Liminal States/Silver #2

 by Robert Boyd

 

Jim Nolan, Liminal States/Silver #2, mixed media, 2019

I am a material boy. I love to own things, especially if those things were created by artists. But because I was laid off shortly after COVID started, I haven't been spending money on art. (If you're hiring, call me!) But a few days ago, I got a new piece of art, which you can see above, hanging in my grimy apartment. It is a work by Jim Nolan, an old artist friend of mine. 

I think I met him when he was giving a brief talk about his work in a Lawndale Big Show about 11 years ago. His work was distinguished then by it's somewhat rough-hewn, craft-less approach. I wish I had a recording of his talk, but I remember that he concluded with a statement like this: "If you keep working on a thing, does it get better?" I'm paraphrasing from memory. It seemed like a strong statement against craft. But nowadays, he is still creating artworks that veer into the conceptual, but he is also doing work as a potter. It seems that he has embraced craft.

 

Jim Nolan, Liminal States/Silver #2, mixed media, 2019

I've written about Nolan's work several times over the past few years. And I thought it would be fun to celebrate this new acquisition with a short post about this work.

 

Jim Nolan, Liminal States/Silver #2, mixed media, 2019

The whole thing is a wooden construction, including the hand-built black frame. The gray square in the center is wood painted with silvery paint. The holes are neatly cut, and about an inch or two beneath the surface is a mirror.

What is it all about? I have no idea. But Jim has told me that all his art is in dialogue with the work of earlier artists. That feels a little masturbatory, but lets be realistic--except for "outsider artists", every artist is in some way in dialogue with the past. I don't mean to suggest that we have a Harold Bloomian anxiety of influence going on here, but why not?

I don't have an explanation that's better than that, but I'm sure if you buy him a beer, Nolan will tell you something...

 

The Lithium Art Fair, part 1

Robert Boyd

It's been a week since the Texas Contemporary Art Fair happened, and it already seems like a distant memory. If I hadn't taken so many photos, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell you what art I saw. Sometimes the most memorable things have nothing to do with the art, unless it's art's destruction. On Friday at TCAF, I was chatting when I heard a loud bang. Sports Car on Earth, In Space by Debra Barrera, one of the featured installations at the show, had fallen over. It looked pretty bad. This piece, under a different name, had appeared as one of the Blaffer Art Museum's Windows on Houston projects. It was a piece I really liked. Apparently someone taking a photo had backed into it. And it was pretty seriously damaged. TCAF wasn't all bad news for Barrera, though. She sold a great drawing, Sno-cat.

 
Debra Barrera, Sno-cat, 2013, graphite and stabilo pencil on paper, adhesive, 33 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches at Moody Gallery

It isn't always art that sticks in your mind. It might be the gallerist from Charest-Weinberg with the big fro.



Or big crowd on opening night--almost all of whom were complete strangers. It's like there is another art world about which I know nothing. Houstonia and Culture Map both had photo features of the opening night and I counted the people I recognized in them. I knew who 12 of the 61 people featured were.

Or the walk from the entrance to the selling floor.


Ann Wood (left) and Sharon Engelstein (center and right)

The Ann Wood house and two giant beautiful inflatable blobs by Sharon Engelstein made a big impression, as did the Clayton Brothers' antic Wishy Washy.


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006

In fact, if those four pieces had been grouped together, they would have formed a surreal diorama--two buildings in front and two "mountains" in the distance.


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006

The fair attendee saw some of the coolest pieces in the show before she saw a single booth.

This is not to say the art in the booths was bad. Far from it; I was very pleased by the overall level of quality. But people kept asking me if I had seen something that really impressed me, and I couldn't think of anything. This is in sharp contrast with the Houston Fine Art Fair, where there were several booths and individual artworks that really blew my mind. But the HFAF also had a lot of really terrible art. You would see some beautiful, unearthly Xul Solar paintings, then turn around to see your seventh Marylin Monroe portrait of the day--it had very high highs and very low lows. TCAF, by contrast, hewed to the middle. Sure there were a few really nice pieces and a few really horrible ones, but the level of its extremes was a lot less than HFAF. In the language of statistics, we would say that TCAF had a small standard deviation while HFAF had a large one. In terms of psychology, HFAF was bipolar, TCAF a little more stable. But leaving behind metaphor, what I think we see is that TCAF was better curated in terms of its exhibitors. And that makes a lot of difference in terms of the experience one has at an art fair.

So let's take a look at some of the art at TCAF, going more-or-less alphabetically by gallery.


left, Mike Beradino piece and right, me wearing a Jim Nolan-designed temporary tattoo.

At Art Palace, Mike Beradino had a piece that took the Cremaster films and ran facial recognition software on them. The piece was composed of two physical parts--the computer on the bottom and the monitor above. The monitor had an image of Cremaster playing inset in the upper center, and you could see red facial recognition squares pop up anytime a face appeared. Surrounding this inset image were free-floating faces (presumably captured by the facial recognition software).

I found it pretty perplexing, and gallerist Arturo Palacio's explanation comparing Beradino's solo (but high-tech) craft work with the collective high-budget Hollywood-like production of Cremaster didn't help me to understand it better. But as I thought about it, I was reminded of what Ben Davis wrote about the middle-class aspirations of art in 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (recently reviewed on this site by Paul Mullan). Comparing visual art to the art of a Pixar movie (in which the awesomely talented skilled laborers subsume their individuality to operate within a framework of total teamwork--as presumably the film personnel in the Cremaster films did), Davis writes, "the uniquely middle-class nature of creative labor in the visual arts would seem to explain its alternative emphasis on the individual, that is, on the virtues of personality and small production." Beradino is therefore quite specifically positioning himself in opposition to large-scale productions requiring talented but anonymous cultural laborers.

The other piece of art in this photo is on my neck. It's a temporary tattoo by Jim Nolan that reads "Le Va," as in Barry Le Va, the pioneering process artist. Nolan had two such tattoos--one for Le Va and one for Beuys.


Joseph Cohen at Avis Frank

It like new piece by Joseph Cohen at Avis Frank. It gets away from the shimmery perfection of his monochrome paintings. The asymmetric canvas, the hanging flaps of paint--it feels like a Rauschenberg except with Cohen's typically intense, glittery color. It combines glamor and grunge in one piece. Lovely.



Willie Cole, Downtown Goddess, 2012-13, bronze, edition of seven, 36 x 9 x 9 inches at Beta Pictoris Gallery

Even since Picasso made a bull's head out of a bicycle seat and handlebars, artists have been taking manufactured things and making more-or-less realistic sculptures out of them. Willie Cole took women's shoes and made these faux-tribal sculptures out of them. It's a witty appropriation.



Norman Bluhm, untitled, 1961, oil on paper on canvas, 50 x 36 inches

Birnam Wood Galleries has some of my least favorite art in the show (several flags by David Datuna). But they also had some handsome high-modernist pieces--one of the only galleries that had such work at TCAF. I loved this Norman Bluhm painting.



Linda Matalon, untitled (four parts), 2013, wax and graphite on paper, 27 x 22.5 inches overall

I saw these fairly subtle pieces (and more by Linda Matalon) at Blackston. I liked them a lot, but what really made me think was how atypical they were for an art fair. They are small and feature relatively few black and grey marks. They don't jump off the wall. Considering the visual cacophony of the art fair, one wonders whether bringing art like this--even if it's beautiful like this art is--makes sense. On the other hand, maybe the way it stands apart from the typical art fair bombast is its virtue in this environment.


Peter Halley at Carl Solway

Even though I'm going in alphabetical order, this Peter Halley piece at Carl Solway Gallery illustrates my point above about art fair art. With its intense fluorescent colors and textured paint surface, it practically burns itself into your brain. You can't not see it as you stroll down the aisle.


Fernando Mastrangelo,  37 inch medallion, 2013, sugar, sprinkles. 37 inch diameter x 2 inches


Fernando Mastrangelo mediallions

Charest-Weinberg only showed work by one artist, these groovy medallions by Fernando Mastrangelo (who had a striking show in Houston last year). I'm not sure what the sales calculus is here. It makes for a fantastic-looking booth, but it also means all of your eggs are in one basket. Plus, it also means bringing no work by your other artists (Charest-Weinberg lists 10 artists in their stable), which they might resent. A tricky business, I imagine.


a bunch of paintings by Cheryl Donegan

David Shelton Gallery had a really nice "walk-through" booth (quite a few of the booths had two entrances, which allowed you to use them as short cuts to other aisles). He packed it full of some of the best work his gallery has, and it showed. I liked the flannel-shirt-style patterns of Cheryl Donegan as well as Kelly O'Connor's colorful "cover song" versions of Brancusi's Endless Column. (They remind me of when Bananarama covered "No Future.")


Kelly O'Connor sculpture


Keegan McHargue, Nymph of Lo, 2013, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Painter Keegan McHargue won the best in show prize of $10,000, which caused some griping among the commentariat at Glasstire. I liked McHargue's paintings a lot, but I would have rather that Fredericks & Frieser had brought down some Gary Panters instead, as they had in the past.


Brad Tucker, Ham Shack, 2013, acrylic and enamel on wood, 32 1/2 x 21 x 4 inches (below) and Butter Dish, 2013, acrylic on wood, 16 x 12 x 3/4 inches (above)


Brad Tucker, Hashmack Tray, 2013, acrylic and enamel on wood, 31 x 25 x 2 1/2 inches


Brad Tucker, Generator, 2013, acrylic on wood, 4 1/2 x 4 x 7 inches and Regenerator, 2013, acrylic on wood, 4 1/2 x 4 x 7

Inman Gallery had a large booth, but still it was surprising (and pleasing) that they devoted one separate enclosed space to a single artist, Brad Tucker. His colorful sculptures depict actual things in a more-or-less abstract way. Some are familiar (TV trays) while some are less so, but they all were delightful and played around with the notion that you could be confused about what you were seeing. Were they sculpture or just colorful found objects? Until you read the label, it wasn't clear. The ordinariness of the subject matter and the colors made me think a bit of Jessica Stockholder.


Dan Douke, Gunk, acrylic on canvas, 10 3/4 x 8 x 8 3/4 inches

The Dan Douke trompe-l'oeil boxes at Jerald Melberg Gallery were amazing but struck me as "stunt art." They were designed to make you say "wow."


Dan Douke, Meguiar's, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 10 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches




Dan Douke, Meguiar's, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 10 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches

In fact, the artist seems so proud of his ability to fool the viewer that he shows us how the trick was done by making the canvas stretching apparatus visible. After all, he could have easily made that part the bottom of the sculpture. (I'm blaming the artist, but it could be the gallery. Maybe the hole is meant to be on the bottom, but the gallery wanted no one to mistake these for actual boxes.)

I visited Jayne Baum's apartment gallery (JHB Gallery) in New York last spring and was delighted to see her here. She had several Ellen Carey photos, as well as a lot of pieces by other artists. Carey is a photographer from Connecticut who specializes in photography not using a camera.


Ellen Carey, Pull with Flares and Rollback #7, 2006, polaroid color positive print, 72 x 22 inches


Guy Laramee at JHB Gallery

This canyon carved out of books by Guy Laramee at JHB also verged on being stunt art, but I was really drawn to it. It's clever and beautiful. But when I see work like this (or work by Cara Barer or Brian Dettmer, who also had work at TCAF at Toomey Tourell Fine Art--sorry I didn't get a photo of it), I feel a pang for the books that were destroyed. These pieces, though beautiful, represent a culture that doesn't value books at physical objects. For Laramee, books are just another piece of modern detritus from which he can fashion a work of art.


Guy Laramee at JHB Gallery

Why do collectors collect art? Thorstein Veblen had some pretty convincing ideas about it, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital" is probably right, too. But for some collectors, particularly those who establish "egoseums" with their names on them to house their collections--Frick, Barnes, Menil, Broad, etc.--there is a quest for immortality.


Tim Etchells, Live Forever, 2010, neon sign, 6 x 78 inches

Tim Etchells' You Will Live Forever at Jenkins Johnson Gallery cuts to the chase and panders directly to collectors' desire for immortality. This is less a work of art than an ironic fetish with fake magical powers. I can't tell whether to be appalled or amused.


Kris Kurski at Joshua Liner

Kris Kurski's detailed and beautiful pieces at Joshua Liner Gallery just look wrong on a white wall. They need a more "goth" setting. If Miss Havisham had art on her walls, you might expect it to look a little like this. Although obviously it is carefully designed and constructed, it has the feeling of being the result of some quasi-natural entropic process. Creepily beautiful.


Allison Schulnik, Lace Curtains, 2012, oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches

Even though I'm going in alphabetical order by gallery (this is from Mark Moore Gallery), Allison Schulnik's Lace Curtains work well with the Kris Kurski above. They both have a feeling of neglect. Schulnik's bilious colors and thick impasto give this piece an unnerving feeling.


Yoram Wolberger, Blue Cowboy #3 (Double Gun Slinger), 2008-2013, reinforced cast fiberglass composite with pigment, 75 x 75 x 22 inches

Changing the vibe completely (but still in the Mark Moore Gallery) is Yoram Wolberger's Blue Cowboy. The scale of this sculpture is what makes it--it's your basic "take something really small and trivial and make a huge sculpture out of it" move that has been a part of contemporary art since Claes Oldenburg. And it sure does look cool. Apparently it was purchased at the show for $100,000! I'd love to know who bought it. I wonder if a sale that size signals to blue chip galleries that TCAF might be worth a try.


John Chamberlain at McClain Gallery

The thing about Houston galleries like McClain Gallery being at the fair is that I've often seen the work they're showing before. But I had never seen this festive John Chamberlain, looking like a tumbleweed at a birthday party. I love it.


Marc Burkhardt, Bridle, 2011, acrylic on wood, 30 x 21 7/8 inches

I included this painting by Marc Burckhardt (from Mindy Solomon Gallery) not just because I like it (which I do) but also because it's in a genre that is kind of a small minority here--realistic painting. Burkhardt engages in some deliberately antique classicizing, and the rope adds a surreal (which is to say modern) touch to it. Still, it's fundamentally a nice painting of a horse.

Mixed Greens had several pieces by Joan Linder, including a bunch of drawings of her sink. It seems like a rather banal subject to draw over and over, but then some of the greatest art of all time involved artists returning to the same banal subject over and over (Cezanne and Morandi, for example).


Joan Linder, Sink (Kiss My Face), 2012, ink on paper, 32 x 58 1/2 inches


Joan Linder, (clockwise from upper left) Green Sink, Yellow Sink, Pink Sink, Purple Sink, 2011 and 2012, colored maker on paper


Joan Linder, Counter, Sink, 2013, accordion book, ink on paper, 31 x 26 3/4 inches closed, 31 x 156 1/2 inches open


Joan Linder, Counter, Sink (detail), 2013, accordion book, ink on paper, 31 x 26 3/4 inches closed, 31 x 156 1/2 inches open

Her drawing has a children's book illustration vibe, which I quite like. These are fun, homey pieces.


Joan Linder, FedEx Box, 2010, watercolor on paper, 16 1/2 x 12 x 3 inches

Interestingly, Linder also did a trompe-l'oeil box. After seeing similar pieces at Frieze by Jürgen Drescher and Andreas Lolis, I am willing to declare "realistically rendered life-size three-dimension depictions of boxes" to be an official trend.


Joan Linder, FedEx Box (detail), 2010, watercolor on paper, 16 1/2 x 12 x 3 inches

OK, this post has gotten a little long. I'm going to stop here and publish a second part--there's still a lot more art from TCAF to plow through.

Art Out in the World: Jim Nolan's shifting SCALE

Robert Boyd

Richard Serra, TWU, 1980, steel (photo by Donna Svennevik)

Richard Serra started making large-scale public sculptures in the 70s. Some of these are on the consecrated grounds of museums and sculpture parks, but many, such as TWU above, were placed in decidedly unconsecrated public areas. They weren't always respected there. A piece called Slat (1985) was removed in 1989 by the mayor of Puteaux after it became a magnet for graffiti and vandalism. Tilted Arc (1981) was eventually removed from the Federal Plaza in New York City over Serra's very strong objections.

The thing about these sculptures is that their relationships to their environments and to the populations that interact with them is not the same as sculptures in a museum or in a private space. An art-lover might look at a Serra in terms of mass, in terms of the color and texture of Cor-Ten steel, in terms of its relationship with surrounding architecture, etc. But a skateboarder might see it as obstacle. A tagger might see it as a surface. A late-night drinker might see it as a semi-private place to take a leak. And many might just see it as a thing that they don't even really think about, much less think about as art.



David Hammons, Pissed Off, 1981, performance (photo by Dawoud Bey)

In 1981, David Hammons did a performance using TWU. He peed on it and then had an encounter with a police officer. (It is widely reported that he got arrested, but there is some doubt about that.) As it was, Serra's sculpture was already a home to graffiti, wheat-pasted signs and litter. Of course, 1981 was in the middle of a fairly grim period in New York's history. More recent photos show TWU as being graffiti-free.

David Hammon undoubtedly had many things in mind when he did Pissed Off. But one of them must have been to reinact one of the grungy ways that the public interacts with public art. And this works really well with minimalist art like TWU because such pieces are empty vessels. They don't have accessible meanings for the general public. They aren't obviously memorials, for example (unless they have the names of the dead engraved on them, as in the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial by Maya Lin). They don't represent something, like a civic bronze statue. Instead, they are just objects plopped down in some park or square someplace.

So Hammons, as an artist, treats TWU the same way many non-artists do. In one performance, it becomes a urinal. In another, a place for shoes.


David Hammons, Shoetree, 1981 (Grupa OK)

Interestingly, Hammon is not just dealing with public art, he is specifically reacting to a piece of minimalist art. Jim Nolan's work has also been largely about dealing with the legacy of minimalism and post-minimalism. Part of this involves creating work out of deliberately cheap materials--crap purchased off the shelf from 99¢ Only or Home Depot. So when he was commissioned to do a temporary public installation as part of the Blaffer Art Museum's Window Into Houston series, it must have seemed like an opportunity for him to play with the idea of minimalist art in public spaces in his usual way. But the thing here is that these windows in a building on Milam in Downtown Houston are not very big. He exactly can't do a "life size" piece the way David Hammons did in 1981. To address public art, he has to shift his scale.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (right window), 2013, mixed media installation

In part, that meant creating a scale model of a sculpture park, using painted 2x2 pieces of wood assembled to resemble colorful David Smith sculptures and scale model people of they type you can get from a hobby shop. (Interestingly, Nolan is not the only Houston artist using these tiny figures--Leo Medrano had a couple of interesting pieces in the Big Show that employed them as well. His use of them, to "bottle" an episode or incident, is very different from Nolan's.)


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

He also uses a small amount of model railroad landscaping material in the "scale model" portion of the piece. A hastily spray-painted green line is used to suggest a tree-line. But viewed on another scale (life-size), it also suggests graffiti.  Nolan is mixing a scale model of a park filled with minimalist public art with life-sized things that one might find in such a park--unofficial and occasionally illegal interactions with the art.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

So he includes objects like beer bottles, fast food wrappers and an old flannel shirt, the kind of trash one might encounter around large scale public art pieces if you get there before the groundskeepers do.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

shifting SCALE is a work that loops in on itself. It is a piece of public art about public art. It is simultaneously life-size and a tiny scale model. It contains representations of its subject as well as actual found objects as its subject.


 Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (left window), 2013, mixed media installation

And like TWU, shifting SCALE exists in public. That means that Nolan can't predict how the public will react--the people who see it will not necessarily be art appreciators. In fact, if it weren't for the sign that accompanies shifting SCALE, it's quite possible that some viewers would not realize that this is a piece of art at all. The piece could end up vandalized or the windows broken.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

A homeless person might sleep under one of the windows one night, or park himself there with a sign reading "Need Money For Food" in hopes of scrounging a few bucks off the drivers exiting I-10 for downtown.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

And a street critic (a variation on the street artist) may tag it with a succinct critique: "needs work".  Nolan seems to have anticipated a range of types of engagement viewers might have, including apparent indifference. He knows he's asking a lot of the average joe viewer. Maybe that's why he includes bouquets as part of the piece--little peace offerings to the public.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE (detail), 2013, mixed media installation

Amazing what you can buy at the 99¢ Only store.


Jim Nolan, shifting SCALE, 2013, mixed media installation

What next? I think HAA needs to commission a permanent piece of public art from Nolan. Now that Wayne Dolcefino is not on the air anymore, they might get away with it.

[Full disclosure: I own some art by Jim Nolan--some drawings and a tube sock with the word "SUCCESS" stenciled on it.]