Dallas on a Saturday in March (might be a little NSFW)

Robert Boyd

(Continued from Dallas on a Friday in March)



Where Friday had been sunny and beautiful, Saturday was rainy and cold. But that didn't keep the custom/classic car people from filling the lot of Four Corners Brewing. This was an unscheduled stop--I was driving east on Singleton and saw them. Pulled a u-turn and checked out some of the best art I saw all day.



Note the "swamp cooler" on the side of this car. A lot of the vehicles here had these primitive air-conditioners mounted on their passenger doors .



The cars seemed about equally split between muscle cars made into low-riders and classic 40s and 50s cars. I was especially pleased to see all the vintage pick-ups. And there were several young women present like the one at the top of the post dressed like 50s bad girls. I guess this is the custom car version of cosplay? If so, I approve.



I also liked how the car clubs had their own matching mechanics shirts. I think contemporary artists should consider forming into similar clubs (with similar matching shirts).



Some people wouldn't really call this art. Maybe a kind of craft. Let's face it--no custom car show is ever going to be listed in Glasstire's calendar section. But it is art. There is a great section in Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (1982), the biography of Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler, that deals with this:

"Of course, what's going on is such situations is precisely an artistic activity. A lot of art critics, especially New York Artforum types, have a lot of trouble seeing the validity of such a contention. I once had a run-in with one of them about this--this was years later, in the middle of the Ferus period. [...] We got going and ended up arguing about folk art. He was one of those Marxist critics who like to think that they're real involved with the people, making grand gestures and so dorth, but they're hardly in the world at all.

"Anyway, he was talking about pot-making and weaving and everything, and my feeling was that this was all historical art but not folk art. As far as I'm concerned, a folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, something you use every day, and you give it overlays of your own personality, what it is you feel and so forth. And a folk art in the current period of time would more appropriately be in the area of something like a motorcycle. I mean a motorcycle can be a lot more than a machine that runs along; it can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic. 

"Anyway, so I looked in the paper and found this ad of a guy who was selling a hot rod and a motorcycle. And I took the critic out to this place. It was real fortunate because it was exactly what I wanted. We arrived at this place in the Valley, in the middle of nowhere, and  here's this kid: he's selling a hot rod and he's got another he's working on. He's selling a '32 coupe, and he's got a '29 roadster in the garage. The '32 he was getting rid of was an absolute cherry. But what was more interesting, and which I was able to show the critic, was that here was the '29, absolutely dismantled, I mean, completely apart, and the kid was making decisions about the frame, whether or not he was going to cad plate certain bolts or whether he was going to buff grind them, or whether he was just going to leave them raw as they were. He was insulating and soundproofing the doors, all kinds of things that no one would ever know or see unless they were truly a sophsticate in the area. But, I mean, real aesthetic decisions, truly aesthetic decisions. Here was a 15-year-old kid who couldn't know art from schmart, but you couldn't talk about a more aesthetic activity than what he was doing, how he was carefully weighing: what is the attitude of this whole thing? What exactly? How should it look? What was the relationship in terms of its machinery, its social bearing, everything? I mean, all these things were being weighed in terms of the aesthetics of how the thing should look. It was a perfect example.

"The critic simply denied it. Simply denied it: not important, unreal, untrue, doesn't happen, doesn't exist. See, he comes from the world of New York where the automobile... I mean, automobiles are 'What? Automobile? Nothing.' Right? I mean, no awareness, no sensitivity, no involvement. So he simply denied it: 'It doesn't exist.' Like that: 'Not an issue.' Which we argued  about a little on the way back over the Sepulveda pass. 

"I said, 'How can you deny it? You may not be interested, but how can you deny it? I mean, there it is, full-blown, right in front of you, and it's obviously a folk art!'

"Anyway, he, 'No, no.'

"So I finally just stopped the car and made him get out. I just flat left him there by the road, man, and just drove off. Said, 'See you later, Max.'"

Robert Irwin FTW!


500X

OK, now I was going to see some alternative art spaces, even if it killed me. I knew 500X was open because their sign had given Saturday hours. That was my first stop. The metal exterior made it look like a typical storefront gallery in terms of size, but it seems they have the whole building to use as they please. There were several galleries, some quite large. There were multiple shows happening all at once. For that reason, it reminded me a bit of Lawndale Art Center in Houston.


Elaine Pawlowicz, Pet Warranty, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

The big show on the ground floor was a group pf paintings by Elaine Pawlowicz. She states her influences are outsider art, Chicago Imagists, surrealism and several others. I think those influences show in Pet Warranty with its weird forced perspective and colors.


Elaine Pawlowicz, Cactus Ball, 2014, oil on canvas,48 x 48 inches

Less so in Cactus Ball, which appears to be aiming more for prettiness. But the problem I have with both paintings is that Pawlowicz's painterly ambitions surpass her technical skills. Both of these paintings would have more oomph if they were convincing images, but her painting of three dimensional things in space is awkward. None of those parrots is quite right, and the figure standing behind them is especially awkward. The position of that hand and the way it's painted doesn't look like a real hand. Now we've come a long way from requiring verisimilitude from painters--that was rarely a concern of the Chicago Imagists, after all. But when Roger Brown needed to paint a hand, it looked pretty much like a hand. Indeed surrealism works best when its dreamlike images seem real.

Cactus Ball is a perfect example of this. Imagine a sphere of flowering cactus plants floating in front of you, about ten feet wide. If you saw such a thing, in a dream perhaps, you'd probably agree that it is a surreal image. But Pawlowicz doesn't paint a convincing sphere. The cacti on the edge of the sphere should be facing out and not toward the viewer. There should be a sense of the center projecting towards us and the edges receding. Cactus Ball just doesn't look like a ball.

The was some humor in some of her paintings of animals, and her intense coloring has appeal, but as a whole, these paintings didn't work for me.


Elizabeth Hurtado, Foci II, 2014, white recycled garment bags, arm knit,  five stitch rows

Upstairs was an installation by Elizabeth Hurtado called Portal that consisted of two large discs, one white and one dark brown. The one above is Foci II.


Elizabeth Hurtado, Foci I, 2014,  recycled garbage bags, arm knit,  five stitch rows


Elizabeth Hurtado, Portal, 2014

The two discs are rugs knitted from material associated with garbage. So I think we're meant to think about the material and the process. But for me, the two large discs, one black and one white, laid on the parallel wooden floorboards, has a mysterious presence. The elemental shapes, the opposing colors; it recalls Malevich and Richard Long. I liked being in the room with them, walking around them. I liked that they were vortices. The work has the appeal of some minimalist works in that the two discs are defined as art in part by their relationship to the architectural space where they are. And the material suggests post-minimalism. And finally, these plastic-bag knit rugs are similar to actual circular knit rugs--which remind me of the kind of home-made rugs my grandparents had, but which these days you are more likely to find on Etsy. It was their qualities as particular objects installed in a particular place that I found exciting.

Before I left, I asked the attendant if he knew wherethe Reading Room was. It was just around the corner. I don't know why my GPS couldn't find the address on Friday. Unfortunately, it was not open. Strike two.

There were several exhibits opening that night. The first was over at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. The exhibit was Inversion of the Sacred by Masami Teraoka. This Japanese-American artist combines western and Japanese art in the pieces in this exhibit, which take the form of large altarpieces (similar to the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan and Hubert Van Eyck). But writing this does not prepare one in the least for the utter insanity of these pieces. Take a look.


Masami Teraoka, Eve and the Pope's Walking Stick from The Cloisters Last Supper series, 2009-2014, oil on panel with gold leaf frame, 120 x 120 x 3 inches

We see that Teraoka is not just creating a pastiche of the Renaissance altarpiece (down to the gold leaf) but also the erotic Japanese silkscreen print, or shunga. Above and beyond the collision of those two classic forms, he paints many of the women in the pieces as modern porn figures--by having them clothed in sexy lingerie or fetish wear, for example. It's a gloriously insane mash-up of disparate elements.


Masami Teraoka, Inversion of the Sacred from The Last Supper series, 2009-2014, oil on panel with gold leaf frame, 120 x 120 x 3 inches

The obvious point is to suggest that the church is hypocritical about sex. If Teraoka were a French surrealist in the 30s, I would say he was being deliberately blasphemous as a provocation. But I don't think that's exactly what is going on here. He states, "My Cloisters Last Supper – Triptych Series addresses Catholic clerical sex abuse. Underlying this theme, I see an authoritative institution trying to dictate individuals’ sexual relationships, gender and morality. To bring out such compelling cultural issues and put them on the Last Supper table may be an appropriate place to start a dialogue – to investigate the anatomy of these abuses." OK sure, but these paintings don't seem to me to be about anger or condemnation. They are too titillating for that, too erotic. I don't think the viewer is meant to be outraged; on the contrary, I think the viewer is meant to look at them with a big grin while exclaiming, "Outrageous!"


Masami Teraoka, Madonna and Geisha Pieta from The Cloisters Last Supper series, 2009-2014, oil on panel with gold leaf frame, 120 x 120 x 3 inches

That said, if the MAC invited Bishop Farrell of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas for a private viewing, or better yet, showed the work to William Donohue of the Catholic League, real outrage could be generated. But for me, a secular and somewhat jaded art viewer, the work seemed delightfully naughty, like The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter by Max Ernst but combined with an eroticism that recalls de Sade. And this connection makes me want to label the work surrealism. It's hard to do surrealism in the 21st century without it seeming a bit trite. But Teraoka overwhelms us with the size of these pieces and the sheer quantity of perverse images. The work makes an impact. In that way, I'd relate it to the work of Paul McCarthy or Jake and Dinos Chapman. And that art is not for everyone, obviously. But there is a part of me that likes to be shocked--that likes to exclaim, "Outrageous!"


Terrell James, Reason, 2013, oil on canvas, 66 x 66 inches

Next I went to see another of the Houston artists showing in Dallas. Terrell James was having an opening at Barry Whistler Gallery. The show was full of brightly colored abstractions like Reason. I don't know where she started out as an artist; she is much younger than the generations that pioneered abstract expressionism and color field painting, which her work reminds me of, but she continues that tradition of abstraction. I see echoes of Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still, Hans Hoffman and Dorothy Hood in her work, particularly in her use of broad flat areas of color, vigorously applied.


Terrell James, (left) Divided Sight 7, 2013, Chinese watercolor on paper, 30 x 22 inches and (right) Divided Sight 6, 2013, Chinese watercolor on paper, 30 x 22 inches

This flatness was especially emphasized with James' Chinese watercolor paintings. I asked James what "Chinese watercolor" was, and she told me that they were literally watercolor paints she bought in China. They have a gouache-like quality. What struck me about these paintings, which invariably would consist of areas of more-or-less flat color underneath a layer of thin black drawn lines, is how much they seemed like silkscreen prints. They had that bold, poster-like quality, and the intensity of the colors reinforced this.

If you like abstract painting like I do, this is a good show to see. The Houston artists I saw in Dallas--James, Joseph Havel and Geoff Hippenstiel--represented our fair city well.


Francis Giampietro, Before and After installation view, 2014

The next stop was Beefhaus, which is the exhibition space for the art collective Art Beef. (Why is it that two of the alternative art spaces in Dallas are called "haus"?) Beefhaus a small storefront that hasn't been seriously remodeled from whatever it was before (it even has a large, walk-in safe), and based on Francis Giampietro's show Before and After, artists can use the space as they will. That's a useful freedom to have. On their page, Art Beef has this statement:

ART BEEF is a collective of artists based in Dallas, Texas interested in challenging notions of authorship and market structure, while questioning the forms of programming most often associated with other artist-run spaces, galleries, organizations, and institutions. While individual artists ourselves, Art Beef is not intended to serve a platform for our own respective practices. This collaborative project is, therefore, a problematizing exploration of artists as curator without the constraints of either a commercial or not-for-profit art space, examining the status and function of art, particularly within the city of Dallas.

They get International Art English extra points for the use of the word "problematizing."  And kudos for combining a humorous name, Art Beef, with a humorless statement. Anyway, Giampietro's show was not humorless, but it was obscure.


Francis Giampietro, Before and After installation view, 2014

Like these three jars of liquid on this easel. What were they? I was a little worried that they may be filled with urine, but I went ahead and smelled them anyway. It was beer. (Whew!) And then there was the hole in the wall off to the left. People would peer into it but not cross the threshold for some reason. That little bit of floorboard along the bottom seemed to act as a kind of psychic barrier. They could see a shelf in the other room with a jar on it. The jar was filled with something dark.


Francis Giampietro, Before and After, 2014

If one went ahead and walked into the room (which I did, of course), this is what you saw. The label reads, "ONE WINTER'S BEARD."  It was funny to me that people were reluctant to step across that border, and even funnier was what actually was in the room.

But that didn't mask the basic opacity of the show. What were these stamped patterns on the wall? Why was there a stretched piece of pig-skin on the wall? What did the badly framed photos of Renaissance frescos signify?


Francis Giampietro, Before and After, 2014

I thought the pigskin might have something to do with football, which Giampietro had touched on in earlier work when he was a student in Houston. But he explained that the whole show was about Pope Francis and the man from whom the Pope chose his name, Saint Francis of Assissi. The green shapes on the wall are Pope Francis' crest. The reproductions of the fresco were from a cycle on the life of Francis, taken from Flickr images.

I have to admit I didn't find this explanation very illuminating, but more important, I would never have guessed it if Giampietro hadn't told me. I don't mind the exhibit being a headscratcher--it's an understatement to say that Giampietro's work rarely lends itself to easy interpretation. But I don't think it quite had the oomph of his earlier work. It felt coy and tentative in comparison.

Giampietro told me the Reading Room was having an opening that night, which explains why they had been closed earlier. Third time was a charm--I finally got to see it.


The Reading Room

This is what the Reading Room looks like from the outside. You can see that it is quite small. Inside, they were displaying a work by Nicolas G. Miller. I can't find much about Miller online, but he seems to be an artist from Marfa, where he has had several shows. This show was pretty spare (but given the tiny space it was in, not excessively so). It consisted of a sculpture (which was actually a big white subwoofer playing sounds), an LP record, and a print.


Nicolas G. Miller, Common Sense, 2014, Audio Engine S8 powered subwoofer, plinth, cables, aromatic cedar, low frequency effects tracks from Spielberg filsm, 60 exhibition copies of the Common sense vinyl record

The room was crowded with talking people which made the sounds from the subwoofer inaudible. Occasionally there was a low rumble, but I think that was thunder coming from outside. Let's face it--opening night is never a good night to experience sound art.


Nicolas G. Miller, Five Rows of Four/Ferns, 2014, screen print, 22 x 30 inches

The record itself was a 33 rpm record in a limited edition of 190. You could buy a copy for a mere $20, which I did. So now I have a copy of barely audible lo-frequency sound effects from Steven Spielberg movies. It's an object not really to be listened to (even though I did because I have that responsibility as a critic). It's more about the idea of what sounds are on the record than the actual sounds.

At this opening, I met up with Jim Nolan who had come to town to help hang Giampietro's show, and he invited me to join him a few Dallas-area artists (including Justin Ginsberg--half of Apophenia Underground, whose show I saw the day before--and Sally Glass, publisher of Semigloss magazine) at a nearby bar. They wanted to go check out a closing night party at Ware:Wolf:Haus, which appealed to me since that was another space I had tried but failed to visit on Friday.



We crossed the bridge over to the west and made our way to the gallery. The closing party was pretty much over, but they kept the doors open for us (we had called and said we were coming by). The show that was ending was Things and Place by Randy Guthmiller, Allison Ginsberg, Matt Koons and Alex Revier.


Randy Guthmiller, three shape pieces

Randy Guthmiller makes a zine called Shapes, which is pretty much just what it says--page after page of various shapes. He says he was influenced by that great shape-maker, Elsworth Kelly. He had a bunch of shape pieces up at Ware:Wolf:Haus. They seem to be shapes drawn on a computer and then printed large. Sometimes the colors are solid, but often they have some repeating texture.


Two pieces by Matthew Koons

Matthew Koons is also intrigued by shapes and also (apparently) uses computer software to create his work, but his images are more complex that Guthmiller's. They often employ photographic source material and are designed to have a quasi-three-dimensional look of pyramids, diamonds and cubes. There is kind of a 60s science fiction/psychedelia feel to them--they could be cover images for a Michael Moorcock-era issue of New Worlds or an early J.G. Ballard novel. Guthmiller chose the artists for the show, and one can see why he relates to Koons' work.

I only got to see it briefly, but Things and Place was quite nice. And this flexible art space, Ware:Wolf:Haus, was full of possibility.  Jim Nolan had been particularly impressed with the grassroots art spaces in Dallas when he had been a resident at CentralTrak. He asked me why Houston didn't have more artist-initiated spaces like this. Part of the answer is that Houston does have such spaces: Scott Charmin Gallery, El Rincon Social, Alabama Song and Skydive (which admittedly has been somewhat dormant lately). But the Dallas scene seems in some ways more simultaneously more sophisticated and more energetic. But maybe that impression is a product of me sweeping in over a weekend and seeing a whole bunch of stuff all at once. But it nonetheless suggests that Dallas is doing important things. Houston has long assumed a sense of artistic superiority in Texas that at this point can't be justified. What Dallas has going on is different from Houston, but in no way inferior.

That was the end of my Dallas art tour, but I was to make one more eventful art stop on Sunday in Waxahachie.

The People's Choices

by Robert Boyd

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

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

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

Best Art Exhibits in 2011

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

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

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

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

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


Best Performance Art in 2011

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

Cody Ledvina's performance Gawd parents: I am real

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

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

Most Significant Local Art-Related Events of 2011

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

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


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

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

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

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


Thanks everyone who voted, and happy new year!

Most Popular Pan Posts of 2011

by Robert Boyd

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

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

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



still from Waste Land

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Robert Boyd's Best of 2011

by Robert Boyd

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



John Wood and Paul Harrison, video stills

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


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

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



Havel-Ruck Projects, Torrent at the Houston Permitting Center

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


Man Bartlett puts a price on your dreams at Skydive

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



Exurb, Input/Output at the Joanna

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



Mark Flood, Another Painting, fluorescent paint

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


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

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


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

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


Natural Resources by The Bridge Club

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


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

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

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

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

Part 5 of the Houston Art Scene's collective favorites of 2011

by Robert Boyd

(Continued from part 4)


Robert Pruitt, You Are Your Own Twin at Hooks Epstein. Mark Flood said Pruitt's You Are Your Own Twin was one of the best gallery shows he saw this year.

Rod Northcutt's Indigenous Genius at Art League. Emily Sloan selected this show, writing "The audience's strong mixed or confused reactions were interesting to me."


Scott Teplin, Crash at Ggallery. This got a vote from Bett Hollis.

Seth Mittag, No Show ( At icetsuoH). This mysterious show (described to me by Mittag as a "non-show") got a thumbs up from Michael Galbreth.


a tiny part of Shaun O'Dell's Silver Wall at Inman

Shaun O'Dell, Feeling Easy Feelings at Inman. Howard Sherman included Shaun O'Dell's solo show on his list of favorites.


Stan VanDerBeek: The Cultural Intercom at CAMH. Devon Britt-Darby wrote that the underground film pioneer's show "was pretty important, too."


Howard Sherman likes the accidental art made with this kind of paint.

The neon orange markings on the pavement in and around downtown. Howard Sherman likes this unusual type of found painting: "One last thing. I feel really strongly about the neon orange markings I see on the pavement in and around downtown. They're done by construction workers marking things off. The arrows and geometic edges are cool. So are the tar splatters. Wonderfully random and more inspirational than most of the art out there." (Personally, I would add painted-over graffiti--the irregular boxes of various shades of grey always appeal to me.)


 Francis Giampietro, Nature Is Crooked from the UH Masters show

33rd School of Art Masters Thesis Exhibition at the Blaffer. An anonymous respondent spoke of the UH masters show. The class of 2011 was pretty remarkable, for sure.

Vija Celmins: Television + Disaster, 1964-9166 at the Menil. Michael Galbreth liked it a lot.


The tiny underwear that was part of Seth Mittag's installation at Rice


Seth Mittag, We're Still Here...  at EMERGEncy Room. Mittag's trailer park tragedy got the nod from an anonymous respondent, who wrote, "Seth is an amazingly humble artist for someone with such knowledge and skill. This installation kicked off the EMERGEncy Room right."

A few quick notes here. A vast majority of the respondents were artists--only Bill Arning (museum director/curator) and Devon Britt-Darby (critic/blogger) were not primarily artists (although Britt-Darby arguably is letting his artist side come to the fore with his current project). I noticed that the artists who responded tended to have observable biases towards institutions or galleries with which they were associated. There was also a bit of a generational bias--artists would select work from their peers. And there were observable "social circle" biases. Now I don't think any of these biases is bad, but it does suggest that if 11 other Houston artists had responded, the results would have been dramatically different. In short, this list is not definitive.

Finally, I have added a post for the worst of Houston in 2011. Check it out.

The Best (and Worst) of 2011 -- The Houston Art Community Fails to Reach a Consensus (part 2)

by Robert Boyd

This is continued from part 1. The shows/events listed below are everything that got one vote from the 14 respondents to my poll.

Howard Sherman, Apocalyptic Wallpaper at McMurtrey. This show actually got two votes, but one was from Howard Sherman himself! I approve of an artist having high self-esteem, but thought it wouldn't be right to count that toward the total. Mark Flood also liked this show.

Alex Jones' protest against the Federal Reserve bank on Allen Pkwy. This odd entry on the list came from Mark Flood: "Maybe not art but I loved [the] Alex Jones led a protest against the Federal Reserve bank on Allen Pkwy., sorta connected with occupy."

Ancestors of the Lake: Art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay, New Guinea at the Menil. Mark Flood wrote, "I also loved [the Menil's] Ancestors of the Lake: Art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. It makes me sound like a Menil groupie but believe me I'm not."


Ana Serrano, House of Beauty installation view, mixed media, 2011

Ana Serrano's Salon of Beauty at Rice Gallery. An anonymous respondent said, "I love to be totally immersed in an artist's world. This was spectacular! I wish I could visit it still."

BOX of Curiosities PODA Project by various Box 13 artists. This was one of the choices of an anonymous respondent.


Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time at MFAH. This color-saturated show was one of Devon Britt-Darby's favorites.


CounterCrawl flyer

CounterCrawl. A bicycling trip through various art studios struck a chord which performance artist Carrie Schneider.

The Cy Twombly Gallery shortly after his death. One of the most moving responses I got to my poll wass this one by painter/collagist/crochetist Stephanie Toppin: "To take an extremely personal take on this that I have not really told or blogged to anyone about, I did the very typical artist thing and visited the Cy Twombly gallery after he died. He is a part of the realm of painters that mak[es] me fall in love with not art, but paint. The relationship to canvas is what I could gawk at, spending hours away. I don't know what I really went for, but I had to go to satisfy the itch of not going. I wanted to think about art now that moved me like this. I felt scared. This year has been a personal rollercoaster for me and art has always been my safe place. For the first time, life seemed marked. I am not afraid of death, I am afraid of artist's death, of an art death. It actually hurts me to type this. Maybe I always felt that his painting lived, the possibility of more, and with his death they truly stopped. All of it became history. This is all there is.

"I know it is dramatic. I wish I was better at communicating a feeling that I can hardly contain. I've been thinking about it for days. I just wanted to tell you, it doesn't matter if you post this. I wish there was a show that shined above this for me.

"Art seems so fast now, there are so many pop up shows and work around every corner. I applaud the energy, I think it helps the public know and understand arts contribution to the culture of the city. I guess I am romantic. I want more slow art. I will have to stew on that."


Dennis Harper, iPageant, performance with paper props, 2011

iPageant, Dennis Harper & friends at the Joanna. An anonymous respondent wrote, "I was really disappointed with Nancy Douthey's performance, and I wish there was more time spent on the game show portion of the exhibition, but this was great." (Personally, I liked Douthey's performance, but I agree the game show should have kept going--hopefully they will restage it sometime.)

The Devon Britt-Darby saga. Emily Sloan voted for "Devon Britt-Darby's life, art, religion, sexcapades!"


Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein at CAMH. And speaking of Devon Britt-Darby, this is one of his top choices of the year.


Emily Peacock, MeeMee and Me, C Print, 2010

Emily Peacock. One anonymous correspondent wrote voted for "anything Emily Peacock does," which raises a point--there are artists that you see here and there who may not have a solo exhibit, but the sum of their work makes a big impact. I can see that effect with Peacock's photography.

Francis Giampietro & Jeremy DePrez, The Power of Negative Feedback at Lawndale. This two-man show garnered a vote from one of my anonymous respondents.

(Because I've reached the limit on the number of characters I can have in my "tags", I'm going to contiunue this in part 3--and part 4 and part 5. Onward!)