Betsy Huete’s Top Ten of 2013

Betsy Huete

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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

From Here to Afternoon: Labor and Formalities

Betsy Huete

Revealing and the concealment of information: it’s a formidable issue that artists and curators alike frequently contend with in presenting to the public. Places like the CAMH or the MFAH, for instance, provide detailed museum placards laying out the exhibition’s historical context or even outright meaning of the work. Most galleries provide some sort of handout, again rooting the work and/or the artist(s) within a particular context. Places like the Menil, on the other hand, provide very little information to the viewer other than the title, year, and artist, greatly entrusting the viewer to enact meaning onto the work—for better or worse. Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov's latest curatorial effort From Here to Afternoon, up now at Glassell, somehow jockeys these two positions.



Exhibition entrance

Albeit written in somewhat ambiguous and fairly impenetrable language, Haggren and Lylov do provide a written document explicating the context and meaning of the exhibition. Also, there are writings scattered throughout the space that functionally anchor and appropriately provide context, and even meditate on a contemporary art exhibit’s positioning within modes of labor and efficiency. But given their equivalence in scale to and spacing between the actual artworks, the writings seem to bear their own weight as autonomous art forms, and work surprisingly well as such. The transmutation of written explanation to art object is a surprising and innovative move that simultaneously informs and subverts meaning—a smart ambiguity that relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks. Another notable treatment (or lack thereof) of the space is the omission of artist and title placards. The result is a cohesive and deeply nuanced yet nebulous grouping: a curation drafted as an unintentional collaboration between artists. While totally practical and probably necessary, it makes the image list attached to the handout seem almost disappointing.


Installation view, front gallery

Placing trust in the viewer to properly engage with the work is a respectable although risky move here—this is an exhibition that requires time. Lots of it. With its text-heavy, historicized, and intellectual agenda, glazing over the work and shrugging it off as an exploration of the banalities and dignity of labor as well as the manipulation of its laborers seems like a tempting prospect. This isn’t fresh territory, after all. Between the Touch Sanitation (1970-80) project of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), or even Houston’s currently running Shrimp Boat Project, effort used as both a material and concept in art has been in play at the very least since the post-minimalists. Fortunately, for the viewer and Haggren/Lylov alike, it doesn’t take too long to realize that in this situation, labor is instead used as a stepping-stone to engender abstraction and formal concerns.


Installation view, middle gallery

That’s not to say that these issues aren’t prevalent in the work, or aren’t meant to be included, or shouldn’t be a part of the work. It’s that they immanently present themselves through a corroboration of visual and textual abstractions resulting from actual systems of efficiency, like the photographic motion studies of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, speech conducting, and shipping containers, just to name a few. One clear example of this is the Laban-Lawrence studies of rhythm and labor, examined here through the lens of Romana Schmalisch. She uses these studies, conducted and published mostly in the 1940s, to explore the texture and rhetoric of efficiency, the most effective of which is Notation of Efficiency (2013). Situated in its own cozy dark room, the piece consists of a single slide projector, operating as an outmoded PowerPoint presentation. It’s a sequence of facts, visual aids, and Laban-Lawrence diagrams that hardly make any sense to the layperson. While seeming to do nothing more than explain a system, Schmalisch’s dead-pan delivery reveals subtle humor, making intense studies of movement like wrapping a Mars Bar feel fascinating, concise, and utterly ridiculous. She also controls the cadence of the projector, its intermittent clicking flying through some slides while spending way too much time on others. It’s a clever way of forcing the viewer to focus on phrases or images he would normally disregard, rendering certain aspects of these studies as not only important, but foreboding, manipulative, and slightly terrifying.


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

Another instance of slide projector usage occurs with Liz Magic Laser’s The Digital Face (2012). In the main part of the exhibition space, two projected images face each other on opposite walls. They are two dancers, Alan Good and Cori Kresge, silently reenacting the choreography of George H. W. Bush’s 1990 and Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, respectively. The slides present images of frozen movements punctuating various points of the speeches. Overall, the piece is a fairly hilarious and extremely intelligent isolation of the movement and texture of political rhetoric, and poignantly fits in the show. But the piece originally existed as a performance at MoMA PS1 and usually shows up in galleries as a dual-channel video, and so much of the humor, nuance, and impeccable movements of the dancers is thus lost in this iteration. While the use of outmoded technology transplanted the viewer to a correlating time period in Schmalisch’s work, it doesn’t make sense with Laser’s. It’s a curatorial attempt at cohesion that cuts The Digital Face off at the knees—a grave misstep.


Liz Magic Laser, The Digital Face, 2012, Two slide projector installation

As previously stated, there are several pieces that quite purposefully lack immediacy, that demand extended attention, and Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov’s Hongkong Turbulence (2013) is one of them. Although the running time is unstated, the looped video likely takes over half an hour to cycle through. The video initially reads as boring and self-indulgent observations of the transportation, shipping, and packing of commodities—a piece that is blanketly ungenerous to the viewer. But after about ten minutes or so (hang in there!), the work suddenly shifts from tedium to intense satisfaction. As it cyclically demonstrates machines and people binding, packing, smashing, crushing, compartmentalizing, selling, beeping, and deconstructing massive amounts of things, the work abstractly and formally, and almost ethnographically, reveals the innards of contemporary systems of efficiency.


Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov, Hongkong Turbulence, 2013, 16mm film transferred to HD video

From Here to Afternoon makes interesting and borderline risky curatorial decisions that, while sometimes hurting the work, also enable it and create formal and conceptual relationships that would not likely exist if each piece were seen by itself. It also uses art to vocalize and think through overshadowed historical moments, and it’s usually presented the other way around in a standard contemporary context.

From Here to Afternoon runs until November 24, 2013, at the Glassell School.