Betsy Huete’s Top Ten of 2015

Betsy Huete

What can I say? I like to keep it super specific. Without further ado, here are my top ten pieces exhibited in Houston in 2015:


10. Paul Krainak, Rural Phase at the Emergency Room Gallery, Rice University

I’m not sure I can officially call this a piece as it functioned more as a handout accompanying this exhibition of hard-lined, geometric paintings. However, it was unexpected, off-the-cuff, yet ambitiously structured, and it was the best part of the show. Thorough and expansive, the hand-out was designed as a newspaper headline, in which Krainak incorporated a disjunctive essay that flowed in and out of making sense, that abstractly yet incisively advocated for and explored the problems of maintaining an art practice in the midwest, and how to locate all of that within the larger aegis of the art historical canon.


9. Patrick Renner, Dylan Conner and Alex Larsen, circumherniadebaser at Some Assembly Required: Exquisite Corpse Sculpture at G Gallery

Whether it’s Funnel Tunnel or any number of the other public commissions he’s had, most of us by now are familiar with Patrick Renner’s more participatory work, most of which is usually in wood. But the Renner piece, done in collaboration with Dylan Conner and Alex Larsen, I was most drawn to was large and imposing, yet also felt more quiet, introspective, and fragile than most of his work I’ve seen. It looked like a dominating, much-too-thin hamster wheel, a modest pink bulge throbbing like an infection or the beginnings of a pregnancy.


8. Lavar Munroe, The Zoo Keeper (2015), Zoo at the Edge of the World: A Continuum of the Exotic, Art League Houston

We may be in 2015, but Lavar Munroe nevertheless keenly reminds us that we are still confined by our innate desire to castigate someone into the other, and to gravitate and fixate our gaze onto the grotesque. He does this with the tantalizing, gooey cotton candy corpse sadism that is The Zoo Keeper, as we bear witness to a mildewing corpse giving birth to a star-studded baby.


7. Camilo Ramirez, Untitled (Shark Teeth) (2014), 33rd Annual Juried Membership Exhibition, Houston Center for Photography

When I ran into this photograph, I felt sick and excited. There’s a certain wonderment in artificially glowing gums, and giant teeth cascading diagonally like a slide. It’s all the more curious situated in an innocuous parking garage. We have no idea if this is stage, or if Ramirez chanced upon it, and the complete lack of context is what makes it brilliant.


6. Jillian Conrad, Parts (2015), Exact Nature, Devin Borden Gallery

With Parts, Conrad reconstitutes fragments—exactitudes, couplings, and fractures that flit between the external and fleeting, vulnerable acts. The banal material, an everyday usefulness of hands quickly shifts to the possibility of wings; ceramics we make become decimated by scratches. Looking pointedly and blankly into asphalt visually represents the white noise she suggests in her final lines. As Parts insinuates poetry, it also suggests sound: is this music sheet meant to be played, to be written upon? Or do we let the lines cut across in looming silence?


5. Stephanie Syjuco, Free Texts: An Open Source Reading Room (2012), Corpocracy, The Station Museum 

Walking into Syjuco’s installation felt like being a kid in a candy store. There has been a lot of work in the past thirty or so years that is ephemeral and valueless, for us to take home with us. But there was something generative about the possibility of giving us information in the form of essays, by not giving us any answers per se, but rather planting seeds for us to read on our own. My first thought in seeing this piece is that it should exist in the street and not in a museum, but I quickly retracted that thought. There’s something special about being able to walk out of a white cube with a handful of tiny papers and mountains of reading material.


4. Henning Bohl and Sergei Tcherepnin, Early Awnings (2015), The Blaffer Museum

Early Awnings was nauseating. On view during the dead heat of Houston summer, this installation provided little respite, as non-functional awnings were situated in such a way that they could not provide a comfortable respite for the viewer, or felt claustrophobic by entrapping her. The sound, the color, the sculptures, the bland lighting all felt like a droning whirlwind or a courtly video game. When I left Early Awnings, I felt drained and empty. It was incredible.


3. Demetrius Oliver, Instrument (2015), Anemometer, Inman Gallery

I could not take my eyes off this work, a simple and mesmerizing view of two spinning roof turbine vents. The curved metal in the vents blurred, slowing, cutting lines feeling dangerous. Instrument echoes how I so often feel about Oliver’s work: cosmological references falling into the every day, making the most banal actions feel ethereal, making them feel like they’re on a precipice of falling into chaos.


2. Autumn Knight, Performance held in conjunction with the In-Situ In-Residence Program (2014), BLUEorange Gallery

I can’t help but feel like a voyeur in this deeply private, personal work by Autumn Knight. And it’s not because this work is confessional—it’s because there’s so much buried in what she doesn’t say. A full throttle, deep kind of ancestral pain emanates from her body as she sings and moves, and as viewers, we want to partake in her vulnerability.


1. Danielle Dean, Hexafluorosilicic, 2015, Core Exhibition, Glassell School of Art 

For some strange reason, it seems important we know this video takes place in a run-of-the-mill apartment in Alief. This completely disjunctive story needs to take place in such a general yet specific location. Family member actors recite a nonsensical soap opera-sounding dialogue culled from commercial ads; there’s a strange middle-aged man who won’t stop squinting. Hexafluorosilicic is silly and strange, and wholly terrifying. The characters keep staring behind this Alief apartment bathroom door. It’s probably just a porcelain toilet, but as Dean so poignantly shows us with her bombardment and cyclical pacing of signs, there’s probably much more to the bathroom than we can acknowledge.

Betsy Huete’s Top Ten of 2013

Betsy Huete

With a city as large and diverse and bustling with artistic activity as Houston, it’s easy to stumble upon great work. So as anyone can imagine, it was not difficult for me to come up with a top ten list for 2013. To be totally fair, however, I didn’t start writing for The Great God Pan is Dead until June of this year—which doesn’t mean much except that I was probably paying more critical attention in the second half of the year than the first. Therefore, it’s possible that I may be biased toward the latter half of 2013. At any rate, the following are my top ten pieces exhibited in Houston last year.

10. Bryan Forrester, Imogene (2012), The Big Show at Lawndale Art Center 
Imogene didn’t even hit #1 on my Big Show top five list, so it may be surprising to see it crop up here, in the top ten of everything. But sometimes images stay with a person in unpredictable ways, and this nude, vomiting, tattoo-laden man stuck with me. Vile and rich, Forrester’s photography is lush and personal, and Imogene feels equally fearsome and romantic.


Bryan Forrester, Imogene, 2012, C-print, 24 x 36 inches (courtesy Lawndale Art Center)

9. Katrina Moorhead, Trying to describe the way that space wraps itself around an object (2013), The Bird That Never Landscape at Inman Gallery 
Like a free-wheeling toddler, or perhaps the elderly homeless man with a pink tutu that frequents the Heights bike path, Katrina Moorhead’s work harbors an irreverent autonomy, seemingly unphased by its presence within a laser clean contemporary gallery like Inman. Yet strangely enough, it’s as if the work also depends on it being shown there, as if it requires that very platform to appear as autonomous. It is a bizarre and exciting paradox, and in Moorhead’s most recent solo exhibition, Trying to describe the way that space wraps itself around an object does not disappoint. A skeletal, black glittering bottle rack that looks like it came from a goth version of Claire’s, Trying to describe the way that space wraps itself around an object is strikingly, disturbingly, and simultaneously playful and menacing.


Katrina Moorhead, Trying to describe the way that space wraps itself around an object, 2013, antique bottle rack, powder coating, plasticine, bandage, 20”x19”x20” (courtesy Inman Gallery)

8. Geoff Hippenstiel, Untitled (2012), Winter Garden at Devin Borden 
I saw Hippenstiel’s solo show Territorial Pissings at Devin Borden in early 2013. While they were nice and engaging enough, there was something almost absurdly commanding about his Untitled shown this past December in the group show Winter Garden. Following his modus operandi of extremely thick, smudgy brush strokes, here Hippenstiel employs sickly decadent silvers, pinks, and golds melding together, toppling each other. Despite its confinement to the wall, Untitled ensnares the viewer, somehow making her feel as though she’s trudging through sugary magma.


Geoff Hippenstiel, Untitled, 2012, Oil on canvas, 36” x 48" (courtesy Devin Borden Gallery)

7. Jillian Conrad, Bonsai Radio #1 (2013), Ley Lines at Devin Borden 
When I reviewed Ley Lines earlier in the year, I wrote quite a bit about Conrad’s proclivities for drawing sculpturally, for crafting lines that reside in an anxious place between forming linkages elsewhere and existing as its own object. It’s this uncertainty that makes the work so compelling, and Bonsai Radio #1 is the best example of that liminality. A quiet work, Bonsai Radio #1 feels like it is whispering vital and indecipherable information.


Jillian Conrad, Bonsai Radio #1, 2013, Concrete, brass, rubber, 18”x20”12”

6. Romana Schmalisch, Notation of Efficiency (2013), From Here to Afternoon at the Glassell School 
From Here to Afternoon was a cerebral show that required lots of time and attention from the viewer. Schmalisch’s Notation of Efficiency was one such work—but with an enormous payoff. A dry and intentionally tedious slide show of Laban Lawrence diagrams from an old fashioned projector, she infused the work with subtle yet nevertheless effective humor. And by controlling the cadence of the slides demarcated by remotely audible clicks, she was able to manipulate the viewer in and out of a lull while asking fascinating questions about the conflation of movement, labor, and efficiency.


Romana Schmalisch, Notation of Efficiency, 2013, Slide projection and model (bamboo sphere)

5. Wols, Oui, Oui, Oui (1946-7), Wols: Retrospective at the Menil Collection 
In a recent review I compared Wols’ Oui, Oui, Oui to spelunking into a cave. What makes this painting so enrapturing is not only Wols’ ability to fervently convey a deeply interior language, but also his scrawling attempt to link the work back to an exterior world.

Wols, Oui, oui, oui, 1946/7, Oil, grattage and tube marks on canvas, 31.7”x25.3”

4. Jamal Cyrus, Texas Fried Tenor (2012), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at CAMH
I didn’t see the actual performance; instead I saw the remnants in the Valerie Cassel Oliver curated Radical Presence. And quite honestly, I don’t care about the performance and would even go as far to say that it doesn’t need it. A fried saxophone, it is voluptuous and grotesque, indicative and inviting of performative elements from the artist and viewer alike. It invokes scathing sensations of crunching and the taste of bitter metal while debilitating one form of expression to create another. And without a hint of didacticism, it poignantly and very tangibly lets the viewer in on the beautifully varied and layered complexities of blackness.


Jamal Cyrus, Texas Fried Tenor, 2012, Fried saxophone, taken from www.studiomuseum.org


Jamal Cyrus, Texas Fried Tenor, November 29, 2012, performance

3. Joan Jonas, Good Night Good Morning (1976), Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane at CAMH 
Jonas is a pioneer of feminine performance and video art, and Good Night Good Morning is a seminal work from the art historical canon. A largely conceptual work, at the CAMH it was exhibited as an elderly video piece emanating from an outdated TV set—yet it still felt contemporary for both intentional reasons and not. While using repetition in all art, not to mention conceptual works, is thoroughly tread and fully utilized territory, it still feels fresh here: one can pick up on miniscule though revealing nuances as Jonas consistently greets the camera each morning and night. Also, due to glitches in the then-new technology, the camera created faded double images as Jonas would traverse the room. A happy accident, the work is fraught with ghost images of Jonas haunting herself.

2. Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, Untitled (Structures) (2012) at the Menil Collection 
Speaking of hauntings, Untitled (Structures) is a cinematic recounting of present day architecture that inhabited various critical moments within the civil rights movement. Long time collaborators Hewitt and Young formally captured the innards of these spaces with barely detectable movement, providing mere glimpses or suggestions of history. These lush cinematic shots fuel an air of mystery, leaving the viewer craving more information, with no choice but to fill in the blanks herself.


Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, Untitled (Structures), 2012, Dual channel video

1. Soo Sunny Park, Unwoven Light (2013) at Rice Gallery 
No one can argue against Unwoven Light’s airy and dynamic pulchritude. A weaving structure filling the installation space at Rice Gallery, Unwoven Light contains thousands of lightly tinted acrylic panels continually refracting light, constantly changing color throughout the day. But the real game changer for me was its unexpected commanding, and really demanding, movement from the viewer. Using tons of winding chain link fence, Park builds an armature that in some places hugs the viewer in like a vortex while spewing him out in others.


So Sunny Park, Unwoven Light, 2013, Chain-link fence, Plexiglas, acrylic film, dimensions variable 

Jillian Conrad—Notable Vacillations

Betsy Huete

There is a long, rich history of the use of detritus in sculpture, and there seems to be a spike in detrital interest in Houston this year, particularly with the Blaffer Museum’s recent Tony Feher and current Andy Coolquitt exhibits. While Jillian Conrad’s choice of materials shouldn’t exactly be considered detritus, she does gravitate towards objects that comprise our everyday: like concrete, fabric, and even cardboard. As Fehrer uses trash to create reductive works and Coolquitt as carriers of memory and previous usage, Conrad utilizes these strategies to generate far more complex formal narratives. Her work has been described as minimalist and compared to Stan Brakhage—these divergent reads all seeming ridiculous and vaguely plausible.

Conrad is less a sculptor and more a draftswoman, as if she is a cartographer for liminal spaces. Between the totally impractical aerial architectural mappings of Sites and Settlements (2012) and projections of faux landmarks like Arch de (2011), she is undoubtedly preoccupied with locations and mirages. Ley Lines, up now at Devin Borden Gallery, is no different—the literal definition meaning the alleged lines created between monuments, ancient structures, and prominent points in landscapes, like ridge tops. The work in this exhibition constantly vacillates between place and pathway, ultimately residing in permanent ambivalence. It’s agitating and fantastic.


Jillian Conrad, Bonsai Radio 2, graphite, brass, concrete, porcelain, steel, solder

The Bonsai Radio series steals the show. Here Conrad displays a mastery of line—she stands and leans brass in subtle ways that yield massive vulnerability and pathos. In Bonsai Radio 2 she juxtaposes impossible, at the very least improbable, materials like graphite, brass, porcelain, and concrete as an overflowing, residue-laden box that feels naturally occurring. The grid-like lines in Bonsai Radio 1 simultaneously suggest ardent directionality and total purposelessness. There is an intimacy in the quaint scale of these objects, and the fact that they are placed on shelves as opposed to pedestals forces a specific angle, enabling the viewer to trust Conrad’s directions, as if he is reading a nonsensical map.


Jillian Conrad, The old straight track, brass, aluminum mesh, thread

The power of Ley Lines lies in moments of utter believability. The viewer cognitively understands that these structures are completely contrived by the artist, yet the pieces somehow effortlessly present themselves as unified objects that could plausibly show up in the world, at least the world outside of the gallery. However, not every moment is completely believable. The old straight track combines a tall yet modest structure of thin brass tubes slightly curving upwards towards the ceiling and leaning against the wall behind it. Near the top, which should be about six feet or so, a perpendicular piece of brass of similar dimensions juts out along the wall. Pieced-together sheets of aluminum mesh cascade down the wall from the perpendicular tube in a triangular format, the tip resting on the floor. Colorful thread scale two sides of the roughly formed triangle, moving in and out like tightly compacted shockwaves. The cold, perpendicular crossing of the brass is arresting by itself. The mesh is strangely decorative, and although the combination of thread and aluminum is materially compelling, it feels confined to the wall and forcefully attached to the brass. Perhaps the mesh should stand freely on the floor, more in line with Collapsed or String Quartet.


Jillian Conrad, Long Division (left), thread, graphite, linen; and Bonsai Radio 3 (right), brass, cardboard, rubber, cork

Long Division likely stands over eight feet tall. Again, two thin brass tubes tower above the viewer, leaning in a pathetically elegant fashion. At the very bottom a small brass leg emerges as an unlikely support, tacked together with muddied plasticine. The gimpy leg and ball of plasticine that links it to the rest of the structure are sincere, sweet, and stunning. But about a third to half of the way up the structure, a wooly phallic arm juts out the side, disturbing the lovely simplicity of line, stagnating the vertical movement of the viewer’s eye.


Jillian Conrad, Short Wave (Orange), thread, graphite, linen

On both sides of the gallery, Conrad has placed framed drawings that contain thread, linen, and long thin sticks of graphite. Certainly these drawings are intended to be their own works, and are stated so in the gallery listing. However, given the relation of them to the free standing sculptures in the gallery space, they feel like studies for the larger works, and they are wonderfully effective that way. The course corrections both in thread lines and pencil lines are indicative of process. By looking at these the viewer gains insight into Conrad’s sculptural decision making, and it is both revealing and beneficial for the work at large.


Jillian Conrad, Collapsed, chicken wire, gold, bronze

Ley Lines as a complete arrangement is sparse, and appropriately so: Jillian Conrad makes pieces that need to meander. They are demure yet aggressive, improbable yet trustworthy. And while they are often reminiscent of an innocent curiosity, they also evoke the kind of anxiety that compels a viewer to repeatedly rethink and revisit her work.

Ley Lines runs through June 25 at Devin Borden Gallery.

Pan Recommends for the week of November 22 to November 28

Robert Boyd

Not much happening this week what with Thanksgiving Holiday--but there are a few things we think you might be interested in.

FRIDAY

Black Friday, Phillip Pyle II at the Art League (as part of The Stacks), 6 pm, November 23. The Stacks isn't a traditional art show that remains more-or-less static throughout its duration. Instead, it's a series of residencies, and that means several opportunities for openings. This Friday, Phillip Pyle II shows us what he did with the shredded remains of stuff left over from the November 16 opening.

SATURDAY

The Drawing Room, Part 2 at the Galveston Arts Center, 6 pm [through January 6]. A group drawing show that features Debra Barrera, Jillian Conrad, Bethany Johnson, Laura Lark, Jayne Lawrence, Leigh Anne Lester, Katie Maratta and Neva Mikulicz. With weather so nice this weekend, a little trip out to Galveston would be ever so pleasant--and a lovely drawing show at GAC would be a nice capper!

{Form follows (Function} follows Form) follows “Function...follows Form." at Kallinen Contemporary, 7 pm. This is the perfect show to see on the way back from Galveston. As usual, Kallinen Fine Art is offering up an overstuffed show in their huge quonset hut, this time displaying art furniture. The artists include John Paul Hartman, Solomon Kane, Amerimou$, Gian Palacios-Świątkowski, Kelley Devine, Dandee Warhol, Chasity Porter and many, many more.

SUNDAY

Y. E. Torres and Erin Joyce: Raised In The Wild: Memories of a Bad Unicorn at the East End Studio Gallery, 6 pm [through November 25]. Don't much about this show, but it sounds in some ways like a sequel to Once there Was, Once There Wasn't, which Torres put on (with Lisa Chow) in August. Fractured fairy tales indeed.

BUT WAIT! The Pilgrims came to this continent and created Thanksgiving for one reason--so we could shop like maniacs on Friday. Now in recent decades this has become something of a bummer because parking lots are full and people brawl in the aisles of stores to get the last marked-down electronic thingumajig, and let's not ignore the folks who get trampled to death.

Sure you can avoid all this by staying home, but where's the respect for tradition in that? So I say, make Black Friday a day to buy art. Or slightly less black Saturday. Art is the perfect gift--it's highly personal and it's not mass-produced by exploited elves and buying art puts money in the pockets of artists. Plus, you are almost guaranteed not to be trampled to death by surging crowds of art consumers. Not all of Houston's galleries are open this weekend, but a lot of them are. I asked a few about their Black Friday (and Saturday) plans. Here's what they told me:

D.M. Allison -- open Friday and Saturday
Peveto -- open Saturday 2 pm to 5 pm
Catherine Couturier -- open Friday and Saturday

Redbud -- open Friday and Saturday
GGallery -- open Saturday

New Gallery -- open Friday and Saturday
P.G. Contemporary -- open Friday and Saturday

Anya Tish -- open Friday and Sturday

Art Palace -- open Saturday
Inman Gallery -- open Saturday
David Shelton Gallery -- open Friday and Saturday

Sicardi Gallery -- open Saturday
Gallery Sonja Roesch -- open Friday and Saturday
Darke Gallery -- open Saturday

(Is your gallery open this weekend? Let us know in the comments.)

My Top 10 Houston Art Shows

Robert Boyd

Hey, it's that time of year. This is my own highly idiosyncratic list. Basically, I went through all the shows I saw last year and gave them a rating from 1 to 10. If a show was above a five, I considered it for this list. I'm ranking them below from best, second best, and so on.

#1. Hand+Made at the CAMH. Great exhibit with a startling variety of performances and objects built around the idea of "craft"--which has been for so long a dirty word in contemporary art. But for me, some of my favorite artists in Houston come out of craft traditions.

#2. Barkley Hendricks at the CAMH. Super show of giant, full-figure portraits of African Americans. To me, it just defined cool. I really loved the Fela installation.

#3. James Drake at the Station Museum. Some of the best shows this year had to do with ideas of manhood or manliness. Drake really captured the stoic, mournful ideal.

#4. James Surls sculptures at Rice University. I have loved James Surls since they installed his sculpture in Market Square back in the 80s. I thought the temporary installation of sculptures at Rice was fantastic. He also had a nice show at Barbara Davis this year.

#5. Maurizio Cattelan at the Menil. Maurizio Cattelan does something kind of obvious in a way. He creates sculptures that seem as if they are three dimensional representations of some forgotten surrealist painter's paintings. The genius part of the Menil exhibit was to scatter them throughout the galleries (and on the roof), mixed in with work from the permanent collection.


Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage, marble at "Because We Are".

#6. Because We Are at the Station Museum. This group show dealt with LGBT civil rights, which in the wake of the defeat of gay marriage in California and now with the Smithsonian Wojnarowicz episode (not to mention the repeal of DADT), feels like it was the right exhibit at the right time. It even included an unusually powerful Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid...). What made this better than the run-of-the-mill agitprop exhibit was that the art was visually powerful and highly personal, as in Patricia Cronin's sculpture.

#7. Peat Duggins at Art Palace. I found this exhibit to be be thought-provoking and very, very beautiful. It delved into the relationship of religion to nature without offering easy answers. Duggins seems to have created his own personal sort of shamanism.



Andrea Dezsö, Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly detail, 2010

#8. Andrea Dezsö at the Rice gallery. Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly was the summer installation, which means the whole thing was behind glass. Dezsö created kind of a puppet-theater tableau of an alien, underground civilization. As a kid, I would have written stories about these people. As an adult, I visited it several times, charmed by her fertile imagination.

#9. Jeff Forster and Jillian Conrad at the Art League. Forster is a ceramicist who has embraced a kind of anti-craft approach. The deconstructed pieces in this show intrigued me. I felt the same about Jillian Conrad's sculptures made of construction site materials and glitter. The work of both these artists is challenging and interesting.

#10. Francis Giampietro at the Temporary Space. Another artist who dealt with masculinity as a subject this year was Francis Giampietro. I liked his heavy, somewhat dangerous assemblages, which reference body building and football.

Honorable mention:
Sarah Williams at McMurtrey Gallery
Joseph Cohen at Wade Wilson
Robert Pruitt at Hooks-Epstein
Wishing Well for Houston by Brian Piana, Aram Nagle and Heath Hayner at the Art League
Not the Family Jewels group show at Gallery 1764
Terry Suprean at the Temporary Space
Material and deStructure group show at Poissant Gallery
Ward Sanders at Hooks-Epstein
Are You There God? It's Me, Birdie group show at the Joannex
MFA Thesis show at the Blaffer Gallery
Daniel Heimbinder at the Joannex
The Big Show at Lawndale
Seth Alverson at Art Palace
Edward Lane McCarthy at Goldesberry Gallery
Boozefox at Lawndale
Tobiah Mundt at Lawndale
B-Sides at Fotofest
Poems and Pictures at the Museum of Printing History
It's Better to Regret Something You Have Done... group show at Art Palace
The New Black: Contemporary Concepts in Color and Abstraction at Williams Tower
Mark Greenwalt at Hooks-Epstein
Maria Smits at Lawndale

For commercial gallery of the year, I think I'm going to go with Art Palace, although I think Moody Gallery, Gallery 1724, Poissant Gallery and many more all had great shows, and I expect PG Contemporary to be a strong contender next year.

The choices are even harder when you go to non-profit spaces. Pretty much all of them had fantastic exhibits, performances, film presentations and more this year. But some special shoutouts to Lawndale and Box 13 and FotoFest for great years, and a special remembrance for The Temporary Space, which we always knew was going to go. A big salute to Keijiro Suzuki, whose curatorial energy was boundless.

I'm not the only one making a best-of list. Douglas Britt has his up at 29-95 (we overlap only on two shows). Has anyone else done one? Britt's is the only other one I have seen, so far...

It's Better to Regret Something You Have Done... at Art Palace

Of all the commercial galleries in town, Art Palace is perhaps the most adventurous. They regularly display works that are intellectually challenging, as well as works that would be difficult for a collector to possess--installations and video art in particular. This show carries on that direction, and it's really exciting but it makes you wonder how long Art Palace can survive as a going concern. (Or maybe--hopefully--I am underestimating the adventurousness of Houston collectors.)

The thing is, since Duchamp--and really since the Renaissance--context has been a really important aspect in understanding an artwork. Art made for a 17th century Dutch burger's home is inherently different from art made to decorate a 17th century Italian church--even if the subject matter is identical. This comes into play when discussing at least some of the artwork Art Palace's current group show, "It is Better to Regret Something You Have Done..." For example, Linda Post's Cozy Group has a slightly different existence in a commercial gallery than in, say, a non-profit art space like Diverse Works or Lawndale.


Linda Post, Cozy Group, televisions, sewn canvas cozies, DVDs (photo courtesy of Art Palace)

Four small televisions are on the floor in the darkened front room of Art Palace. Each is playing something. Each is covered by a custom fitted cozy, like a tea cozy, made of canvas. Obviously a TV cozy is a very different thing than a tea cozy--a TV cozy has no practical use. There is no need to insulate a TV to keep it from losing heat. The cozies, in fact, prevent the TVs from operating optimally by covering the screen and muffling the sound. Entering the room makes one think of scenes from movies where people enter a dusty old house where the furniture has been covered with sheets. The ghostly shapes of the furniture in such scenes are so suggestive and ominous that this scenario has become a cliche for haunted house movies. Likewise, the Cozy Group has a haunted feel--one that is amplified by the fact that the TVs are playing. The cozies make the screens glow softly and spookily in the darkened room.

So why does it matter that this is being displayed at Art Palace rather than a museum or nonprofit art space? Because by being in Art Palace, one is implicitly asked to imagine this in the possession of a collector. One must imagine this in someone's home--that someone would devote a room in their home to house this spooky, severe piece. (I realize, of course, that you could walk into a gallery and forget its commercial purpose and see the art within as art qua art--and if you can do that, you are a much purer person than me.) The interesting thing is that this piece (or earlier versions) has been shown in non-profit spaces in 2004-05 and 2009. Now as hard as it is to imagine someone owning this group, the thought is tremendously appealing. Imagining this scenario for me makes experiencing Cozy Group in Art Palace a richer experience than it would be at, say, the Incident Report Viewing Station in Hudson New York.

(The reverse would be true about an oil painting in a commercial art gallery. Oil paintings have a long history as objects of commerce, whose location in a gallery is to facilitate a cash transaction. However, an oil painting in a non-profit art space implies a theory or thought process is at work to make sense of it being there. An oil painting in such a space is the end result of a curatorial process, and thinking about that process adds something to the painting itself.)

 After the 2009 Lawndale Big Show, there were two nights of slide presentations by the artists.I'm pretty sure Jim Nolan was one of the presenters, and his talk, though brief, was memorable. (If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.) He described his work as being influenced by Joel Shapiro, which I didn't get. I associated Shapiro with those cutesy cast railroad tie men, like the one in the Cullen Sculpture Garden. But Shapiro has done a lot of other work that you can see as possibly influencing Nolan. This piece distinctly recalls some of Shapiro's wooden floor pieces:


Jim Nolan, It's Better to Regret Something You Have Done/First House, painted wood (photo courtesy of Art Palace)

Some of Nolan's pieces--including Not in focus yet / Grey, which is in this show--feature a string with the two ends attached to the wall (among other elements). This element has a casual feeling--it is literally hanging around--and the artist doesn't determine the form. Gravity and mathematics do. I think this is what appeals to me. A completely flexible string, hanging freely from two ends, will form one shape and one shape only--a parabola. The focus and directrix of the parabola will depend on the length of the string and the distance between the two endpoints. So Nolan has a great deal of control over what the parabola will look like, but still he is surrendering his decision about the shape of the string to the laws of gravity. It's a kind of humility.


Jim Nolan, Not In Focus Yet / Grey, carpet, wood, string and pushpins

And this leads to a second thing Nolan said at Lawndale. It was so memorable to me that I remember almost word for word. "If you keep working on a thing, does it get any better?" On one hand, this could be read as a rejection of craft. But on the other hand, I think it relates to the string, or to the unpainted wood in Double Rose. Or the flattened cardboard boxes that Robert Rauschenberg did (and which can be seen at the Menil). If it works, why fuss with it? If gravity makes a perfect parabola--an elegant shape--why not let it?

Jillian Conrad's art is similar in the sense that she allows her modest, unlovely construction site materials look like what they look like, without any attempts to beautify them. This was apparent in the work she showed at the Art League earlier this year, which looked like detritus recovered from a construction site (with glitter added). This effect is also apparent in her work here, such as the piece Sweet and Lowdown.


Jillian Conrad, Sweet and Lowdown, concrete blocks, plaster, clay, wood and pigment


Jillian Conrad, Sweet and Lowdown, concrete blocks, plaster, clay, wood and pigment

What makes this piece for me is the line on the floor--all the rest of it could be a sculpture in a tradition sense (broadly speaking), but the line on the floor really fuzzes things. If Rosalind Krauss is right and sculpture prior to the '60s could be described as not-landscape and not-architecture, then that little line makes you wonder if this is architecture--a corner of an unfinished structure. Of course, she suggested that minimalist and post-minimalist artists had expanded the field of sculpture--"sculpture"could now be simultaneously architecture and sculpture. But with Conrad's work, I am reluctant to use the term "architecture"--I want to say "building." (I would say "construction," but that is a term already loaded with specific artistic meaning.)

This again is work that is strange in an art gallery. Removing it to a collector's back patio, say, would make a viewer wonder if she was looking at a piece of art or an unfinished building project. And because it is in a gallery and has a price attached to it, I personally can't help but imagining that very scenario. In fact, imagining it is highly amusing for me! A piece like this is ambiguous--depending on context, it may announce itself as non-art or art. And ambiguity can be really funny. And that makes me love the work even more.

I wonder why Nathan Green was included in the exhibit. Maybe they thought the exhibit needed a splash of color, which Green provides in spades.


Nathan Green, Tumblr Totem, mixed media, 2010

Green's paintings (to go by his website) are deliberately crude mostly square canvases. So here it looks like he has literally stacked paintings on top of one another. Instead of a painting being a "thing," here it is an "element". A very distinct element--each painted part is very different in color and value from the ones below and above it. The use of the word "Tumblr" in the title in interesting. I can't find any obvious relation between this work and the popular blogging site (as far as I could determine, Green doesn't have a blog). So let that remain a mystery. All I can think of is that these canvases stacked on top of one another look like they could really easily tumble off the wall at any second.


Nathan Green, untitled arrangement, mixed media, 2010

Here Green takes has paintings and creates a kind of taxonomy of how paintings could exist relative to a wall., They could hang on a wall ( the black and white canvas on the upper left); they could be painted right onto the wall (the yellow and green stripey rhombus); they could lean against the wall. In a way, Green reproduces in a minimal form a painter's studio, where one is likely to encounter paintings with all of these relations to the wall.

Neither Barry Stone's Ikea collages nor Kara Hearn's line drawings of weeping comedians did much for me. But four out of six ain't bad.