doing standup comedy for 8 hours straight), some involved repeating the same absurd action over and over (riding around the 610 Loop over and over for 24 hours; walking around the crosswalks at the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft for 8 hours); and some were sui generis (wearing portable fences as they walked around city hall; moving objects counterclockwise from the southernmost, westernmost, northernmost and easternmost points of the city). They concluded by restaging their first event, The Art Guys Agree on Painting, as The Art Guys Agree On Painting, Again, This Time From Thirty Feet Up. 12 Events wasn't just a celebration of their long partnership, it was a tribute to the site of that partnership, the city of Houston.
The Property
by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)
This graphic novel (which I reviewed here) by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan took the form of a madcap romantic comedy (a delightful one) to deal with the fraught issue of the history of relations between Polish Jews and Gentiles. (See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
by Tony Judt for a grimmer recitation of this distressing history.) The opening and closing scenes on the airplane (coming to Poland and
returning to Israel demonstrate the duality between frivolity and
seriousness that typifies the story. Of course, it helps that the art is beautiful and the visual storytelling lively. It's Modan's best comic from a career of excellent work, and it suggests where she can go in the future. My main worry now is that she may end up seduced away from comics to film--Modan would be a great screenwriter/director.
Sean Shim-Boyle's Salt House at Project Row Houses
To describe what Sean Shim-Boyle did with his Project Row Houses installation is to minimize its impact on the viewer. Nonetheless, here goes. Shim-Boyle took inherent elements of the row house and limited his installation to minimal use of existing elements. Specifically he put a second chimney in and added a new light source in the floor. But the magic was actually being in the space. The angled chimney was uncannily like the original chimney, and by its position made the familiar boxy room of the row house utterly strange. Devon Britt-Darby wrote in Art + Culture Texas, "The criss-crossing lines created by the chimneys, the beams, the windows and shadows give seemingly every vantage point an enchanting division of spaces that cries out for a viewfinder."
Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable
Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuffed at Brand 10 Artspace
When I saw the above piece in Fort Worth, I instantly thought of Richard Long circles of slate. Long's work suggests to me the deep geologic time of the earth. Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Happy Meal toy version suggests another kind of time--call it "mess time"--the tiny period of time it takes for children to spread toys evenly over the floor space of one's home. It's work that makes you smile, but it also makes you think about the stuff that fills our lives. Mary Magsamen and Stephen Hillerbrand often use their two children in their work (they should get credit!), and much of the work is about being a suburban nuclear family. (I wonder how their work will change when their kids enter adolescence. So far, though, they seem like real good sports about working with mom and dad.) This exhibit was especially about the possessions that fill up a suburban home--the piles of stuff that fill a house, end up in garage sales, Good Will stores, and landfills. It was a playfully absurd exhibit.
Jeremy DePrez, left: Untitled (Milton), 2013, oil and wax on canvas, 82 x 36 inches; and right: Untitled (Harriet), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 36 inches
Jeff Elrod's and Jeremy Deprez's Fantasy Island at Texas Gallery
I'm not going to pretend I really understand Jeremy DePrez's artwork. On the contrary, I feel like whenever I try to analyze it, I fall flat on my face. That was the case when I looked at his work in his MFA exhibit, and it was the case when I saw his paintings in the Boredom show at Lawndale. I wish I could say I had an "aha!" moment seeing his work displayed with Jeff Elrod's at Texas Gallery. But I did have a revelation: whatever it is that DePrez is doing, I like it. The slightly irregular look of his canvases in this show (the stretchers weren't straight, the parallel lines were broken up) gives the work a carefully constructed feeling of slackness. They get it right by not getting it right. Oh, and the Jeff Elrods were excellent, too.
Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize
by Sean B. Carroll (Crown)
Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and in just over a month defeated the French and British armies there. Albert Camus was the editor of a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jacques Monod, a biologist, was recruited into the Resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. When the various Resistance organizations were joined under an umbrella organization, the French Forces of the Interior, Monod was the chief of staff. The writer and biologist didn't meet each other until after the war, however, when they became close friends. Camus continued to write and remained an activist, turning against Communism in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Monod fought a public battle against the ideologically-motivated Soviet pseudo-science of genetics known as Lysenkoism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Monod went on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for his pioneering genetics work. Only a brief portion of the book that considers the personal friendship of the two men. Instead, Carroll weaves their life stories into the history of the French Resistance, the Hungarian rebellion, the study of genes, etc. In addition to showing the intersections between these two brilliant men, this book manages to show how the advances in biology in the period from just before World War II through the 60s are as much a part of history as anything else--that despite the split of the humanities and science into "two cultures," it is possible to consider them together fruitfully. I could not put Brave Genius down once I started--it was the most compelling book I read all year.
Brandon Araujo's exhibit at Domy Books and New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at Spring Street Studios
Araujo's paintings have sneaked up on me over the course of the year. I know I have probably seen his work before, but the first time I noticed was at the exhibit at Domy (it was really a "Brandon" show, but Domy was still there). And I wasn't totally sure what to think about it. Then I saw more of his work in the Spring Street group show and finally visited his studio during Artcrawl. Araujo is an artist who is working out his own style, but he is also one whose work has a relationship to work by other artists around his age in Houston. So trying to understand his work is related to the task of trying to understand the work of some of his peers (among whom, the artists in the Spring Street show--Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López). But these artists aren't the germ of some regional school of painters--there are artists all over who are working in similar areas of abstract painting--Nathan Green, for example. They are sometimes called New Casualists or New Provisionalists. I'm a little loathe to put Araujo in that pigeonhole, particularly so early in his career. I can't put my finger on what I like about it, but the thing is, every time I see his work, I want to see more.
Ken Price, Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay, 14.5 x 15 x 14 in.
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center
If you read much about contemporary art, you will have seen over the past few decades a reduction of discussion of craftsmanship in the conversation. This goes doubly so for arts that are traditionally considered part of the craft tradition. But the considerable rise in the critical fortunes of Ken Price recently suggests that the the fortunes of craft may be changing. Price, who died in 2012 just a few months before his retrospective opened at LACMA, was one of the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery. His work has a jazzy West Coast vibe. It's playful and fun. As a ceramicist, Price would make overtures to the traditions of the crafts (his highly abstracted "cups," for example) but was also quite willing to toss tradition completely overboard when it suited him. Seeing a lifetime's work from Price was one of the best museum experiences I had all year.
Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks
This is an incomplete comics narrative. Every now and then, Horrocks will throw up a new page on his website. He just posted page 103. The first page was posted in 2009. So why call this a 2013 work? I've been following it for quite a while with great pleasure, but it was this year that it really electrified me. The very first page in 2013 plops the protagonist Sam in the middle of an orgy with 50 beautiful green Venusian women (the page reproduced above is the only "SFW" page from that sequence). Now if someone had described this too me, I'd say it sounded like a lame pile of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that a cartoonist as sensitive and possessing of moral rectitude as Dylan Horrocks would draw such a thing. And yet, here it is. It isn't ironic--it's eroticism is meant to be erotic. But within the context of the narrative, it works--especially as you see how the rest of 2013's pages unfold. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is about the ability of comics to be wish fulfillment. The first part is essentially realistic, a story of a blocked cartoonist. But there is an abrupt switch to the fantastic, specifically magic realism in the sense of Italo Calvino.This feels like it is shaping up to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville
, Horrock's graphic novel that posited that there was an secret art history of comics. That Horrocks continually creates major works about cartoonists and comics may seem solopsistic, and the character Sam does in many ways seem to be a stand-in for Horrocks himself. But the work is playful in the same way that If on a winter's night a traveler is playful, and that draws me in.
Honorable mention
Usually top 10 lists are about one type of thing. Top 10 movies, top 10 books, etc. In the past we've run best-of lists for visual art and performance art. This year, I decided to follow Griel Marcus's example and just list anything I wanted, regardless of genre. This blog is still an art blog, however, so art dominates the list. But it's not all art exhibits. These are exhibits, books, comics, etc., that appealed to me mightily this year.
The list is not in any particular order. There are many items on the "honorable mention" list that could easily have gone in the top 10 list if I thought about it long enough. And these items reflect both my own taste, idiosyncratic as it may be, and what I had access to. (I'm always impressed by critics who seem to have, for example, seen every movie released in a given year. But I'm an amateur part-time art critic, and I know I missed some great exhibits in the past year.) So the way to view this list is not as a top 10 list but rather as a list of things that I considered good in 2013.
Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliot and Robert Gober (The Menil) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle
by Chuck Smith (powerHouse Books)It was a Forrest Bess year for me this year. The Menil put together a fine exhibit, which included within it an exhibit originally curated by Robert Gober for the Whitney Biennial. I suspect that the exhibit was what prompted Chuck Smith to turn his 1999 documetary into a book. The documentary is good, but the book is so much better--including complete texts of many Forrest Bess letters and tons of photographs. For me, the exhibit and the book inspired three posts that I'm proud of--first a review of the show, then a recounting of legendary newspaperman Sig Byrd's visit with Bess, and finally an account of my attempt to find the location of Bess's long-gone shack on East Matagorda Bay.
12 Events by the Art Guys
The Art Guys have been a partnership for 30 years. This year, they decided to step away from the baroque style of their more recent projects and do 12 "simple" events. Some involved endurance (walking the length of Little York, the longest street in Houston; doing standup comedy for 8 hours straight), some involved repeating the same absurd action over and over (riding around the 610 Loop over and over for 24 hours; walking around the crosswalks at the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft for 8 hours); and some were sui generis (wearing portable fences as they walked around city hall; moving objects counterclockwise from the southernmost, westernmost, northernmost and easternmost points of the city). They concluded by restaging their first event, The Art Guys Agree on Painting, as The Art Guys Agree On Painting, Again, This Time From Thirty Feet Up. 12 Events wasn't just a celebration of their long partnership, it was a tribute to the site of that partnership, the city of Houston.
The Property
by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)This graphic novel (which I reviewed here) by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan took the form of a madcap romantic comedy (a delightful one) to deal with the fraught issue of the history of relations between Polish Jews and Gentiles. (See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
by Tony Judt for a grimmer recitation of this distressing history.) The opening and closing scenes on the airplane (coming to Poland and
returning to Israel demonstrate the duality between frivolity and
seriousness that typifies the story. Of course, it helps that the art is beautiful and the visual storytelling lively. It's Modan's best comic from a career of excellent work, and it suggests where she can go in the future. My main worry now is that she may end up seduced away from comics to film--Modan would be a great screenwriter/director.
Sean Shim-Boyle's Salt House at Project Row Houses
To describe what Sean Shim-Boyle did with his Project Row Houses installation is to minimize its impact on the viewer. Nonetheless, here goes. Shim-Boyle took inherent elements of the row house and limited his installation to minimal use of existing elements. Specifically he put a second chimney in and added a new light source in the floor. But the magic was actually being in the space. The angled chimney was uncannily like the original chimney, and by its position made the familiar boxy room of the row house utterly strange. Devon Britt-Darby wrote in Art + Culture Texas, "The criss-crossing lines created by the chimneys, the beams, the windows and shadows give seemingly every vantage point an enchanting division of spaces that cries out for a viewfinder."
Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable
Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuffed at Brand 10 Artspace
When I saw the above piece in Fort Worth, I instantly thought of Richard Long circles of slate. Long's work suggests to me the deep geologic time of the earth. Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Happy Meal toy version suggests another kind of time--call it "mess time"--the tiny period of time it takes for children to spread toys evenly over the floor space of one's home. It's work that makes you smile, but it also makes you think about the stuff that fills our lives. Mary Magsamen and Stephen Hillerbrand often use their two children in their work (they should get credit!), and much of the work is about being a suburban nuclear family. (I wonder how their work will change when their kids enter adolescence. So far, though, they seem like real good sports about working with mom and dad.) This exhibit was especially about the possessions that fill up a suburban home--the piles of stuff that fill a house, end up in garage sales, Good Will stores, and landfills. It was a playfully absurd exhibit.
Jeremy DePrez, left: Untitled (Milton), 2013, oil and wax on canvas, 82 x 36 inches; and right: Untitled (Harriet), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 36 inches
Jeff Elrod's and Jeremy Deprez's Fantasy Island at Texas Gallery
I'm not going to pretend I really understand Jeremy DePrez's artwork. On the contrary, I feel like whenever I try to analyze it, I fall flat on my face. That was the case when I looked at his work in his MFA exhibit, and it was the case when I saw his paintings in the Boredom show at Lawndale. I wish I could say I had an "aha!" moment seeing his work displayed with Jeff Elrod's at Texas Gallery. But I did have a revelation: whatever it is that DePrez is doing, I like it. The slightly irregular look of his canvases in this show (the stretchers weren't straight, the parallel lines were broken up) gives the work a carefully constructed feeling of slackness. They get it right by not getting it right. Oh, and the Jeff Elrods were excellent, too.
Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize
by Sean B. Carroll (Crown) Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and in just over a month defeated the French and British armies there. Albert Camus was the editor of a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jacques Monod, a biologist, was recruited into the Resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. When the various Resistance organizations were joined under an umbrella organization, the French Forces of the Interior, Monod was the chief of staff. The writer and biologist didn't meet each other until after the war, however, when they became close friends. Camus continued to write and remained an activist, turning against Communism in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Monod fought a public battle against the ideologically-motivated Soviet pseudo-science of genetics known as Lysenkoism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Monod went on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for his pioneering genetics work. Only a brief portion of the book that considers the personal friendship of the two men. Instead, Carroll weaves their life stories into the history of the French Resistance, the Hungarian rebellion, the study of genes, etc. In addition to showing the intersections between these two brilliant men, this book manages to show how the advances in biology in the period from just before World War II through the 60s are as much a part of history as anything else--that despite the split of the humanities and science into "two cultures," it is possible to consider them together fruitfully. I could not put Brave Genius down once I started--it was the most compelling book I read all year.
Brandon Araujo's exhibit at Domy Books and New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at Spring Street Studios
Araujo's paintings have sneaked up on me over the course of the year. I know I have probably seen his work before, but the first time I noticed was at the exhibit at Domy (it was really a "Brandon" show, but Domy was still there). And I wasn't totally sure what to think about it. Then I saw more of his work in the Spring Street group show and finally visited his studio during Artcrawl. Araujo is an artist who is working out his own style, but he is also one whose work has a relationship to work by other artists around his age in Houston. So trying to understand his work is related to the task of trying to understand the work of some of his peers (among whom, the artists in the Spring Street show--Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López). But these artists aren't the germ of some regional school of painters--there are artists all over who are working in similar areas of abstract painting--Nathan Green, for example. They are sometimes called New Casualists or New Provisionalists. I'm a little loathe to put Araujo in that pigeonhole, particularly so early in his career. I can't put my finger on what I like about it, but the thing is, every time I see his work, I want to see more.
Ken Price, Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay, 14.5 x 15 x 14 in.
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center
If you read much about contemporary art, you will have seen over the past few decades a reduction of discussion of craftsmanship in the conversation. This goes doubly so for arts that are traditionally considered part of the craft tradition. But the considerable rise in the critical fortunes of Ken Price recently suggests that the the fortunes of craft may be changing. Price, who died in 2012 just a few months before his retrospective opened at LACMA, was one of the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery. His work has a jazzy West Coast vibe. It's playful and fun. As a ceramicist, Price would make overtures to the traditions of the crafts (his highly abstracted "cups," for example) but was also quite willing to toss tradition completely overboard when it suited him. Seeing a lifetime's work from Price was one of the best museum experiences I had all year.
Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks
This is an incomplete comics narrative. Every now and then, Horrocks will throw up a new page on his website. He just posted page 103. The first page was posted in 2009. So why call this a 2013 work? I've been following it for quite a while with great pleasure, but it was this year that it really electrified me. The very first page in 2013 plops the protagonist Sam in the middle of an orgy with 50 beautiful green Venusian women (the page reproduced above is the only "SFW" page from that sequence). Now if someone had described this too me, I'd say it sounded like a lame pile of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that a cartoonist as sensitive and possessing of moral rectitude as Dylan Horrocks would draw such a thing. And yet, here it is. It isn't ironic--it's eroticism is meant to be erotic. But within the context of the narrative, it works--especially as you see how the rest of 2013's pages unfold. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is about the ability of comics to be wish fulfillment. The first part is essentially realistic, a story of a blocked cartoonist. But there is an abrupt switch to the fantastic, specifically magic realism in the sense of Italo Calvino.This feels like it is shaping up to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville
, Horrock's graphic novel that posited that there was an secret art history of comics. That Horrocks continually creates major works about cartoonists and comics may seem solopsistic, and the character Sam does in many ways seem to be a stand-in for Horrocks himself. But the work is playful in the same way that If on a winter's night a traveler is playful, and that draws me in.Honorable mention
- 9.5 Thesis on Art by Ben Davis (Haymarket Books)
- Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
directed by Drew DeNicola and Oliva Mori
- Inside Llewyn Davis directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
- The Core Fellows exhibit at the Glassell School of Art featuring Andrea Behm, Anna Elise Johnson, Jang Soon Im, Madsen Minax, Miguel Amat, Ronny Quevedo, Senalka McDonald and Tatiana Istomina
- North of South, East of West directed by Meredith Danluck
- The uncontrollable nature of grief and forgiveness (or lack of) by Kathryn Kelley (Art League)
- Within Without the Space of a Corner by Nick Kersulis (Devin Borden Gallery)
- Tracing Our Pilgrimage by Kermit Oliver (Art League)
- Ad Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics
with an essay by Robert Storr (Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner)
- Not How It Happened by Joel Ross and Jason Creps (Tiny Park)
- A chain of non-events by Katie Wynne (Lawndale)
- World Map Room
by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)
- Zinefest
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Searching for Forrest Bess
Robert Boyd
(This was originally published on Glasstire in a slightly different form.)
In 1947, Forrest Bess, who is the subject a show at the Menil that runs through August 18, moved to Chinquapin, a tiny unincorporated settlement at the end of a dirt road on the northeast side of East Matagorda Bay. ( I reviewed that show here.) Michael Ennis wrote, "In 1947 Bess left San Antonio and went to live with his parents at their bait camp at Chinquapin." After a while, Bess built his own place: "Back at Chinquapin Bess found himself again under the hypnotic, almost mystical influence of the Gulf. 'The peninsula is a lonely, desolate place,' he wrote, 'yet it has a ghostly feeling about it—spooky—unreal—but there is something about it that attracts me to it—even though I am afraid of it.' He was now determined to stay. He built a shack on a concrete slab using the hull of a tugboat and copper sheets from the bottom of an old ferry, and he added a slanted concrete 'prow' to his little home that would, he hoped, withstand the battering of hurricanes. He continued to fish for a living and to record and paint his visions." ("His Name Was Forrest Bess," Michael Ennis, Texas Monthly, June 1982) After Hurricane Carla hit in 1962, only the slab and the concrete prow of his shack remained. Bess rebuilt. It wasn't a hurricane that made him move away from Chinquapin; it was the sun. After having surgery on his nose for skin cancer in 1966, Bess moved to his mother's house in Bay City.
What Ennis doesn't say is whether Bess lived on an island or on the mainland. Robert Gober describes his home as being "on a tiny spit of a treeless island" ("The Man That Got Away," Robert Gober, published in Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible
, 2013). Houston Chronicle columnist Sigman Byrd visited Bess at his shack, so his testimony should be authoritative--unfortunately, it is extremely ambiguous. He wrote, "After supper at Forrest Bess' house at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou (surely the loneliest spot in Texas), we all went into the shipshape studio to drink tequila and coffe and look at our host's pictures." ("Trawling in the Collective Subconscious at Chinquapin," Sigman Byrd, The Houston Chronicle, March 11, 1956) So was the bait camp on an island or not? Either way, the place is remote. Chinquapin lays on East Matagorda Bay between (but not particularly close to) Matagorda and Sargent, two barely-there communities. The nearest town of any size is Bay City, with about 20,000 residents, 25 miles away.
But why should we care where Bess lived? He was an important artist, and I like knowing about the lives of Texas artists. That's probably reason enough. But I think there is more to it. This place was obviously important to who Bess was and how he made his art.
His work is arcane and very private. It doesn't admit the viewer easily. What made Bess the painter he was? Since he painted the symbols he saw in visions, we have to ascribe at least some of his genius to mental illness. Bess developed a theory of immortality through hermaphroditism that became an unhealthy obsession. He not only saw visions (which seems fairly benign) but performed dangerous autosurgery on his own penis and was eventually hospitalized for schizophrenia and alcoholism. (I mention these last things because I don't want to perpetuate the myth of madness as artistic inspiration--whatever benefit Bess derived from his illness, the costs he bore were far higher.)
A frustrated sexuality played into his esoteric theories, which informed his paintings. Bess was homosexual, but had no outlet for it in Bay City, where he was afraid to reveal himself. While he was in the army, he received a savage beating when he divulged his homosexuality. While he was able to meet other gay men in Houston and San Antonio, he complained that they found him too masculine. After his retreat to Chinquapin, he may have experienced no sexual relationships, much less romantic love. (No wonder he was such an avid letter-writer--his correspondents, who included Meyer Schapiro and Carl Jung, were some of his closest acquaintances.) Loneliness shines out in his work.
While it seems obvious that these factors contributed to his art, I think the place he made the work is also important. He started seeing the visions that fueled his most important work after he moved out to Chinquapin. Would he have seen the same things, done the same work, if he had been living in Houston or New York City? I guess it's possible, but it seems to me that the extremity of his life on this desolate shore must have had some effect on his art. Jesus and the stylites also went to bleak remote locations to facilitate their visions, after all.
Chinquapin Road
I drove out to Chinquapin in June to see what I could see. Chinquapin Rd. is a 10-mile dirt road off of FM 521. It takes you through miles and miles of corn fields and past the Big Boggy National Wildlife Refuge. My iPhone, chirping at me to turn right or left on this dirt road, seemed to be leading me to the end of the Earth. But finally I reached East Matagorda Bay. There are a number of houses at the end of Chinquapin Rd., apparently all built after Carla which, by all accounts, scraped this area clean. The houses are all on a winding creek called Chinquapin Bayou which runs down to the by from Lake Austin, just to the north. The whole area is surrounded by water--lakes, creeks, the bay, marshes--and very little of it rises more than a couple of feet above the water. People in these parts are fishermen and shrimpers.
My first trip out there was inconclusive. If Forrest Bess lived on the mainland, he didn't leave any obvious trace (not that I was expecting to find anything visible after 49 years). And if he lived on an island, as Gober writes, I couldn't access them without crossing the Intracoastal Waterway. I didn't have a boat and wasn't quite confident about my swimming ability. So I looked around a bit, took a few photos, and left.
The remains of a concrete slab on the mainland--could it be Bess' cabin's foundation?
That afternoon, I drove straight from Chinquapin to Galveston, where there was an exhibit opening at the Galveston Artist Residency. I told a friend there about the unsuccessful trip and explained that to really explore the area, I needed a boat. She said she knew someone who might be able to help. She introduced me to Eric Schnell, the director of the GAR and I told him what I believed--that Forrest Bess lived on an island in East Matagorda Bay when he started having visions and painting the abstract paintings we have since become familiar with. (By this time, I had somehow convinced myself that he definitely lived on an island as opposed to the mainland, even though I have no particular proof one way or the other.)
Eric suggested that he might be able to wrangle a boat and got my contact information. I marked it down as merely a conversation over beers at a party--I didn't really expect anything to happen. I put it out of my mind and moved on to other projects. Then in late June, I got an email from him. The expedition was on. He had a friend from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency who needed to take a trip out to Matagorda to look at a couple of potential habitat restoration projects. We set a date and I shared what maps I could find. Assuming Bess lived on an island that was near the terminus of the Chinquapin Rd., I figured there were only four islands it could be.
Four candidates for Forrest Bess's island
As it turned out, Eric's friend from NOAA, Kristopher Benson, was interested in checking out Bird Island, which is a protected wildlife habitat. Kris is a marine habitat resource specialist at the Galveston NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory located in the old Fort Crocket Buildings. His proposal was for us to accompany him as he went to West Matagorda Bay to look at an oyster reef, then over to East Matagorda Bay to see Bird Island. My work schedule is such that every other Friday, I have a day off. So on July 19, I drove down to Galveston early in the morning, meeting Eric at GAR at 7:30 am. We drove together over to NOAA and met up with Kris. We had a comfy government Suburban and a flat-bottom aluminum boat in a trailer behind us. The boat reminded me of the boats I used to work on when I worked doing shallow water seismic exploration for Western Geophysical back in the 80s in Nigeria and Brazil. It was designed to go very fast (it had a large outboard motor) and to be able to operate in very shallow water. The tradeoff is comfort, but that's OK--it was a work boat, not a pleasure boat.
NOAA's flat-bottom aluminum boat
I thought it was strange that Eric happened to know a NOAA scientist. I chalked it up to the fact that Galveston is a small town, but the reason was actually more direct. Kris is married to the director of Artist Boat, a art/education/environmental non-profit in Galveston. Artist Boat has lots of projects that combine art and the environment, including a purchase of some of the last undeveloped land on the west end of Galveston for the purpose of keeping it wild. Kris had firsthand experience mixing art with the environment, so our little expedition was right up his alley.
We headed off first to Palacios, a small pretty town on West Matagorda Bay. Palacios has a sizable population of Vietnamese immigrants and their descendents. We drove past a Vietnamese neighborhood that could be a suburban subdivision in Houston--brick homes, cul de sacs--except for the shrimp nets drying in the back yard. The other weird thing about Palacios is how people pronounce it--the Spanish origin has been totally forgotten. Folks say "puh-LA-shush".
We entered the bay from the public boat launch. It was still early, and there wasn't a breeze. The water was smooth and occasionally glassy. The sky blended with the water at the horizon, leaving us in an indistinct space of blue. Matagorda Bay was like a giant naturally formed James Turrell.
The bay was filled with jellyfish--thousands of them. We elected not to do any swimming.
Kris opened the throttle and headed out to a spot that seemed like literally the middle of nowhere. The bay is large and even at full throttle it took a while to get to our destination. We had maps and a GPS device and were using them to try to find a particular oyster reef known as Half Moon Reef. Kris later wrote me with a description of the project: "The currently funded phases of the project will restore approximately 40 acres of oyster reef through the placement of substrate material to restore the 3-dimensional structure of the reef and the hard substrate needed for recruitment and settlement of oyster larvae (spat). My purpose in visiting was to get a sense of the on-the-ground conditions at the project sites, as they are in an area of the coast that I'm only rarely able to get out in the field to see. We are also working with The Nature Conservancy on oyster restoration projects in other areas, so comparing these sites with those areas is helpful in understanding how our projects function." NOAA is one of the many federal and state agencies cooperating on the Half Moon Reef project.
Eric Schnell, left, and Kris Benson, right
Except for the shrimpers, we were mostly alone out there. It was an astonishingly isolated place, even though we knew Palacios was nearby.
Finding the reef was not easy. The map and the GPS device didn't seem to exactly match up. Nonetheless, Kris took samples of the salinity (high due to the drought) and dragged the anchor to look at the contents of sea bed.
When we headed back, the motor started conking out. It seemed that it wasn't drawing fuel. We switched out fuel lines and messed around with it, but we couldn't get it to work quite right. We limped slowly back to the landing at Palacios. I was worried that this was the end of our expedition, but Kris was still eager to see Bird Island. So we loaded up the boat, stopped for some bahn mi sandwiches, and pressed on, driving over to the Chinquapin Road and thence to East Matagorda Bay.
According to the Texas State Historical Association,
Chinquapin
Some were quite nice (but far short of the palatial beach houses on Galveston's West End), but most tended towards the ramshackle end of the spectrum.
Sometimes they looked as if they had been built one piece at a time, perhaps over several years. I like the one above because it is a classic dogtrot style house. But it worries me, too--a stiff breeze and some heavy rain will flood it.
I don't know how these houses compare to what was here in Forrest Bess' day. But let's just say that the powers that be have never bothered to pave the Chinquapin Road. The community is extremely remote and the dwellings pretty modest.
The Chinquapin Road ends at the Intracoastal Waterway. Islands 1, 2, 3 and 4 are on the other side of this dredged-up channel. But we had to launch our vessel from a private boat launch further up Chinquapin Bayou, which meanders very lazily to the bay. (This is no Houston-style channelized bayou.) I was worried that we'd stall out again and be stranded. Eric stayed on shore just in case we needed to call for help. It took many tries to get the motor to start, which didn't boost my confidence. But Kris seemed unconcerned.
We headed out very slow on the bayou. It was very shallow and he didn't want to risk stranding us by going too fast and hitting a sandbar.
Chinquapin Bayou
Once we crossed the Intracoastal Waterway, we passed through the narrow channel (really a continuation of the bayou) between islands 2 and 3. Before the Waterway was dug, these islands had been part of the mainland. But because of this narrow channel, they are now desolate uninhabited places. But was that always the case?
It was on island 3 where we saw this little fella. We couldn't tell if it was a starving coyote or a fox or a stray dog, and we wondered how it managed to survive on this treeless desert island. Were there mice to hunt?
The islands were devoid of human habitation of any sort. The only sign that people had been on the islands were from the raised areas (where dredged mud had been deposited in decades past), detritus that had washed ashore, and the occasional duck blind.
Duck blind on Island 3
There was no obvious ruin of Bess's shack, which we didn't expect to see anyway. Just scrub grass and shrubs, some birds, and our fox friend, who we saw more than once as we rode around the islands.
Island 1
After cruising past all three islands on the Intracoastal Waterway side, we went out bay side to check out the other side of each island. Kris decided to land on island 3 (he offered to go ashore on each of the islands, but I didn't see much point--they were all the same).
Island 3
Except where the islands had been built up with dredged material, the land and water blended seamlessly. The boat went through this area of grass in about six inches of water before reaching dry land.
standing on island 3
These islands were fairly long but very narrow. As I stood on the south side of the island, I could see a tugboat on the north side in the Intracoastal Waterway. There was constant barge traffic here.
Bess started to have visions of symbols when he lived here. The visions are the source of the symbols we see in his paintings. These islands are so small and isolated, and may have been even more isolated in the 1950s. It doesn't seem all that strange that someone living here would start to see things. Particularly someone blessed (or cursed, as it may have been in Bess' case) with imagination.
Forrest Bess, untitled (The Crowded Mind/The Void), 1947, oil on canvas, 10" x 11 3/4"
From what I had been told, I've concluded that if Bess lived on an island, it had to be island 1, 2 or 3. But there was a fourth island to check out--Bird Island. Once I saw it, it was obvious that Bess could never have lived on it. As small as 1, 2 and 3 were, Bird Island makes them look enormous. (Having said this, it's probable that the island was bigger in the 50s--these sand spits are always eroding and changing size.)
Bird Island
Bird Island was one of the reasons we were there. It is a protected bird habitat, and this tiny spit of land is covered with birds of all different species nesting. It's far enough from shore that predators like the fox can't get to it.
Kris wrote me that "the Bird Island site in East Matagorda Bay (also called Dressing Point), and the adjacent Half Moon Shoal area, are areas where a project concept has been proposed by multiple state and federal agencies. NOAA did not originate the project concept and does not yet have an official position with regard to the concept. In general, the proposed project would prevent erosion of the island and stabilize the shoal, and possibly expand the size of the island." So while NOAA was not officially involved with any proposed Bird Island project, Kris was interested in checking it out.
And you can see why. Birds already use every square inch of the island for their nests. I was astonished to see so many different kinds of birds, from roseate spoonbills to cormorants to brown pelicans and more, nesting side by side. I was torn by a desire to get closer and a responsibility not to disturb the nesting grounds.
Even if we never saw the exact spot where Bess's cabin was, it was worth the trip to see Bird Island. It was a breathtaking sight. I only wish I had brought a telephoto lens.
We made our way back to the landing, where Eric was patiently waiting for us (hoping we hadn't managed to stall and strand ourselves). Tired and a little bit sunburned, we loaded the boat onto the trailer and headed back to Galveston. As we drove back, Kris told me that NOAA might be able to help me find the exact location of Bess's cabin. It turns out that people have been taking aerial photos of the coastal areas of Texas since the 1940s. He uses them in his work to determine how habitats have changed over time.
Photo courtesy of the Texas General Land Office
This is an aerial photo from 1952 of the northeast part of East Matagorda Bay. You can see Bird Island in the center and the Intracoastal Waterway running as a stripe across the top third. Chiquapin Bayou and the three islands are easily visible, but island 3 is connected to a larger island. Between 1952 and now, there has been visible erosion of the islands.
Photo courtesy of the Texas General Land Office
Here we can see what appear to be two structures, one on island 2 and one on island 3. (Island 1 and 2 were apparently a single island back then.) Could one of them be Forrest Bess's shack? And the other his parents' bait camp? It's possible I suppose. Then again, I could have it completely wrong and they could have been on the mainland.
What would I do if I found the location of Bess's cabin? I'd like to go back and put a plaque in the ground there. And wouldn't it make sense to petition the state government to name that island after Forrest Bess. Here is one of Texas's greatest artists, and as far as I can tell he had nothing named after him. "Forrest Bess Island" would be a nice start. But most of all, I'd like to maybe cmap out on the spot--just pitch a tent, close my eyes and see what visions come.
Epilogue 1
Shortly after I wrote the article above, I saw painter Richard Stout at the Menil bookstore, and mentioned my search and the difficulty of finding Bess’ camp. Stout instantly said it was on an island. I asked him which one–pointing out that two islands at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou are separated by the bayou itself. He thought for a second and said, I think the east island, which was the island we saw the fox on, aka Island 3.
I walked into the store, and bought a copy of Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle, a new book version of Chuck Smith’s 1997 documentary film. It’s more about Bess the man than his art and reproduces a number of letters and photos, including photos of Bess’ shack! The book definitely states that the bait camp is on the island, on the bayou side. Fishermen coming from the mainland would go through the bayou channel, pull up to the little dock Bess built, and yell out for him to bring out some bait shrimp. So the mystery was getting close to being solved.
Epilogue 2
Or was it? After the original version of this article was published, I started hearing from people who had ambiguous evidence and contrary eyewitness testimony. First, I received a scan of a letter from Forrest Bess that featured a hand-drawn map. It seemed to confirm that the shack was on island 2.
But then Bob Bess, Forrest Bess's nephew, wrote a letter to Glasstire indicating the camp was on the mainland! I sent him an email with the following image attached.
I asked him which, if any, of these four locations was the location of the camp. He confirmed that it was #2--on the mainland, on the west bank of Chinquapin Bayou. "If you have seen The Key to the Riddle DVD, I am the young boy with Forrest (probably about 1952). That was obviously filmed at the camp." Despite the repeated references to an island in various texts, Forrest Bess's home was on the mainland. This fits with what Sigman Byrd wrote in 1956--he wrote about having to be ferried back to his car. Chinquapin Road is on the east side of the bayou. And it even matches Forrest Bess's hand-drawn map, which didn't indicate north. The reason I thought it indicated a camp on an island was because I was looking at it upside down.
Somehow it feels more romantic to imagine Bess on a desert island. But let me say that location #2 is every bit as remote as any of the islands, except for Bird Island. All the houses are on the other side of the bayou. On the west side, there is a whole lot of marshy nothing. It is still one of the loneliest places in Texas, I reckon. A good spot to hang out if you want to see visions...
(This was originally published on Glasstire in a slightly different form.)
In 1947, Forrest Bess, who is the subject a show at the Menil that runs through August 18, moved to Chinquapin, a tiny unincorporated settlement at the end of a dirt road on the northeast side of East Matagorda Bay. ( I reviewed that show here.) Michael Ennis wrote, "In 1947 Bess left San Antonio and went to live with his parents at their bait camp at Chinquapin." After a while, Bess built his own place: "Back at Chinquapin Bess found himself again under the hypnotic, almost mystical influence of the Gulf. 'The peninsula is a lonely, desolate place,' he wrote, 'yet it has a ghostly feeling about it—spooky—unreal—but there is something about it that attracts me to it—even though I am afraid of it.' He was now determined to stay. He built a shack on a concrete slab using the hull of a tugboat and copper sheets from the bottom of an old ferry, and he added a slanted concrete 'prow' to his little home that would, he hoped, withstand the battering of hurricanes. He continued to fish for a living and to record and paint his visions." ("His Name Was Forrest Bess," Michael Ennis, Texas Monthly, June 1982) After Hurricane Carla hit in 1962, only the slab and the concrete prow of his shack remained. Bess rebuilt. It wasn't a hurricane that made him move away from Chinquapin; it was the sun. After having surgery on his nose for skin cancer in 1966, Bess moved to his mother's house in Bay City.
What Ennis doesn't say is whether Bess lived on an island or on the mainland. Robert Gober describes his home as being "on a tiny spit of a treeless island" ("The Man That Got Away," Robert Gober, published in Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible
, 2013). Houston Chronicle columnist Sigman Byrd visited Bess at his shack, so his testimony should be authoritative--unfortunately, it is extremely ambiguous. He wrote, "After supper at Forrest Bess' house at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou (surely the loneliest spot in Texas), we all went into the shipshape studio to drink tequila and coffe and look at our host's pictures." ("Trawling in the Collective Subconscious at Chinquapin," Sigman Byrd, The Houston Chronicle, March 11, 1956) So was the bait camp on an island or not? Either way, the place is remote. Chinquapin lays on East Matagorda Bay between (but not particularly close to) Matagorda and Sargent, two barely-there communities. The nearest town of any size is Bay City, with about 20,000 residents, 25 miles away. But why should we care where Bess lived? He was an important artist, and I like knowing about the lives of Texas artists. That's probably reason enough. But I think there is more to it. This place was obviously important to who Bess was and how he made his art.
His work is arcane and very private. It doesn't admit the viewer easily. What made Bess the painter he was? Since he painted the symbols he saw in visions, we have to ascribe at least some of his genius to mental illness. Bess developed a theory of immortality through hermaphroditism that became an unhealthy obsession. He not only saw visions (which seems fairly benign) but performed dangerous autosurgery on his own penis and was eventually hospitalized for schizophrenia and alcoholism. (I mention these last things because I don't want to perpetuate the myth of madness as artistic inspiration--whatever benefit Bess derived from his illness, the costs he bore were far higher.)
A frustrated sexuality played into his esoteric theories, which informed his paintings. Bess was homosexual, but had no outlet for it in Bay City, where he was afraid to reveal himself. While he was in the army, he received a savage beating when he divulged his homosexuality. While he was able to meet other gay men in Houston and San Antonio, he complained that they found him too masculine. After his retreat to Chinquapin, he may have experienced no sexual relationships, much less romantic love. (No wonder he was such an avid letter-writer--his correspondents, who included Meyer Schapiro and Carl Jung, were some of his closest acquaintances.) Loneliness shines out in his work.
While it seems obvious that these factors contributed to his art, I think the place he made the work is also important. He started seeing the visions that fueled his most important work after he moved out to Chinquapin. Would he have seen the same things, done the same work, if he had been living in Houston or New York City? I guess it's possible, but it seems to me that the extremity of his life on this desolate shore must have had some effect on his art. Jesus and the stylites also went to bleak remote locations to facilitate their visions, after all.
Chinquapin Road
I drove out to Chinquapin in June to see what I could see. Chinquapin Rd. is a 10-mile dirt road off of FM 521. It takes you through miles and miles of corn fields and past the Big Boggy National Wildlife Refuge. My iPhone, chirping at me to turn right or left on this dirt road, seemed to be leading me to the end of the Earth. But finally I reached East Matagorda Bay. There are a number of houses at the end of Chinquapin Rd., apparently all built after Carla which, by all accounts, scraped this area clean. The houses are all on a winding creek called Chinquapin Bayou which runs down to the by from Lake Austin, just to the north. The whole area is surrounded by water--lakes, creeks, the bay, marshes--and very little of it rises more than a couple of feet above the water. People in these parts are fishermen and shrimpers.
My first trip out there was inconclusive. If Forrest Bess lived on the mainland, he didn't leave any obvious trace (not that I was expecting to find anything visible after 49 years). And if he lived on an island, as Gober writes, I couldn't access them without crossing the Intracoastal Waterway. I didn't have a boat and wasn't quite confident about my swimming ability. So I looked around a bit, took a few photos, and left.
The remains of a concrete slab on the mainland--could it be Bess' cabin's foundation?
That afternoon, I drove straight from Chinquapin to Galveston, where there was an exhibit opening at the Galveston Artist Residency. I told a friend there about the unsuccessful trip and explained that to really explore the area, I needed a boat. She said she knew someone who might be able to help. She introduced me to Eric Schnell, the director of the GAR and I told him what I believed--that Forrest Bess lived on an island in East Matagorda Bay when he started having visions and painting the abstract paintings we have since become familiar with. (By this time, I had somehow convinced myself that he definitely lived on an island as opposed to the mainland, even though I have no particular proof one way or the other.)
Eric suggested that he might be able to wrangle a boat and got my contact information. I marked it down as merely a conversation over beers at a party--I didn't really expect anything to happen. I put it out of my mind and moved on to other projects. Then in late June, I got an email from him. The expedition was on. He had a friend from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency who needed to take a trip out to Matagorda to look at a couple of potential habitat restoration projects. We set a date and I shared what maps I could find. Assuming Bess lived on an island that was near the terminus of the Chinquapin Rd., I figured there were only four islands it could be.
Four candidates for Forrest Bess's island
As it turned out, Eric's friend from NOAA, Kristopher Benson, was interested in checking out Bird Island, which is a protected wildlife habitat. Kris is a marine habitat resource specialist at the Galveston NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory located in the old Fort Crocket Buildings. His proposal was for us to accompany him as he went to West Matagorda Bay to look at an oyster reef, then over to East Matagorda Bay to see Bird Island. My work schedule is such that every other Friday, I have a day off. So on July 19, I drove down to Galveston early in the morning, meeting Eric at GAR at 7:30 am. We drove together over to NOAA and met up with Kris. We had a comfy government Suburban and a flat-bottom aluminum boat in a trailer behind us. The boat reminded me of the boats I used to work on when I worked doing shallow water seismic exploration for Western Geophysical back in the 80s in Nigeria and Brazil. It was designed to go very fast (it had a large outboard motor) and to be able to operate in very shallow water. The tradeoff is comfort, but that's OK--it was a work boat, not a pleasure boat.
NOAA's flat-bottom aluminum boat
I thought it was strange that Eric happened to know a NOAA scientist. I chalked it up to the fact that Galveston is a small town, but the reason was actually more direct. Kris is married to the director of Artist Boat, a art/education/environmental non-profit in Galveston. Artist Boat has lots of projects that combine art and the environment, including a purchase of some of the last undeveloped land on the west end of Galveston for the purpose of keeping it wild. Kris had firsthand experience mixing art with the environment, so our little expedition was right up his alley.
We headed off first to Palacios, a small pretty town on West Matagorda Bay. Palacios has a sizable population of Vietnamese immigrants and their descendents. We drove past a Vietnamese neighborhood that could be a suburban subdivision in Houston--brick homes, cul de sacs--except for the shrimp nets drying in the back yard. The other weird thing about Palacios is how people pronounce it--the Spanish origin has been totally forgotten. Folks say "puh-LA-shush".
We entered the bay from the public boat launch. It was still early, and there wasn't a breeze. The water was smooth and occasionally glassy. The sky blended with the water at the horizon, leaving us in an indistinct space of blue. Matagorda Bay was like a giant naturally formed James Turrell.
The bay was filled with jellyfish--thousands of them. We elected not to do any swimming.
Kris opened the throttle and headed out to a spot that seemed like literally the middle of nowhere. The bay is large and even at full throttle it took a while to get to our destination. We had maps and a GPS device and were using them to try to find a particular oyster reef known as Half Moon Reef. Kris later wrote me with a description of the project: "The currently funded phases of the project will restore approximately 40 acres of oyster reef through the placement of substrate material to restore the 3-dimensional structure of the reef and the hard substrate needed for recruitment and settlement of oyster larvae (spat). My purpose in visiting was to get a sense of the on-the-ground conditions at the project sites, as they are in an area of the coast that I'm only rarely able to get out in the field to see. We are also working with The Nature Conservancy on oyster restoration projects in other areas, so comparing these sites with those areas is helpful in understanding how our projects function." NOAA is one of the many federal and state agencies cooperating on the Half Moon Reef project.
Eric Schnell, left, and Kris Benson, right
Except for the shrimpers, we were mostly alone out there. It was an astonishingly isolated place, even though we knew Palacios was nearby.
Finding the reef was not easy. The map and the GPS device didn't seem to exactly match up. Nonetheless, Kris took samples of the salinity (high due to the drought) and dragged the anchor to look at the contents of sea bed.
When we headed back, the motor started conking out. It seemed that it wasn't drawing fuel. We switched out fuel lines and messed around with it, but we couldn't get it to work quite right. We limped slowly back to the landing at Palacios. I was worried that this was the end of our expedition, but Kris was still eager to see Bird Island. So we loaded up the boat, stopped for some bahn mi sandwiches, and pressed on, driving over to the Chinquapin Road and thence to East Matagorda Bay.
According to the Texas State Historical Association,
CHINQUAPIN, TEXAS (Matagorda County). Chinquapin is on an unpaved road on Live Oak Bayou just north of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and East Matagorda Bay, east of the Big Boggy National Wildlife Refuge, and eighteen miles southeast of Bay City in southeastern Matagorda County. It is surrounded by swampland. It and nearby Chinquapin Bayou were probably named for a type of tree in the area. The community, which has been in existence since at least the 1940s, was built on land that was once part of Bay Stock Farm, property owned by John J. LeTulle (a half brother of Victor Lawrence LeTulle). At one time Chinquapin had grown to around 100 cabins. In 1961 it was completely destroyed by Hurricane Carla; it gradually rebuilt, and by 1972 a landing strip and nineteen new dwellings had been added. The community appeared on 1989 highway maps. It is primarily a fishing village. In 2000 the population was 30. (Rachel Jenkins, "CHINQUAPIN, TX (MATAGORDA COUNTY)," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hrcer), accessed July 23, 2013. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.)I assume that population of 30 refers to full-time residents.There were more than thirty houses there, and they looked like weekend retreats for serious fishermen.
Chinquapin
Some were quite nice (but far short of the palatial beach houses on Galveston's West End), but most tended towards the ramshackle end of the spectrum.
Sometimes they looked as if they had been built one piece at a time, perhaps over several years. I like the one above because it is a classic dogtrot style house. But it worries me, too--a stiff breeze and some heavy rain will flood it.
I don't know how these houses compare to what was here in Forrest Bess' day. But let's just say that the powers that be have never bothered to pave the Chinquapin Road. The community is extremely remote and the dwellings pretty modest.
The Chinquapin Road ends at the Intracoastal Waterway. Islands 1, 2, 3 and 4 are on the other side of this dredged-up channel. But we had to launch our vessel from a private boat launch further up Chinquapin Bayou, which meanders very lazily to the bay. (This is no Houston-style channelized bayou.) I was worried that we'd stall out again and be stranded. Eric stayed on shore just in case we needed to call for help. It took many tries to get the motor to start, which didn't boost my confidence. But Kris seemed unconcerned.
We headed out very slow on the bayou. It was very shallow and he didn't want to risk stranding us by going too fast and hitting a sandbar.
Chinquapin Bayou
Once we crossed the Intracoastal Waterway, we passed through the narrow channel (really a continuation of the bayou) between islands 2 and 3. Before the Waterway was dug, these islands had been part of the mainland. But because of this narrow channel, they are now desolate uninhabited places. But was that always the case?
It was on island 3 where we saw this little fella. We couldn't tell if it was a starving coyote or a fox or a stray dog, and we wondered how it managed to survive on this treeless desert island. Were there mice to hunt?
The islands were devoid of human habitation of any sort. The only sign that people had been on the islands were from the raised areas (where dredged mud had been deposited in decades past), detritus that had washed ashore, and the occasional duck blind.
Duck blind on Island 3
There was no obvious ruin of Bess's shack, which we didn't expect to see anyway. Just scrub grass and shrubs, some birds, and our fox friend, who we saw more than once as we rode around the islands.
Island 1
After cruising past all three islands on the Intracoastal Waterway side, we went out bay side to check out the other side of each island. Kris decided to land on island 3 (he offered to go ashore on each of the islands, but I didn't see much point--they were all the same).
Island 3
Except where the islands had been built up with dredged material, the land and water blended seamlessly. The boat went through this area of grass in about six inches of water before reaching dry land.
standing on island 3
These islands were fairly long but very narrow. As I stood on the south side of the island, I could see a tugboat on the north side in the Intracoastal Waterway. There was constant barge traffic here.
Bess started to have visions of symbols when he lived here. The visions are the source of the symbols we see in his paintings. These islands are so small and isolated, and may have been even more isolated in the 1950s. It doesn't seem all that strange that someone living here would start to see things. Particularly someone blessed (or cursed, as it may have been in Bess' case) with imagination.
Forrest Bess, untitled (The Crowded Mind/The Void), 1947, oil on canvas, 10" x 11 3/4"
From what I had been told, I've concluded that if Bess lived on an island, it had to be island 1, 2 or 3. But there was a fourth island to check out--Bird Island. Once I saw it, it was obvious that Bess could never have lived on it. As small as 1, 2 and 3 were, Bird Island makes them look enormous. (Having said this, it's probable that the island was bigger in the 50s--these sand spits are always eroding and changing size.)
Bird Island
Bird Island was one of the reasons we were there. It is a protected bird habitat, and this tiny spit of land is covered with birds of all different species nesting. It's far enough from shore that predators like the fox can't get to it.
Kris wrote me that "the Bird Island site in East Matagorda Bay (also called Dressing Point), and the adjacent Half Moon Shoal area, are areas where a project concept has been proposed by multiple state and federal agencies. NOAA did not originate the project concept and does not yet have an official position with regard to the concept. In general, the proposed project would prevent erosion of the island and stabilize the shoal, and possibly expand the size of the island." So while NOAA was not officially involved with any proposed Bird Island project, Kris was interested in checking it out.
And you can see why. Birds already use every square inch of the island for their nests. I was astonished to see so many different kinds of birds, from roseate spoonbills to cormorants to brown pelicans and more, nesting side by side. I was torn by a desire to get closer and a responsibility not to disturb the nesting grounds.
Even if we never saw the exact spot where Bess's cabin was, it was worth the trip to see Bird Island. It was a breathtaking sight. I only wish I had brought a telephoto lens.
We made our way back to the landing, where Eric was patiently waiting for us (hoping we hadn't managed to stall and strand ourselves). Tired and a little bit sunburned, we loaded the boat onto the trailer and headed back to Galveston. As we drove back, Kris told me that NOAA might be able to help me find the exact location of Bess's cabin. It turns out that people have been taking aerial photos of the coastal areas of Texas since the 1940s. He uses them in his work to determine how habitats have changed over time.
Photo courtesy of the Texas General Land Office
This is an aerial photo from 1952 of the northeast part of East Matagorda Bay. You can see Bird Island in the center and the Intracoastal Waterway running as a stripe across the top third. Chiquapin Bayou and the three islands are easily visible, but island 3 is connected to a larger island. Between 1952 and now, there has been visible erosion of the islands.
Photo courtesy of the Texas General Land Office
Here we can see what appear to be two structures, one on island 2 and one on island 3. (Island 1 and 2 were apparently a single island back then.) Could one of them be Forrest Bess's shack? And the other his parents' bait camp? It's possible I suppose. Then again, I could have it completely wrong and they could have been on the mainland.
What would I do if I found the location of Bess's cabin? I'd like to go back and put a plaque in the ground there. And wouldn't it make sense to petition the state government to name that island after Forrest Bess. Here is one of Texas's greatest artists, and as far as I can tell he had nothing named after him. "Forrest Bess Island" would be a nice start. But most of all, I'd like to maybe cmap out on the spot--just pitch a tent, close my eyes and see what visions come.
Epilogue 1
Shortly after I wrote the article above, I saw painter Richard Stout at the Menil bookstore, and mentioned my search and the difficulty of finding Bess’ camp. Stout instantly said it was on an island. I asked him which one–pointing out that two islands at the mouth of Chinquapin Bayou are separated by the bayou itself. He thought for a second and said, I think the east island, which was the island we saw the fox on, aka Island 3.
I walked into the store, and bought a copy of Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle, a new book version of Chuck Smith’s 1997 documentary film. It’s more about Bess the man than his art and reproduces a number of letters and photos, including photos of Bess’ shack! The book definitely states that the bait camp is on the island, on the bayou side. Fishermen coming from the mainland would go through the bayou channel, pull up to the little dock Bess built, and yell out for him to bring out some bait shrimp. So the mystery was getting close to being solved.
Epilogue 2
Or was it? After the original version of this article was published, I started hearing from people who had ambiguous evidence and contrary eyewitness testimony. First, I received a scan of a letter from Forrest Bess that featured a hand-drawn map. It seemed to confirm that the shack was on island 2.
But then Bob Bess, Forrest Bess's nephew, wrote a letter to Glasstire indicating the camp was on the mainland! I sent him an email with the following image attached.
I asked him which, if any, of these four locations was the location of the camp. He confirmed that it was #2--on the mainland, on the west bank of Chinquapin Bayou. "If you have seen The Key to the Riddle DVD, I am the young boy with Forrest (probably about 1952). That was obviously filmed at the camp." Despite the repeated references to an island in various texts, Forrest Bess's home was on the mainland. This fits with what Sigman Byrd wrote in 1956--he wrote about having to be ferried back to his car. Chinquapin Road is on the east side of the bayou. And it even matches Forrest Bess's hand-drawn map, which didn't indicate north. The reason I thought it indicated a camp on an island was because I was looking at it upside down.
Somehow it feels more romantic to imagine Bess on a desert island. But let me say that location #2 is every bit as remote as any of the islands, except for Bird Island. All the houses are on the other side of the bayou. On the west side, there is a whole lot of marshy nothing. It is still one of the loneliest places in Texas, I reckon. A good spot to hang out if you want to see visions...
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