Pan is Five Year Old

Robert Boyd

  

I just realized that Pan had an anniversary this month. The Great God Pan Is Dead is officially five years old. Now if you look over in the right hand column, you will see posts going as far back as December, 2006. But that is a little deceptive.

I started a personal blog (initially called Boyd's Blog, later renamed Wha' Happen?) back in May 2006. I occasionally wrote about art on it, increasing in frequency as I made more of an effort to see more local art events and exhibits. Finally, in August 2009, I decided to spin off an art blog separate from my personal blog. My first post official post was posted on August 21, 2009. But I imported a bunch of art posts from Wha'Happen? into this blog, which is why it seems to start much earlier.

The first five posts after that introductory post were:

• An explanation of the title of the blog from a piece by William Burroughs.
• A post on Herb and Dorothy Vogel (with notes on the Menils and Glenn Bray).
• A post relating a dream I had about James Turrell. 
• A description of some of the acts at the Frenetic Theater Fringe Festival, including Jim Pirtle's wine enema.
• A post about James Surls giving a talk at Lawndale (featuring art by Emily Sloan and Elaine Bradford).

Interestingly, some of these are subjects I would return to again and again: two more posts about the Vogels,  several posts mentioning Jim Pirtle (including this one), ditto for Surls, Elaine Bradford and Emily Sloan.

As for Wha'Happen?, it gradually diminished as The Great God Pan Is Dead expanded.

To celebrate our fifth birthday, I'm going to re-post my five favorite posts, perhaps with a little introductory commentary, over this Labor Day weekend.

I want to thank everyone who has read The Great God Pan Is Dead for the past five years, and I especially want to thank the writers who contributed over the years: Dean Liscum, Virginia Billeaud Anderson, Betsy Huete, Brian Piana, Paul Mullan, Pete Gershon and Carrie Marie Schneider. Thank you all so much!

How To Dispose of 5000 Works of Art: Herb and Dorothy 50 x 50

Robert Boyd

The collector's mania sneaks up on you. I'm in my super-cluttered bedroom looking around, and there are 51 visible artworks (and many more in portfolios on my bookshelves as well as artworks hanging in other rooms). They range from a painted postcard sent to me by Earl Staley and silkscreened limited edition beer-bottles with art by Ron Regé, Jr. and C.F. to paintings by Lane Hagood, Rachel Hecker and and Chris Cascio. I'm not saying this to brag--well, maybe a little--but to point out what all serious collectors come to realize--that they have a lot of stuff and will someday need to dispose of it.

We think of collectors as rich people, but despite the shocking auction prices we read about, the reality is that almost anyone can collect art. Small artwork, prints, art by non-"big name" artists can all be pretty affordable. If you can buy directly from an artist, that usually saves you some money. Sometimes you can trade for art--if you offer a service that artists need. (Hence the art collections of dentists.)

The Vogels are the gods of this approach to collecting. A quick recap of their story: Herbert Vogel was an amateur painter who worked for the post office. His wife Dorothy had a job at a public library. They loved art. They were really into pop art when they got married in 1962, but it was too expensive for them. So they started buying minimal art (not quite yet the new thing when they started). They made a deal with one another--they would live on Dorothy's salary and buy art with Herbert's income. And they did, for decades. In the end, they had a collection of over 4000 pieces of art, which they donated to the National Gallery. In 2008, a really entertaining film , Herb & Dorothy by Megumi Sasaki, was made about the couple. And that seems like it should have been the end of it. The problem is that Herb and Dorothy kept on collecting and kept on donating to the National Gallery, which finally said, enough! As big as the National Gallery is, it just couldn't absorb 5000+ pieces of art.

So they came up with a wonderful solution. They made a gift of art to 50 museums--one in each state--of 50 pieces of art. This is the 50x50 program. Thus 2500 pieces of art were distributed all over the country. And Megumi Sasaki filmed a sequel, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50.

The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas got the 50 pieces of art reserved for Texas. I saw them when the Blanton mounted an exhibit of the work, and one thing I noticed is that not every artist they collected has ended up in the canon. The Vogels had an amazing ability to pick "winners," but no one bats a thousand. (Interestingly, the Blanton also received James Michener's large collection of modernist art after his death. In the book American Art since 1900, Robert Kushner looks at Michener's collection in terms of a year by year "batting average"--significant works as a percentage of the whole. He calculates Michener's lifetime average at .319, which I'd say is pretty great. Is it crass that I'd like to know what the average is for the Vogels?)

That's one thing the new documentary examines--artists who haven't achieved any particular fame whose work was collected by the Vogels.


Charles Clough with the Vogels at the Metropolitan Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

For example, the film looks at Charles Clough. He is an abstract painter who came out of the same Buffalo scene that spawned Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo (Clough was a co-founder of Hallwalls). The Vogels collected a large number of his pieces (127 are part of the 50x50 collection), and he is one of the artists whose work ended up in all 50 museums. But his career as an artist has been rocky. He admits to having hardly sold anything in the previous 10 years. He points to a map of the USA covered with thumbtacks. Each one represents an artwork in a museum. And two-thirds of them are a result of the 50x50 program.


Charles Clough painting (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Another artist who never achieved fame was Martin Johnson. Johnson had some success in the late 70s and early 80s, but eventually moved to Richmond Virginia to run the family business, which represented plumbing supplies to buyers.


Martin Johnson and the family business (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turned out, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond was one of the recipients of the Vogel collection, and they were amazed to learn that one of the artists whose work they received lived right there in Richmond.


Martin Johnson and his work (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Artists whose moment of success happened decades ago are suddenly finding their work in museums all over America. For artists like Clough, it could mean a second chance at success.

The artist who most exemplifies the Vogel collection is Richard Tuttle. Herbert Vogel was quite close to Tuttle, and Tuttle is represented by 336 pieces in the 50x50 collection--enough for each museum in the program to get at least six Tuttles.


Richard Tuttle with the Vogels (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turns out, he's not super happy about the 50x50 program. He would have preferred to see the collection stay in one piece, even if it meant storing most of it. But he's realistic and is shown visiting with curators in Maryland to discuss the best way to display his work from the collection.


Richard Tuttle at the Academy Art Museum in Maryland  (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Of course, Tuttle is a pretty difficult artist to love. Most of his work in the collection consists of pieces of lined notebook paper with one or two small watercolor marks on it. This is pretty challenging work, especially in provincial museums in Montana or Alabama. How to show this work in these disparate places is the main subject of the movie. The filmmaker traveled to several of these far-flung museums, including small museums in Honolulu and Fargo, North Dakota. Stephen Jost, the director of the Honolulu Museum of Art, addresses this head on. He knows the work is difficult for many visitors, and the Honolulu Museum has worked very hard to help viewers engage with it. One scene shows children playing a game with the art--they have a guide to all the pieces with little image excerpts, and they are in a race to see who can find them all on the walls first. But Jost acknowledges that there are some viewers who are just plain hard to reach in general and especially with the art from the Vogel collection. These viewers are teenagers and young adults.


Sullen teens at the Honolulu Museum of Art (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

What some of the museums have done is make the Vogels the focus of the exhibits--telling their story. The Blanton had the first Vogel documentary running continuously. Some museums actually recreated parts of the Vogel's apartment, down to stuffed cats and turtles (the Vogels never had children--they had pet cats, fish, and turtles).


The Plains Art Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Places like the Plains Art Museum were thrilled to get the gift. Director Colleen Sheehy states her pride in being in the company of LA MOCA and the Albright-Knox Gallery, who also received Vogel gifts.  She used the Vogels themselves as the way to interest viewers in the work. She explained it this way: "The work might seem difficult, but they're so accessible." She actually commissioned a local artist, Kaylyn Gerenz, to create a stuffed animal version of one of their cats to be exhibited alongside the work in a small recreated corner of the Vogel's apartment.

One of the museums they donated the work to, the Las Vegas Art Museum, abruptly closed in February 2009, a victim of the recession which hit Las Vegas especially hard. Part of the conditions for accepting the gift were that if you closed, you had to give it to an approved museum in the same state. In this case, the work went to the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV. By focusing so much on several small, regional museums, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50 almost becomes a documentary about provincial museums. It's fascinating to see how they strive to stay relevant and stay afloat.

Herbert Vogel died during the filming of this documentary. The Vogels had already stopped collecting, and their apartment was emptying out.




Before and after (stills from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

After you've given away your life's work, I guess passing on (at the ripe old age of 90) is not so bad. But I worry about Dorothy (now 78). Will an apartment with no art and no Herb be too lonely for her?

One more interesting thing about Herb & Dorothy: 50x50. It was partly financed by a Kickstarter campaign. They did a typical thing--gifts of a certain size would get you a download of the finished movie, and a little more would get you the DVD.  In short, they presold the movie. I was pretty sceptical when I heard about it, mainly because I didn't really believe there was anything else to say after the first movie. But I went ahead and donated enough to get the DVD, and I was very pleasantly surprised. By focusing on artists like Charlie Clough and Martin Johnson and museums like the Plains Museum and the Honolulu Museum, Sasaki created a completely new documentary around the Vogels. It's an informative, moving documentary.

Road Trip: Austin Again

Robert Boyd

I like visiting Austin to look at art. Austin is nice. It's fun to be around hills every now and then. My sister and her family live there, and I like to visit them. And their cat. And as it happens, I was in Austin this weekend feeding their cat (and otherwise catering to its every whim). While I was there, I checked out the following art exhibits.

Tiny Park: I wrote a separate post about this stop on the tour (guided on Friday night by the Virgil of the Austin art scene, Jaime Salvador Castillo).

Rigoberto A. Gonzalez at the Mexican American Cultural Center: Great exhibit, fantastic venue (the MACC, which I was completely unaware of until Castillo took me there). This exhibit also got its own post.




Lane Hagood at Domy: This show consists of three paintings and a 'zine, which was sold out by the time I got there, alas. I was shown a not-for-sale copy of the zine and it looked fantastic. It was about the ghost of James Ensor haunting Hagood.


Installation view at Domy

The show otherwise consisted of three paintings. This permitted an unusually roomy display--each painting got its own wall. Despite the paucity of paintings in the show, it was actually reviewed (or "picked") by Artforum. Soon Hagood will be too important (and too expensive) to hang out with the hoi polloi. I'm lucky I bought his work early--as I write this, I am looking at a Hagood painting hanging over my desk.


Lane Hagood, Eyeball Rug

I have two comments about the Eyeball Rug. First, I wonder if Hagood had been reading Jim Woodring before he painted this, because Woodring included an eyeball rug (whose eyes follow the protagonist) in a story. The second point is related. Why is this a painting? Why not make an actual rug? This could be the beginning of a whole line of Hagood designed home furnishings. I don't know about you, but I would love to have a real eyeball rug.

The Vogels at the Blanton Museum: You've seen Herb and Dorothy, right? Well, if you haven't, it's playing in the Blanton Museum in the same gallery displaying the 50 pieces of art given to the Blanton from their collection. Briefly, Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a mail clerk and reference librarian, respectively, started collecting art in the early 60s. They were enthusiastic collectors of minimal and post minimal art, and often bought less expensive items (drawings instead of paintings) directly from the artists. They had good eyes and were often quite prescient in their purchases (they were the first people to buy a Sol Lewitt, for example). The legend of their collection grew, and they offered it to the National Gallery. But their collection was too large for even the National Gallery to accept--it took about 1000 pieces of the Vogel's collection. Then they came up with the idea of donating 50 pieces to institutions in each of the 50 states. In Texas, the Blanton Museum was the museum selected to receive the Vogel's gift. These 50 pieces are currently on view there. Herb and Dorothy are my heroes. I actually get choked up when I imagine their life of heroic collecting on a budget and the astonishingly non-greedy way they chose to dispose of their collection.


Daryl Trivieri, Untitled (portrait of the Vogels), 1998,  charcoal on paper 22 1/2" x 30 3/16"

While they focused on minimalism and post-minimalism, they actually had quite catholic tastes. The show at the Blanton reflects that. But it also reflects that they had their favorites--particularly Richard Tuttle. Sixteen of the 50 works given to the Blanton are Richard Tuttle pieces--usually watercolor on small pieces of of paper.


Richard Tuttle, Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings - Box 8, Group 28, 1980-82, watercolor and graphite on loose leaf notebook paper (ruled; hole-punched), 11 7/16" x 8"

The way they handled their collecting was that her salary paid for their living expenses while his paid for the art. And while that added up to a tidy sum over the years, the fact is that any given Sotheby's contemporary auction will see more cash change hands in a single night than the Vogels spent on art in their entire lifetime. And yet, they ended up with one of the greatest art collections in history. This should be a lesson for all you art lovers out there who are too intimidated to buy art. You can do it. The Vogels did on a very modest income.


Stephen Antonakos, Ruby and Red Incomplete Circles, 1976,  graphite and colored pencil on paper, 29 15/16" x 22 5/16"

While the Vogels had an uncanny ability to pick "winners," the fact is that a large part of their collection consists of work by artists that don't make the art history texts. It's easy to see how Stephen Antonakos fits in with their collection, but until I saw his series of incomplete circles at the Blanton, I'd never heard of him. Indeed, the Vogel's collection might inspire some new scholarship about some of the lesser-known minimalists and other artists front he 60s and 70s.


Elizabeth Murray, Green Cup - Brown Table, 1999,  paper collage, with gouache and watercolor, 11 3/4" x 9 1/4"

But as I said before, it's not all minimalism. Not every piece is so severe. This beautiful little Elizabeth Murray painting, for example, exemplifies the playful, rubbery qualities of Murray's work.

The Collecting Impulse will be up until August 12, but the pieces will be part of the Blanton's permanent collection. The Vogel's 50x50 is an almost unimaginable gift to the people of America, particularly in this age of greedy, narcissistic collectors with their own private museums.

The Human Touch, Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Collection at the Blanton: That this bit of corporate propaganda is being shown next to the Vogel's collection is supremely ironic. What is RBC Wealth Management? It is the money management arm of the Royal Bank of Canada. Like pretty much every big bank in the Western world, it has faced unwelcome scrutiny since 2008. The CTFC accused RBC of exercising sham futures trades to achieve a tax advantage earlier this year. So as oil companies learned in the late 70s and 80s, when your corporate reputation is suffering, that's the time to sponsor some big art shows. And since RBC Wealth Management is a retail business, a good art exhibit might also drum up a few customers. (I'm going to guess that there is a high correlation between adult museum visitors and consumers of financial management services.) So they're taken their collection on the road. It's already been to the Redline in Denver, Colorado; the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada; the Yakima Valley Museum in Yakima, Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida; the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana; the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, MN; the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska; and possibly other venues I have missed. This thing has been touring for years. (If you want to see The Human Touch at your museum, RBC encourages you to contact them.)

Alec Soth Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from Sleeping by the Mississippi, 2002, chromogenic color print, 32" x 40"

This whole thing is kind of strange. The museums that display this exhibit are all secondary or tertiary museums. This show is cheap to put on--I'm assuming RBC pays for most of it, and no curator is required. But there is something feels off about displaying a bank's art collection in a public museum. I feel a little uncomfortable when a big name collector does this--a commercial enterprise doing it seems all the more skeevy. I don't think art exhibits should be giant advertisements. But that's what this feels like to me.


Kerry James Marshall, Blind Ambition, 1990, acrylic and collage on canvas, 84" x 55"

The problem is that viewing this exhibition that way is to deny its actual virtues--or perhaps a better word would be "pleasures." The art included in The Human Touch is appealing, interesting and occasionally beautiful. The Chuck Close silkscreen John (a portrait of John Chamberlain), for example, had a shimmering active surface, colors in contrast with one another and yet still creating an ultimate unity--a portrait of the master sculptor. Kerry James Marshall's Blind Ambition cleverly spoke to the complexity of "climbing the ladder" and "colorblindness" in terms of the African-American experience. There is a powerful John Ahearn plaster sculpture in the exhibit. In short, whatever my misgivings, I liked the art on display.

But one final note--it is interesting to contrast the work shown in The Human Touch and the in the Vogel's collection. The Vogel's, to my mind, were much more adventurous collectors than RBC Wealth Management.

Leticia Bajuyo at Women and their Work: Technology and obsolescence underlie Event Horizon by Leticia Bajuyo. It consists of two structures that have each other. Each structure consists of a theremin and thousands of CDs tie-wrapped into the form of a snakey funnel.



The two wide parts of the funnels face each other. The theremins are each at the narrow part of the funnel. In theory, the funnels could act as amplifiers, but I suspect there is too much noise leak for them to be effective.







As a conceptual piece, Event Horizon seems pretty obvious--even heavy handed. But as an object, it's quite beautiful and intriguing. And people loved playing with the theremins--especially kids. In short, while it doesn't succeed on all levels, it succeeds enough.