Art at the Houston Permitting Center

by Robert Boyd


Do you read Swamplot? (You should--it's one of Houston's most consistently entertaining blogs.) Every year they vote for "the Swampies", voting on various architectural, development, and planning/anti-planning successes and fiascoes in the Houston metro area. One Swampie is "Most Notable Recycling Effort"--a vote for the best remodelling/refurbishing/repurposing project in Houston. And on the top of the ballot this year is the Houston Permitting Center--and the voting seems to be favoring it. (Voting closes on December 27.) Pretty much everyone who has seen this has been impressed.



The Houston Permitting Center

What is it? It used to be a warehouse, and many who saw it described it as an eyesore. It's on the very end of Washington, next to the Amtrack station. The City of Houston decided to turn this building into their new Permitting Center. This is where contractors go to get the various permits they need for building projects. The city hired Studio RED to design the Center. The City devotes a 1.75% of capital improvements to art.  So for an expensive project like this, that's a shitload of money for art. Mary Margaret Hansen won the commission, but it wasn't a single piece of art she put up. Instead, working with 12 artists, she put art everywhere inside and outside the building.

Hansen is a compulsive blogger--she has a personal blog and seems to start up a new blog every time she starts a new project. I like this--it builds anticipation, and informs people about the process and the progress of the project. Her blog about the Permitting Center is worth reading, but reading it as the project unfolded was the ideal way to experience it.




interior of the Houston Permitting Center, first floor

The first art you see on the inside is this:



This is the information desk. Most of the art is labeled, but I couldn't find one for these decorative silhouettes.



Kaneem Smith, Remnant Reverie, 2011

The name plaque for this piece by Kaneem Smith instructs viewers to "please touch."

As I walked further towards the south end of the first floor, I saw these:




I thought at first they were a large art installation, but what they in fact are are demonstration models of various construction materials. But just behind them is this:



Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Torrent (detail), 2011

This is the first "indoor" piece I've ever seen by Havel and Ruck. It definitely gives on the impression of flotsam being carried away by a flood. Kind of a weird item for a building that is mainly concerned with building things (although the Permitting Center also issues demolition permits).Even though they are using recycled material in this piece, it seems ironically to suggest that this is the end-state of all this construction that happens in Houston. It's an evergreen notion:

"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Gonzo247, Information Highway, 2011



Gonzo247, Sunset in the City, 2011

Of the two Gonzo247 pieces, I prefer sunset in the city. It feels closer to a traditional graffiti piece. Also I like the irony--sunset often being associated with a quiet time, but in his work, he implies that the city comes alive at night. It has a jazzy urban feel that in some ways recalls Start Davis.



Mary Margaret Hansen, Overheard, 2011

Hansen spent time at the old permitting office listening to the phrases people used. Then she created this word collage out of her research. I've heard through the grapevine that she is irked that they put chairs in front of the piece. No artist likes to have their work covered up. But the Houston Permitting Center is not a museum--it's a working office. Things like this are to be expected. And I thought it had an unexpected aesthetic benefit. In my photograph, it feels like the piece is mirroring the actual thoughts of the guy sitting in front of it with his rolled-up plans and paperwork.



Jesse Sifuentes, View from the East, 2011

A lot of the work so far seems to reflect the bustle of both the Center and of the City, which is appropriate. The Permitting Center is about Houston in transition: tearing down, transforming, building up. You hear a soundtrack of chopped and screwed hip hop or grindcore. Not so with this pretty line of magnolias by Jesse Sifuentes.We're still clearly in an urban environment, but Sifuentes is reminding us of one of Houston's glories--its abundant trees.



Geoff Winningham, Fishing at Allen's Landing on Buffalo Bayou, 2001

The most subtle pieces are Geoff Winningham's photos, which are somehow printed on metal.Winningham too shows a quiet side of the city, but with the reflection in the still water, he reminds the viewer that they are in an urban space--indeed in the very heart of the city. The shadows, the reflection, the silhouette of the fisherman all make this a formally complex photograph. For that reason alone, you could sit and look at it for quite a while. But as a portrait of this city, it also seems perfect. It's timeless--one imagines this scene was common 100 years ago, and it wouldn't be out of place in an old Sig Byrd column.

There are several other artworks in the building and outside. The Houston Permitting Center strikes me as an exemplary example of how to use the 1.75% of capital costs for art. And I say this in a city that is full of squandered art dollars (ahem Tolerance ahem Open Channel Flow).

Filthy Lucre Links

by Robert Boyd

The rich are not like you and me. For one thing, they can use art as collateral for low-interest loans. A story in Bloomberg Businessweek details how a hedge fund manager, Michael Steinhardt, used Picassos and a Jackson Pollack he owns to secure a low-interest loan for a real-estate development.

A real estate developer would ordinarily finance this type of development through a two- to three-year renovation loan that would carry a variable interest rate based on a benchmark such as the London Interbank Offered Rate, also known as Libor. Banks usually charge a significant premium to Libor for such loans because of the risk that the development project will go awry, leaving the lender with a half-completed building as collateral, Stephen Brodie, the head of Herrick’s banking practice and an expert in both art and construction finance, said in an interview.

But fairly liquid collateral, like Picasso paintings, reduce the risk for the bank. And when their risk is reduced, their interest rates come down. Of course, this only works if you own valuable art in the first place. [Miles Weiss and Katya Kazakina, Bloomberg Businessweek via Art Market Monitor]

Rich guy's plan to save Greece. Dakis Joannou, the billionaire Greek art collector whose collection was the subject of a notorious vanity exhibit at the New Museum, actually has some good ideas about what his home country can do to dig out from its financial problems.

[Joannou,] the chairman of the Greek construction company J&P-Avax SA and founder of the 28-year-old Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art helped establish the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, transforming the Spanish city from backwater to arts boomtown.

“Culture is a big business that people are hungry for and we have huge assets,” Joannou, 71, says from his office in the shadow of the Olympic stadium. “But the government uses our assets to make political statements and to gain votes. It’s a matter of survival for them, and nobody wants to invest in culture or anything else in a climate of bankruptcy.”

Even so, Joannou says that the two main political parties, Pasok and New Democracy, are devoid of the necessary cultural drive, and that the government’s projected 12 percent rise to 16.5 million foreign tourists visiting Greece in 2011 compared with last year is a Pyrrhic indicator.

“The tourists who come to Greece go to the sunny islands, making any rise in visitor numbers pathetic in comparison to our assets,” he says. “Culture management must be creative, imaginative, exciting and that can’t be done here.”

Joannou says he thought Greece’s luck had turned when it won the right to host the 2004 Olympics, only to spend 9 billion euros on a project that ended in financial disaster, at the time lumbering the government with a deficit in excess of 4 percent of gross domestic product and beyond European Union limits.

“I went on a few of the government culture committees, but their inability to act frustrated me,” he says. “I no longer get involved. I gave up on them. I do my thing. It’s a shame.”

Joannou shakes his head. “We could have done here what we did in Bilbao,” he says. “Politicians didn’t want to listen.”

In a world where Hollywood spends hundreds of millions to produce movies like 300, The Lightning Thief, Clash of the Titans, and most recently, Immortals, Greek cultural and artistic tourism should be major industries. [A. Craig Copetas, Bloomberg Businessweek via Art Market Monitor]



Then there's the rest of us. Spinning off from Occupy Wall Street is Occupy Museums. Their manifesto begins:

The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite.

Now personally, I am glad that museums are elite institutions. I don't want "the people" to decide what goes into museums. The rest of the manifesto speaks to the conflicted nature of collectors and museums (see Dakis Joannou above), and that is an important issue. But let's say that conflict of interest somehow went away--would it necessarily benefit artists? Or would their situation be about the same as it is now? Hrag Vartanian has issues with this protest.

I think Occupy Wall Street hits on the bigger issue that impacts not only the art world but every other facet of society, namely access to money and power. Where were these protesters yesterday during the Sotheby’s art handlers protest? Since August 1, members of the 99% (i.e. art handlers) have been locked out by Sotheby’s, and they continue to need help standing up to the art market’s disregard of workers who make the system run.

Still, the manifesto is rousing. I especially liked this:

For the last few decades, voices of dissent have been silenced by a fearful survivalist atmosphere and the hush hush of BIG money. To really critique institutions, to raise one’s voice about the disgusting excessive parties and spectacularly out of touch auctions of the art world while the rest of the country suffers and tightens its belt was widely considered to be bitter, angry, uncool. Such a critic was a sore loser.

The action will take place today at 3 pm in New York City.
[Occupy Museums, Hyperallergic]

Critiquing disgusting excessive parties. Houston artist MM Hansen is apparently not afraid to seem bitter, angry or uncool as she amusingly dissects a charity/art event at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Words do not do this evening justice. It was a total photo op night. A friend emailed me to say she'd put me on a list for this evening's charitable event at the Galleria's Saks Fifth Avenue. I won't mention the charity, because the photos I took and the experience I had have nothing to do with the charity's good works. And perhaps that is exactly the point.

She peppers her account with photos and gentle, pithy descriptions that hide a barb underneath.

I saw two uncomfortable looking bare-chested Houston fireman meandering about, each carrying an expensive black handbag. Who put them up to that? Why weren't they signing a new 2012 calendar instead, if indeed, there is one this year. Or perhaps they weren't Houston firemen?

It's hard for me to read this (and see the accompanying photo) without  thinking how weird and condescending it is for a group of wealthy charity organizers to hire a couple of members of the working class to be eye-candy for the night. Hansen concludes:

I am not sure why folks go to so many of these events. Is it because their friends ask them to contribute to a worthy cause? And is it also because we have no plaza publicas in this country in which to parade in the evening and gossip? A bit of both?

Check out her blog for lots and lots of photos of this event. I've been to a few of these, and I always feel pretty uncomfortable at them. [Rockbridge Times]


If you want to fight for artists, fight for droit moral. Droit moral, or moral rights, covers a lot of area in art. One area is that if a work of art is resold, the artist of the work should benefit from this. Sometimes laws cover just the gain in value of the artwork, sometimes the total resale price. This kind of law is common in Europe, and exists in California--but is not widely enforced. Hence a class-action lawsuit that has just been filed against Sotheby's and Christie's.

The fact that California's Resale Royalty Act is "little known" (as the Wall Street Journal's Kelly Crow describes it in her article today) is no excuse for ignoring it. This law is anomalous in the U.S., but not in Europe. It is surely well known to Sotheby's and Christie's legal counsel.

The two auction houses have just been sued in U.S. District Court, Central District of California, by New York artist Chuck Close, California artist Laddie John Dill and the heirs of Robert Graham (and also, in Christie's case, the Sam Francis Foundation). They are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorneys' fees, under the California law. 

Lee Rosenbaum thinks the law is poorly constructed because it takes 5% of any resale--even sales that are for less than the purchase price. I think it can be argued either way. If the royalty were just on the capital gains, one would want it to be much higher than 5%. But the accounting for this would be a nightmare and subject to all kinds of shenanigans. A royalty on any sale is easier to keep track of (and even then, not so easy--if it were, this lawsuit would be unnecessary). I'm pretty sure artists have no such royalty rights in Texas, where property rights trump all. [CultureGirl]



Where the rich will be tonight in Houston. The Texas Contemporary Art Fair opens tonight, with the VIP Preview Party starting at 7:30 pm (and the even more exclusive CAMH Preview Party at 6 pm). I'll probably go to the later party (for some reason, I have received five VIP passes from various sources, which either indicates that I am now a member of the elite or more likely that they were giving away passes to any bum with a blog). Expect photos of the fabulousness! (And if Occupy Houston were to show up in front of the Brown Convention Center tonight, well, that would be an interesting coincidence!) [Texas Contemporary Art Fair]

Lots of Art at the Houston Permitting Center

by Robert Boyd

After my last depressing post, I want to cheer readers up a little. I follow a blog called the Rockbridge Times written by artist Mary Margaret Hansen. You should put it on your RSS feed. She doesn't post frequently, but it's always good when she does. And this post from last week was an eye-opener.

The Houston Permitting Center on Washington Ave. is where you go to get all those pesky permits the city requires (although I think the city is working to put as much of that online as possible). When they decided to refurbish the old building, they hired Studio RED as the architects. I don't know if Studio RED hired Hansen to coordinate the art, or if the city did--in any case, Hansen was in charge of putting together a lot of art for the building, working closely with Studio RED. And it looks like it will be fantastic when it's done. Here's some of the art in progress:



The piece above is a Havel & Ruck mural.



Here is Gonzo 247 doing a mural for the parking garage (I think).



Geoff Winningham has some photos blown up and printed on metal. (Winningham was a professor of mine at Rice.)

There's lots more at Rockbridge Times. This project reminds me of Second Seating, a big installation Hansen did in 2009 where she also corralled a bunch of artists into doing their own bits. Hansen is somewhere between a curator, an impresario and a conductor for this. I can't wait til it's finished. As much as I would normally want to avoid the Permitting Center, this stuff will make it worth the visit.

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Second Seating

Second Seating is a huge installation next to Irma's downtown. It is basically a tribute to the East End of Houston--the industrial part of town along the ship channel where the oldest Hispanic neighborhoods are. I think of the East End as a collection of neighborhoods that are almost utterly unknown to most of the suburbanites of west Houston or north of town. (They may know Downtown, Midtown, Montrose, the Museum District, Greenway Plaza, the Heights... but the rest of the inner loop is terra incognita.)

The exhibit is made up of objects and furniture assembled from detritus from the East End--industrial equipment, metal cans, plastic bottles, oyster shells, etc. The primary objects are tables, chairs, place settings, and chandeliers--in other words, it is as if an elegant restaurant has been assembled entirely out of junk.

For example, this chandelier made of bleach bottles:


I'm not sure who the artist is on this one, but I like it. I've always liked it when artists made something pretty out of garbage, whether it is Vietnamese toys made out of tin cans or Picasso making a bulls head out of a bicycle seat and handlebars.

The person behind this (curator? ringmaster?) is Mary Margaret Hansen (pictured below on the left).



You can see that the installation itself is kind of a riot. No "white cube" for Hansen! She has a number of collaborators, including well-known grafitti artist (and Aerosol Warfare gallery owner) Gonzo247.


Table and chairs by Gonzo247

Another table setting is this one--I'm not sure who is responsible for it.



I think it is meant to represent Galveston Bay and maybe it has some environmental theme. But what it made me think of is Miss Havisham's table in David Lean's film version of Great Expectations.



I think my favorite part of the show was this:



Here's a wider shot to give you a sense of scale and also a sense of how well it fits in.



I think the artist for this piece is Jose Solis, but I'm not certain.

I think on the whole, Second Seating is too jumbled, too scattered. It has a lot of heart though, and definitely is a love letter to the East End. You have one more chance to see it--it will be open during this year's Artcrawl (Saturday, November 21).