Most Popular Pan Posts of 2011

by Robert Boyd

I write posts, Dean Liscum writes posts, but we never have any idea in advance whether they will catch on with readers. You people are ciphers! Anyway, here are the most popular 2011 posts based on page views:

1) A Matter of Wit at Fotofest. Readers came for the nudity but I hope they left delighted with these wacky, surreal photos.

2) A Letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. I can take no credit whatsoever for this animated version of a well-known encouraging letter from the famous conceptual artist to the famous post-minimal artist. It was animated by Levni Yilmaz, and it really caught on with readers, probably because of its good humor and optimism.



still from Waste Land

3) Vik Muñiz's Waste Land. This was a review of the Oscar-nominated documentary. Read the review then watch it on Netflix!

4) Mysterious North Houston Art Colony Discovered. This was my first (of three) post about Itchy Acres up in Independence Heights. It got a link from Swamplot, the ever-popular real-estate blog, whose readers (including me) delight in finding new and unusual things in out-of-the-way Houston neighborhoods.

5) The LapDance Scholarship (NSFW). This one, about and artist/stripper who funds other artists through her erotic dancing, caught on partly because of those four magic letters NSFW, but also because I posted links on various Iowa and University of Iowa Reddits. I hope some readers got the message about how Emily Moran Barwick grants challenged the very idea of grants--it forced grant recipients to know exactly how their grants were being paid for (which is not the usual case).

6) Is The Houston Chronicle's Art Critic Trying to Get Himself Fired? This was the first of several posts on the saga of Devon Britt-Darby, where he comes out as a once-and-future gay prostitute and former meth addict. This is an ongoing story, and you can follow it on Britt-Darby's blog, Reliable Narratives.

7) Urban Animals by Merrie Wright. There's a great Shonen Knife album called "Rock Animals" which has a song on it ironically about animals made of concrete in a local playground. Maybe people had the same cognitive dissonance here--Wright's art had nothing to do with the beloved 1980s roller-skating gang in Houston, but was actually about animals in urban environments, evolving new strategies of camouflage.

8) Howard the Duck is an Orphan Now...Gene Colan, 1926-2011. This was an obituary of the artist most associated with the comic character Howard the Duck.



Francis Giampietro, "Thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissolvable by the annihilation of one of us!", reconstituted refrigerator, pressure treated wood, furniture leather, ice and pvc, 2011

9) Every Year More MFAs Are Loosed On Houston. This was my review of the 2011 University of Houston MFA class, but it also was a think piece on what happened to previous year's MFAs.

10) Diana Al-Hadid, Cordy Ryman and Jennifer Riley at Peel. Three out-of-town artists showed at Peel (which primarily shows out-of-towners). Al-Hadid and Ryman in particular are up-and-comers. This review is not too different from my other reviews, so I have no idea why it was so popular.

All I can judge by this is that readers like the following--nudity, sex workers, videos, and artists who aren't from Houston. So for 2012, expect a lot more posts featuring videos of international art stars cavorting with naked prostitutes. That should push my page views high enough to start running ads!

Now one final "most popular" post. It's from 2010, but it was the most popular post in 2011 and is my all-time most popular post: Age of Consent. It's a discussion of the movie Age of Consent, about an Australian artist who moves out to a remote beach to try to get new inspiration. It's based on a novel of the same name by an extremely interesting Australian artist/writer named Norman Lindsay. So why is this old post so popular? Imagine the following words in a Google search: "Helen Mirren" and "naked".

Urban Animals by Merrie Wright

Merrie Wright, Decaying Swallow, earthenware sculpture and digital print

Merrie Wright is a ceramicist who teaches up at UT Tyler. Her show at Goldesberry Gallery combines ceramic sculptures of animals and photos of those sculptures in appropriate setting. What is amusing is that each of the animals--all of them wild animals--seems to have developed protective coloring to help them survive a tough urban environment. So the swallow above has coloring that resembles the fading, peeling paint of a park bench.


Merrie Wright, Graffiti Bluebird, earthenware sculpture and digital print

Graffiti Bluebird assume the dramatic colors of the spraypainted wall behind it.


Merrie Wright, Graffiti Bluebird, earthenware sculpture and digital print

Once you take them out of the environment, their coloring seems odd to say the least, if not completely arbitrary. Of course, the thing is that these color schemes only work as camouflage in highly specific circumstances--the bluebird has to be standing in front of a very specific piece of graffiti to be invisible--otherwise, I suspect this color scheme would call attention to itself--which would exert a lot of negative evolutionary pressure on this particular breed of bluebird.

So that begs the question--are these animals chameleons, able to change their color to fit in? That might be the case with the bluebird and swallow, but that theory falls apart with the exhibition's coyote.



Merrie Wright, Construction Zone: Coyote, earthenware sculpture and digital print

The coyote is not blending in with the background--here he is imitating a specific "natural" feature of the landscape. I think there are certain insects that do this, but this coyote is taking it to the extreme.


Merrie Wright, Construction Zone: Coyote, earthenware sculpture and digital print

Most Houstonians are familiar with urban wildlife. We've all seen squirrels and a large variety of birds, and I'd bet that most of  us have seen possums, raccoons and skunks in their neighborhoods on occasion. I haven't heard of coyotes or foxes in Houston, but I've read that coyotes are becoming fairly common in other cities--even New York. And the suburbs north of Houston have been experiencing an increased deer population. These animals turn out to be extremely adaptable to urban environments, and perhaps Wright is commenting on this adaptability. (In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman predicts that if humans suddenly disappeared, wild animals would quickly recolonize human places--they are already here after all--and easily shove aside domesticated dogs, which might become extinct. He gives good odds for the survival of cats, though.)



Merrie Wright, Reserved Parking: Squirrel, earthenware sculpture and digital print

But another meaning suggested itself to me as I looked at these pieces. The standard camouflage of these animals has from time immemorial been to hide them in nature--to help them look like nature. And the practice of art from Lascaux to the end of the 19th century was, with certain important exceptions, about depicting nature--including men and women as part of nature. But as the human-made world has come to dominate, the subject of art has evolved to the depictions of human-made things. When Pop Art first hit the world, a lot of the critical and curatorial response was about how these artists were depicting mundane man-made stuff (the first Pop Art museum show was titled "New Paintings of Common Objects").

Wright's animals are like artists, who after centuries of camouflaging themselves as nature, now, in her vivid tableaux, camouflage themselves as man-made stuff. The question is whether this show is celebrating this... or regretting it.

Of course I may be overinterpreting it. I think it would be easy to feel delight looking at these pieces without digging much deeper. That you can dig deeper is a bonus.