2013: A Highly Personal Top 10 List

Robert Boyd

Usually top 10 lists are about one type of thing. Top 10 movies, top 10 books, etc. In the past we've run best-of lists for visual art and performance art. This year, I decided to follow Griel Marcus's example and just list anything I wanted, regardless of genre. This blog is still an art blog, however, so art dominates the list. But it's not all art exhibits. These are exhibits, books, comics, etc., that appealed to me mightily this year.

The list is not in any particular order. There are many items on the "honorable mention" list that could easily have gone in the top 10 list if I thought about it long enough. And these items reflect both my own taste, idiosyncratic as it may be, and what I had access to. (I'm always impressed by critics who seem to have, for example, seen every movie released in a given year. But I'm an amateur part-time art critic, and I know I missed some great exhibits in the past year.) So the way to view this list is not as a top 10 list but rather as a list of things that I considered good in 2013.



Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliot and Robert Gober (The Menil) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle by Chuck Smith (powerHouse Books)

It was a Forrest Bess year for me this year. The Menil put together a fine exhibit, which included within it an exhibit originally curated by Robert Gober for the Whitney Biennial. I suspect that the exhibit was what prompted Chuck Smith to turn his 1999 documetary into a book. The documentary is good, but the book is so much better--including complete texts of many Forrest Bess letters and tons of photographs. For me, the exhibit and the book inspired three posts that I'm proud of--first a review of the show, then a recounting of legendary newspaperman Sig Byrd's visit with Bess, and finally an account of my attempt to find the location of Bess's long-gone shack on East Matagorda Bay.



12 Events by the Art Guys

The Art Guys have been a partnership for 30 years. This year, they decided to step away from the baroque style of their more recent projects and do 12 "simple" events. Some involved endurance (walking the length of Little York, the longest street in Houston; doing standup comedy for 8 hours straight), some involved repeating the same absurd action over and over (riding around the 610 Loop over and over for 24 hours; walking around the crosswalks at the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft for 8 hours); and some were sui generis (wearing portable fences as they walked around city hall; moving objects counterclockwise from the southernmost, westernmost, northernmost and easternmost points of the city). They concluded by restaging their first event, The Art Guys Agree on Painting, as The Art Guys Agree On Painting, Again, This Time From Thirty Feet Up. 12 Events wasn't just a celebration of their long partnership, it was a tribute to the site of that partnership, the city of Houston.



The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)

This graphic novel (which I reviewed here) by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan took the form of a madcap romantic comedy (a delightful one) to deal with the fraught issue of the history of relations between Polish Jews and Gentiles. (See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945by Tony Judt for a grimmer recitation of this distressing history.) The opening and closing scenes on the airplane (coming to Poland and returning to Israel demonstrate the duality between frivolity and seriousness that typifies the story. Of course, it helps that the art is beautiful and the visual storytelling lively. It's Modan's best comic from a career of excellent work, and it suggests where she can go in the future. My main worry now is that she may end up seduced away from comics to film--Modan would be a great screenwriter/director.



Sean Shim-Boyle's Salt House at Project Row Houses

To describe what Sean Shim-Boyle did with his Project Row Houses installation is to minimize its impact on the viewer. Nonetheless, here goes. Shim-Boyle took inherent elements of the row house and limited his installation to minimal use of existing elements. Specifically he put a second chimney in and added a new light source in the floor. But the magic was actually being in the space. The angled chimney was uncannily like the original chimney, and by its position made the familiar boxy room of the row house utterly strange. Devon Britt-Darby wrote in Art + Culture Texas, "The criss-crossing lines created by the chimneys, the beams, the windows and shadows give seemingly every vantage point an enchanting division of spaces that cries out for a viewfinder."


Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable

Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuffed at Brand 10 Artspace

When I saw the above piece in Fort Worth, I instantly thought of Richard Long circles of slate. Long's work suggests to me the deep geologic time of the earth. Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Happy Meal toy version suggests another kind of time--call it "mess time"--the tiny period of time it takes for children to spread toys evenly over the floor space of one's home. It's work that makes you smile, but it also makes you think about the stuff that fills our lives. Mary Magsamen and Stephen Hillerbrand often use their two children in their work (they should get credit!), and much of the work is about being a suburban nuclear family. (I wonder how their work will change when their kids enter adolescence. So far, though, they seem like real good sports about working with mom and dad.) This exhibit was especially about the possessions that fill up a suburban home--the piles of stuff that fill a house, end up in garage sales, Good Will stores, and landfills. It was a playfully absurd exhibit.


Jeremy DePrez, left: Untitled (Milton), 2013, oil and wax on canvas, 82 x 36 inches; and right: Untitled (Harriet), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 36 inches

Jeff Elrod's and Jeremy Deprez's Fantasy Island at Texas Gallery 

I'm not going to pretend I really understand Jeremy DePrez's artwork. On the contrary, I feel like whenever I try to analyze it, I fall flat on my face. That was the case when I looked at his work in his MFA exhibit, and it was the case when I saw his paintings in the Boredom show at Lawndale. I wish I could say I had an "aha!" moment seeing his work displayed with Jeff Elrod's at Texas Gallery. But I did have a revelation: whatever it is that DePrez is doing, I like it. The slightly irregular look of his canvases in this show (the stretchers weren't straight, the parallel lines were broken up) gives the work a carefully constructed feeling of slackness. They get it right by not getting it right. Oh, and the Jeff Elrods were excellent, too.



Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize by Sean B. Carroll  (Crown)

Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and in just over a month defeated the French and British armies there. Albert Camus was the editor of a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jacques Monod, a biologist, was recruited into the Resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. When the various Resistance organizations were joined under an umbrella organization, the French Forces of the Interior, Monod was the chief of staff. The writer and biologist didn't meet each other until after the war, however, when they became close friends. Camus continued to write and remained an activist, turning against Communism in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Monod fought a public battle against the ideologically-motivated Soviet pseudo-science of genetics known as Lysenkoism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Monod went on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for his pioneering genetics work. Only a brief portion of the book that considers the personal friendship of the two men. Instead, Carroll weaves their life stories into the history of the French Resistance, the Hungarian rebellion, the study of genes, etc. In addition to showing the intersections between these two brilliant men, this book manages to show how the advances in biology in the period from just before World War II through the 60s are as much a part of history as anything else--that despite the split of the humanities and science into "two cultures," it is possible to consider them together fruitfully. I could not put Brave Genius down once I started--it was the most compelling book I read all year.



Brandon Araujo's exhibit at Domy Books and New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at Spring Street Studios

Araujo's paintings have sneaked up on me over the course of the year. I know I have probably seen his work before, but the first time I noticed was at the exhibit at Domy (it was really a "Brandon" show, but Domy was still there). And I wasn't totally sure what to think about it. Then I saw more of his work in the Spring Street group show and finally visited his studio during Artcrawl. Araujo is an artist who is working out his own style, but he is also one whose work has a relationship to work by other artists around his age in Houston. So trying to understand his work is related to the task of trying to understand the work of some of his peers (among whom, the artists in the Spring Street show--Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López). But these artists aren't the germ of some regional school of painters--there are artists all over who are working in similar areas of abstract painting--Nathan Green, for example. They are sometimes called New Casualists or New Provisionalists. I'm a little loathe to put Araujo in that pigeonhole, particularly so early in his career. I can't put my finger on what I like about it, but the thing is, every time I see his work, I want to see more.


Ken Price, Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay, 14.5 x 15 x 14 in.

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center

If you read much about contemporary art, you will have seen over the past few decades a reduction of discussion of craftsmanship in the conversation. This goes doubly so for arts that are traditionally considered part of the craft tradition. But the considerable rise in the critical fortunes of Ken Price recently suggests that the the fortunes of craft may be changing. Price, who died in 2012 just a few months before his retrospective opened at LACMA, was one of the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery. His work has a jazzy West Coast vibe. It's playful and fun. As a ceramicist, Price would make overtures to the traditions of the crafts (his highly abstracted "cups," for example) but was also quite willing to toss tradition completely overboard when it suited him. Seeing a lifetime's work from Price was one of the best museum experiences I had all year.



Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks

This is an incomplete comics narrative. Every now and then, Horrocks will throw up a new page on his website. He just posted page 103. The first page was posted in 2009. So why call this a 2013 work? I've been following it for quite a while with great pleasure, but it was this year that it really electrified me. The very first page in 2013 plops the protagonist Sam in the middle of an orgy with 50 beautiful green Venusian women (the page reproduced above is the only "SFW" page from that sequence). Now if someone had described this too me, I'd say it sounded like a lame pile of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that a cartoonist as sensitive and possessing of moral rectitude as Dylan Horrocks would draw such a thing. And yet, here it is. It isn't ironic--it's eroticism is meant to be erotic. But within the context of the narrative, it works--especially as you see how the rest of 2013's pages unfold. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is about the ability of comics to be wish fulfillment. The first part is essentially realistic, a story of a blocked cartoonist. But there is an abrupt switch to the fantastic, specifically magic realism in the sense of Italo Calvino.This feels like it is shaping up to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville, Horrock's graphic novel that posited that there was an secret art history of comics. That Horrocks continually creates major works about cartoonists and comics may seem solopsistic, and the character Sam does in many ways seem to be a stand-in for Horrocks himself. But the work is playful in the same way that If on a winter's night a traveler is playful, and that draws me in.

Honorable mention

• 9.5 Thesis on Art by Ben Davis (Haymarket Books)
• Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me directed by Drew DeNicola and Oliva Mori 
• Inside Llewyn Davis directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
• The Core Fellows exhibit at the Glassell School of Art featuring Andrea Behm, Anna Elise Johnson, Jang Soon Im, Madsen Minax, Miguel Amat, Ronny Quevedo, Senalka McDonald and Tatiana Istomina
• North of South, East of West directed by Meredith Danluck
• The uncontrollable nature of grief and forgiveness (or lack of) by Kathryn Kelley (Art League)
• Within Without the Space of a Corner by Nick Kersulis (Devin Borden Gallery)
• Tracing Our Pilgrimage by Kermit Oliver (Art League)
• Ad Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics with an essay by Robert Storr  (Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner)
• Not How It Happened by Joel Ross and Jason Creps (Tiny Park) 
• A chain of non-events by Katie Wynne (Lawndale) 
• World Map Room by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)
• Zinefest 

Sunday Afternoon Links

Robert Boyd

Here's a few items that have crossed my RSS feed in the past few days.


Ken Price, The Pinkest and the Heaviest, 1986, fired and painted clay, two parts: 7 x 4 ½ x 3 ¾ in, 8 ½ x 8 ½ x 7 ¾ in

ITEM: This article by the always excellent John Yau on Ken Price was also documents the triumph of conceptualism over craft in major contemporary art institutions (it mentions museums, but art schools and alternative art spaces could be mentioned as well).

I found it perfectly in keeping with long held policies and biases that the show went to the Met [...] and not to the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, or the Whitney Museum of American Art — three institutions which have all but openly declared their hostility toward the craft tradition to which Ken Price, who worked in ceramics, clearly belongs.

In fact, it is apparent to me that all three museums continue to embrace an old and destructive prejudice. As the art historian T. J. Clark has pointed out, painting also belongs to the craft tradition, which is one reason why New York museums have a pretty bad track record when it comes to supporting or examining anything contemporary made by hand, particularly if craft rather than deskilling is involved. ["Ken Price's Time" by John Yau, Hyperallergic, August 25, 2013]

View Robert's Houston Art Map in a larger map

ITEM: Until recently, I hadn't updated my Houston art map in ages. Galleries open and close, though, and new pieces of public art are installed, etc. So here is the updated map. It basically has about a 75 mile radius around Houston. Obviously most art locations tend to be bunched together inside the Loop, but I try to include things that exist further and further out. I wish that there was a Pearl Fincher-style museum in each of the cardinal points. The north has the Pearl Fincher. We need one west (in Katy?), south, and east (Baytown?).  But really, there's enough here to keep interested explorers pretty busy. If you notice any errors or omissions, please let me know!


Keith Haring signing at the FUN Gallery in February 1983. Photo by Martha Cooper. Reproduced in NEA Arts issue 2, 2013.


ITEM: Did you know the NEA has it's own magazine? And it's  pretty good. The second issue has articles on Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, Lady Pink and more. We don't have an official Academy in the U.S., no imposed canon of taste (except that that arises as a general consensus within art schools and museums--see John Yau above), but if there were an Academy in the U.S., it would be the NEA. And here they are, devoting most of their space in their official magazine to comics and street art. If you asked me in 1988, when I first started writing about comics and when I started producing some highly illegal spray can art, whether these art forms would ever be canonical, I would have certain said no while simultaneously longing for it. When I worked for The Comics Journal, we were torn between wanting our artform to be acknowledged by cultural arbiters and disdaining them in favor of an independent path. So now, 25 years later, comics and street art seem to have arrived. Break out the champagne, I guess.

NEA Arts includes a great audio feature with Patti Astor about the history of the Fun Gallery, which was a key part of the East Village scene in the early 80s and the first flowering of street art.

Since the place was so small our first year, the place was so small we could only have one-man shows. And we never set out to be a graffiti gallery. We just gave shows to all of the people that were in this community that we thought really had talent. So we also included Stephen Kramer, Arch Connelly. And as well as the graffiti greats, Dondi, Fab 5, Lee, Futura. But every artist was treated just as an independent artist. And we were actually the first gallery to give graffiti artists one-man shows. To identify them as separate talents. Because usually they were just in these big smoosh piles. “Oh, that’s graffiti art.” And we were the first gallery to do that, and I think we were very proud of that. And I also think that the thing that we did was we opened up the art world to everyone. No more white wine, white walls, white people. ["Patti Astor and FUN Gallery: Inventing Space for Creative Culture" by Josephine Reed, NEA Arts issue 2, 2013]

Fun Gallery plays a walk-on role in a book I just read, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, as the first gallery of the East Village scene in the early 80s, of which Wojnarowicz was an important part. The irony is that Wojnarowicz ended up being locked in battle with the NEA in an opening salvo of the "culture wars." The NEA has remained a punching bag ever since. And to be honest, I never give much thought to it. It seems like a minor factor in my world. But I like NEA Arts.


skeleton + ass + Bill Willis = genius

ITEM: My favorite local Tumblr belongs to Bill Willis, who makes collages of random images with his own face--with an invariably manic expression--pasted in. Willis is a painter who had the last show at the Joanna, but I think this Tumblr is really his primary artistic outlet. Add it to your RSS feed.

What I'm Looking Forward to Seeing in 2013

Robert Boyd


Forrest Bess, Untitled, 1947, oil on canvas

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible at the Menil Museum, April 19 to August 18, 2013. This is not a full-scale retrospective, apparently--the show will consist of 40 paintings and several works on paper, and will incorporate the Robert Gober-curated Forrest Bess mini-show that was part (the best part) of the most recent Whitney Biennial. I can't wait, but I wish it was bigger.


Ken Price, Underhung, 1997, Fired and painted clay, 23 ½ x 21 ½ x 16 in. 

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center from February 9 to May 12, 2013. You can see this show at LACMA for two more days, if you happen to be in L.A. this weekend. Its next stop, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, definitely justifies a road-trip to Dallas.


DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960. Photograph by Burt Glinn

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, February 28 to June 2, 2013. I'm definitely taking a trip to New York to see this. I've greatly admired the few Defeo pieces I have seen in person and have longed to see her famous Rose.

 
James Turrell, Acro, Green, 1968, projected light

James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from June 9 to September 22, 2013. Before he became a designer of aggrandizing ziggurats, James Turrell made some pretty compelling artworks. I look forward to wandering through darkened galleries looking at piece like the one above.

What art are you looking forward to seeing in 2012?

Against Artist Statements

 
Ken Price, L Red, 1963, Ceramic painted with lacquer and acrylic on wood base, 13 ½ x 12 x 10 in.

As far as I'm concerned, the explaining artist puts himself or herself in front of the work for the purpose of destroying the mystery of how it came into being. Borges said, "Rational explanation destroys the faith that art requires of us." That's for the viewers. For the artists, I think we need to have faith that the art experience can take place between the viewer and the work itself. [Ken Price, from "Ken Price: A Talk With Slides," Chinati Foundation Newsletter, October, 2005]

This quote was reprinted in the beautiful catalog, Ken Price, for the Ken Price retrospective at LACMA (coming soon to the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Ken Price, 1935-2012

by Robert Boyd


Ken Price piece that was on view at the Houston Fina Art Fair last year

Ken Price, the brilliant ceramic sculptor, one of the Ferus boys, died today in New Mexico. Jerry Saltz offers a very nice remembrance. The Menil has some Ken Price pieces, some of which were displayed last year. I hope they will be brought out again. This has been a bad month--Mike Kelley, Charlie Stagg, and now Ken Price.

The Houston Fine Art Fair Wrap-Up, part 3

by Robert Boyd

That last post (part 2) might have left a bad taste in your mouth. Let's look at a few pieces of art that I liked in the show and wrap this up.(Part 1 is here.)

Art I Liked


Ken Price, Marcel, acrylic on fired ceramic, 1999

Wouldn't you like this lovely Ken Price? I would. This was at the William Shearburn Gallery booth, which I thought was pretty top-notch. (Update: For some reason, this image--a photograph that I took of Ken Price's sculpture, got a DMCA complaint. I guess that trumps fair use. You'll just have to imagine a beautiful Ken Price sculpture here.)


Joseph Havel, Soft Target #2, fabric, cut up American flags, needles and thread on aluminum, 2011

William Shearburn also had this lovely Joseph Havel piece.


Sandy Skoglund, Walking On Eggshells, pigmented inkjet on paper or cibachrome, 1997

I haven't seen a Sandy Skoglund in years, and was delighted to see this one in the booth of Yvanamor Palix Fine Arts. My understanding is that Yvanamor Palix operates as a private dealer out of a space in the Spring Street Studios building (curiously enough, she used to be located in Paris. I'd like to hear the story of how she landed in Houston.)


Susan Graham, Army Six-shot single action center fire revolver, glazed porcelain, wood base, plexi vitrine, 2003


Schroeder, Romero & Shredder had a table like pretty much every booth, but they left cool pieces of art like this one just laying around. It's like they were just daring me to try to swipe Susan Graham's revolver. 


Kehinde Wiley, Portrait of a Lady, oil and enamel on canvas, 2006

I've always liked Kehinde Wiley's afro-baroque paintings, and this one is hilarious. This one was on view at Pan American Art Projects.


Some Closing Thoughts



William Betts, Amalienburg, acrylic paint on reverse drilled mirror plexi, 2011, detail with my reflection in it


I spoke to Patricia Ruiz-Healy of Ruiz-Healy Art in San Antonio about the fair. I was particularly interested because she was coming from a place so close by, but perhaps not that well known to Houston collectors. As far as they are concerned, she could have been coming from Europe or South America. She told me, "It's been good... It could be better. But it's the first year." But she also saw the fair as an investment--a way to grow some artists from South Texas who weren't well-known to the Houston market. 


They had some great pieces by the late photographer Chuck Ramirez as well as several cool fire-drawn pieces by BillFitzgibbons. But what really caught my eye was this:



George Schroeder, model for Synergy, 2009

If you work in the Westchase area, you might have seen the huge version of this George Schroeder sculpture in front of the ABB building right on the beltway. When I first saw it, it struck me as the perfect piece of corporate sculpture, and I wrote about it.


Last Sunday, I was chatting with an artist who's been around the local scene for a long time, and we were discussing how Houston got Lawndale, the Core Program, and Diverse Works in a relatively short period of time during the late 70s and early 80s. He posited that there was something in the air artistically. I responded that there was also something else in the air--money. Houston was at an economic high-water mark in those days, and folks were writing checks for scrappy non-profit art spaces. Then came the crash of 1985.


Several friends have pointed out that Houston has more money than other places in the U.S. right now. It has not been immune to the recession, but the price of oil is high and that has mitigated a lot of the pain. If you are an Art Fair organizer in 2011, Houston has got to look pretty good! I enjoyed this fair--meeting gallerists, looking at art, and so on. But if this fair exist because there's money here for the taking, I would also like to see the local elite put some of that money into struggling non-profit art spaces here--places like Box 13, Skydive and La Botanica, as well as supporting our already established art spaces that still depend on folks' generosity to keep the doors open every day.

Anyway, The Houston Fine Art Fair is kaput for the year. We have to look ahead, not back!  After all, we have Texas Contemporary Art Fair coming up in just a few weeks. And in a naked attempt to ride on that fair's coattails, I want to announce that I am curating a show with Zoya Tommy that will open simultaneously with the Texas Contemporary Art Fair. More details will be rolled out, but it's a group show with 10 Texas artists, working in sculpture, photography and painting. The name of the exhibit is Pan y Circos. Details coming very soon!

Note on The Ferus Gallery by Kristine McKenna

by Robert Boyd

Regular readers know I have a small obsession with the Ferus Gallery, which operated in Los Angeles between 1957 and 1967. Part of the reason for the obsession is that Ferus shows how an art scene can develop outside the artistic capital(s)--New York being the capital of the art world at that time. As someone who lives in Houston and is interested in art, I have to believe things like that can happen--that great art scenes can develop far from art capitals. But another reason for my obsession with Ferus is that Ferus has in the past and continues to this very day to impinge on my artistic life--and, it must be added, on the artistic life of Houston, Texas. Why is that?

I think it largely comes down to Walter Hopps. Hopps and Edward Kienholz were the cofounders of the Ferus Gallery. In 1979, Hopps became a consultant for the Menil Foundation, and then director of the Foundation in 1980. He was also the founding director of the Menil Museum when it opened in 1987. So Hopps had a big influence on art in Houston for a long time, and has an influence even now, years after his death. I'm fairly sure he was responsible for bringing Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz to Houston (I and a few fellow students spent a life-changing afternoon with them watching old Kienholz documentaries at the Rice Media Center), as well as Robert Irwin (who was an artist in residence at Rice while I was a student there). The Menil Museum has shown lots of the Ferus artists over the years--solo shows for Ken Price, Ed Kienholz, Jay DeFeo and Andy Warhol, and in group shows, work by Price, Kienholz, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, DeFeo, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol. Many (if not most) of these artists have work in the Menil's permanent collection. There is a show up right now, "Earth Paint Paper Wood: Recent Acquisitions," that includes pieces by Ken Price and Jay DeFeo. So five years after Hopps death, the Menil is still acquiring work by Ferus artists. And tomorrow (October 23, 2010) a gallery show of Larry Bell work is opening at The New Gallery (this show, however, has nothing to do with Hopps, as far as I can tell).



Ferus continues to fascinate me, so I snatched up THE FERUS GALLERY by Kristine McKenna. McKenna is a Los Angeles-based journalist best-known for her interviews. In this book, she tried to talk to a constellation of people associated with the Ferus Gallery--artists, Irving Blum, various collectors, spouses and siblings of key players, etc. For those who died before she could interview them (Hopps and Kienholz especially), she drew from other interviews. Out of this material, she constructed an oral history of the gallery, full of Rashomon-like contradictions. She also borrowed photographs from her subjects, including tons of casual snapshots. The book leads off with biographies of the major characters in the story, then launches into the chronologically arranged oral history.

The book is absolutely gorgeous. The design (by Lorraine Wild) is beautiful, mixing the casual photos of artists and hangers-on with color photos of the art. This is not an approach you see often in art books. If the book is strongly narrative, it usually is all text with a few illustrations of work and a few photos of the subject(s). If it's a monograph, the photos will be pretty much all artwork. McKenna and Wild realized that the snapshots of the artists were part of the story (part of the history) and were generous in reproducing them, along with images of the artwork itself.


Ken Price, B.G. Red, clay with acrylic and lacquer, 1963

The basic story of the gallery is that Kienholz and Hopps had tried to have their own galleries in the 50s, but were not notably successful. They teamed up to found Ferus. Early on, Ferus showed a lot of San Francisco artists--San Francisco had a better-developed contemporary art scene at the time--along with the youngest, most cutting edge L.A. artists they could find. At some point, Hopps bought out Kienholz's share and brought in Irving Blum as a partner in late 1958. It's unclear if Kienholz left because Blum was coming in or what. It is clear that Kienholz hated Blum and Blum didn't like Kienholz's work. It is funny that both men were partners for Hopps because they seem like complete opposites. In any case, Blum was what the gallery needed--he was suave and could chat up collectors in a way that Kienholz couldn't. Ferus kept exhibiting Kienholz's work until after Hopps left the gallery. At that point, Kienholz's animosity towards Blum caused him to jump ship to the Virginia Dwan Gallery.

In the early 60s, Hopps began curating exhibits for the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). In 1960, he got a full-time job with the museum and left Ferus (he would become director of the museum in 1963). In a way, The Pasadena Art Museum can be seen as a non-profit Ferus outpost. Hopps displayed a lot of the same artists there. Meanwhile, Ferus displayed more and more of the new New York artists, including Andy Warhol's first solo exhibit in 1962. In that year, Hopps put together the first museum show of pop art--before it had been named--called New Paintings of Common Objects. In 1966, Hopps was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown caused by amphetamine addiction. The Pasadena Art Museum, evidently not wanting a speed freak as a director, fired him. He divorced his wife Shirley (from whom he had been separated for about a year) who then went on to marry Irving Blum the following year! And Ferus closed that year.

This book captures the personal and political dynamics pretty well. There was definitely a group who hated Blum--partly because he came in and brutally cut down the gallery's roster, and partly because he was such a slick rick. Sonia Gechtoff out-and-out accuses him of theft (and adds that she could never understand why Shirley Hopps would leave Walter for Irving).

Among the artists, there is camaraderie but also competition. All of the Ferus artists started as more-or-less abstract expressionists (except maybe Ken Price) and quickly moved away from it. Kienholz moved one direction (grungy, socially-aware assemblage), and most of the others moved a different direction (a direction sometimes called "finish fetish" for their use of high-tech manufacturing techniques). They were a bunch of macho sexists who hung out at Barney's Beanery (and, according to Judy Chicago, bragged about their "joints").  Billy Al Bengston was the self-appointed ring-leader and apparently the most competitive of the bunch (it is not surprising that he was also a professional motorcycle racer). Larry Bell remarks that when he started adding industrial glass to his work, Bengston tried to discourage him. Bell realized he had done something that Bengston wished he had done. Perhaps Bengston could see that in the end, he was not going to be top dog. (In my view, the ones art history will remember are Ruscha, Kienholz, Bell, Price, DeFeo and Irwin. And maybe Wallace Berman.)


Larry Bell in his studio, 1961

As I said, there are amazing photos in the book. I want to end with one totally insane one:


Jay DeFeo nude in front of The Rose, 1959

No other artist in the book poses nude with one of their artworks (although there are photos of Robert Irwin naked in a bathtub). So you can wonder about a double standard regarding male nudity and female nudity, etc. But I think this photo is awesome. If I were a photographer, I'd try to imitate it and get artists to pose nude in front of their work. I like the concept. Of course, there are some artists here in Houston who I'd very much enjoy seeing nude before their work--for thoroughly dishonorable reasons. But beyond the voyeuristic thrill of it, I like the idea of the artist stripped bare before the world and the work. The work, in many ways, exposes the artist already. Being nude reflects that.

Tiptoeing through the Tulips

It's intellectually risky for a dude to approach feminism and feminist art. But I just read Through the Flower by Judy Chicago, and it's really interesting, so I'm going to try to tiptoe through the subject (but will probably end up blundering about). Through the Flower was written originally in 1975, before she finished her most famous piece, The Dinner Party (1974-1979). This one is a new edition from 1993. I found it at Half Price Books, and as luck would have it, it's an autographed copy.



Chicago began her career as an artist in the 1960s in Los Angeles. She was one of the L.A. style minimalists, and as such, her work embraced high-tech fabrication, a high level of craftsmanship, and a certain playfulness. Think of artists like John McCracken and the Ferus boys--Ken Price, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell. Chicago was doing pieces like this:


Judy Chicago, Car Hood, sprayed acrylic lacquer on a 1964 Corvair hood, 1963-64

You can definitely see the resemblance between what she was doing and what Billy Al Bengston was doing. And there is a high level of craft here. But she had an ambiguous relationship with craft. In Through the Flower, she sees craft as a thing that boys learned as a matter of course (in shop class) but that girls did not. I think this is really arguable, and that in a way, she is seeing craft through male eyes if she sees it that way. There were (and are) traditionally female crafts that few boys learn. Sewing and needlework, for example. I think an issue was that such crafts were not looked at as art--and that is a male failing. That they weren't looked at as craft in the context of Chicago's book is a failing on her part.

In her desire to acquire craftsmanlike skills (above and beyond what was taught to her in art school), she took a class in auto-body painting (the only woman with 250 men in the class) and another in pyrotechnics (!)--which feel totally like "boy" things to learn. Perhaps she felt she had to do these things to compete in a man's world. Certainly the piece above speaks to manly kind of things--custom car culture, in particular. (Custom car culture was a big influence on other artists in L.A. at the time, especially Robert Irwin.)

She tried to fit in with the art scene of L.A. of the early 60s. Now readers of this blog know I have often expressed admiration for the Ferus scene. Chicago--without naming names (damn!)--paints a less attractive picture.

Halfway through my last year in graduate school, I became involved with a gallery run by a man named Rolf Nelson. He used to take me to the artists' bar, Barney's Beanery, where all the artists who were considered "important" hung out. They were all men, and they spent most of their time talking about cars, motorcycles, women, and their "joints."

A piece like Car Hood (which is excellent, in my opinion) was her way of trying to demonstrate to them that she could be a "tough" artist like them. She writes about her work then as hiding her real self in an attempt to fit in (to "pass"?). And maybe so, but look at this piece:


Judy Chicago, Rainbow Picket, originally sculpted in 1966 and recreated in 2004

Rainbow Picket is awesome! The colors, the angle, the way it fits against the wall. It would stand proudly next to a Sol Lewitt, a Dan Flavin, a John McCracken.


Judy Chicago, Red Dome Set, sprayed acrylic lacquer on formed acrylic, 1968

This is another really cool minimal piece. But again, Chicago felt like she was hiding from herself. In retrospect, she believes that in these round forms, her female nature is trying to come through, but she didn't want to believe it at the time. She describes how a woman artist from New York (who?) visited her studio and saw these pieces. She said, "Ah, the Venus of Willendorf." Chicago was crushed because she took it as a critical, cutting remark, and also because this woman had seen through her minimalist defenses.

So she embraced feminism. She educated herself on woman artists through history (there is a great chapter here on what she learned looking at their work, as well as studying the great women writers and thinkers). She found other women artists who had seen the sexist environment of the art world and of society in general, and who wanted to do something about it. Chicago befriended an older artist, Miriam Schapiro, and they began to work together on feminist art classes and spaces, including Womanhouse and a feminist program at CalArts.

Chicago and Schapiro eventually split their partnership over an ideological disagreement. Chicago was, essentially, a separatist. She wasn't an extreme separatist (she was married to a man, after all), but she thought there should be an entirely separate art world for women--all woman art classes, women's galleries, etc. Schapiro, rightly I think, wanted to work within the system and evolve it from within. Whatever problems she had with CalArts, she thought it was still worth fighting the battle there. And I think Schapiro was right, basically. The art world, for itrs many faults, is a less sexist place than many other parts of society. (At least, that's how it seems to me--but I'm a guy after all.)

Chicago also rejected abstraction, and started drawing and painting a lot of flowers and vaginas. Also doing a lot more performance--cartoonish plays like "Cock and Cunt," but also shamanistic performance like Woman/Atmosphere.


Judy Chicago, Woman/Atmosphere, fireworks and painted body, 1971

Despite a change in subject matter towards the real and away from the abstract, her basic painting style--mostly hard-edged with smooth, spray-painted gradations of color, remained the same. (Which reminds of Philip Guston, who around the same time also went from doing abstract paintings to figurative paintings--but his skittery bruch style and his pallet remained constant.)

Obviously her journey of self-discovery was leading somewhere. And we now know where:


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, ceramic, porcelain, textile, 1974-79

This is her most famous work. Generally, Chicago doesn't seem to be a major figure in recent art history. It may be because people see a work like The Dinner Party and feel it is too literal, too obvious. My feeling is, so what? It's so beautiful and so cool. That outweighs the hit-you-on-the-head obviousness of it. But at the same time, I think her early minimal pieces are great, too, and really underrated. (At least, what I've seen of them.)

Feminist art is something I really want to learn more about. Fortunately, there is a movie that I think is going to be key for understanding this movement that is premiering right now at the Toronto Film Festival. It's called Women Art Revolution--A Secret History. The director, Lynn Hershman, has been working on it literally for decades. I saw a short preview of it at the Cinema Arts Festival, and it looks really good.