Hunting Prize 2015 Finalists

Robert Boyd

Hey, buckaroos, it's Hunting Prize time again, and they have uploaded photos of all the finalists to Facebook. In the past, Hunting has had controversy because of its prohibition of any art that anyone might possibly find offensive. A lesser controversy, but one that bubbles up most years, is that it seems to discriminate against abstract painting (although that complaint surely was silenced by last year's winner, Winston Lee Mascarenhas). But lending credence to this theory is that with this year's finalists, abstract paintings are vastly outnumbered by figurative paintings. That said, we don't know what the general pool of entrants was. Maybe this ratio of figurative to abstract among the finalists reflects what they received from artists entering the contest. Without more knowledge of the first round entrants and of the criteria by which they were judged, I am reluctant to say that the Hunting judges have a bias against abstract painting per se.

Below are a few pictures that caught my eye. Many of these works are by artists I already admire a lot, but the pieces that intrigue me most are the ones by people I've never heard of or are, at best, only slightly familiar with. I love coming across work like that, which is why I like open-call events like the Hunting Prize and the Big Show.


Alice Leora Briggs, Puesto, 2014, sgraffito drawing with acrylic ink and gesso on panel diptych: each panel 18 x 24 inches

Dean Liscum reviewed Alice Leora Briggs' work back in 2012.


Fernando Ramirez, Clouds

I haven't seen that many Fernando Ramirez pieces, but I have liked all the ones I have seen. They have a fearful edge that reminds me a bit of artists as diverse as Vince Locke and Brian Chippendale. But will the Hunting judges go for art that looks like it could serve as the cover of a death metal album? I doubt it, but who knows?



Gina Gwen Palacios, Abel's Lot, 2014, Oil on pane,l 37" x 36"

I was completely unfamiliar with Gina Gwen Palacios, but I liked the way the bleak landscape Abel's Lot collapses in the middle. It suggests sudden violence in a small town, like in a novel by Jim Thompson or Cormac McCarthy.



Harvey Johnson, Didn't It Rain

I'm glad I saw this Harvey Johnson image because it reminds me I need to take a road trip to Beaumont to see Harvey Johnson: A Triple Middle Passage at AMSET. His work is always great. (Why do we have to go to Beaumont to see solo museum exhibits by so many Houston artists?)


 Heather Bause, Honeycomb

I was surprised to learn that this drippy painterly abstraction is by Heather Bause, whose previous work has been pretty hard-edge in my experience.But looking at her recent work on her website shows that this is a direction she's moved into, and I have to say I like it a lot.


Jimmy Houston, Trailblazer

Every now and then I will see a piece by Jimmy Houston in a group show or during Art Crawl. But his work is generally not the kind of work you see in local galleries--illustrational, cartoony, "low brow," etc. But I like his work quite a bit and this particular Disney-crossed-with-steampunk image tickled me. Sure it's illustrational--and I like good illustrations.


Laura Lark, Arena

This is an unusual Laura Lark piece. If done using her typical stipple technique, it must have been rather tedious to create--it's so dark and dense.  I can't tell if it's a collage or if she just drew the male hand projecting from the woman's chest, but that combined with the darkness of the image and the bad surveillance photo quality give Arena a slightly sinister feeling.


Lindy Chambers, Party Animals

I loved Lindy Chambers' use of bold flat colors with clean outlines in Party Animals--it's like a cross between Patrick Caulfield and Hergé. She recently had a show at d.m. allison, which I liked but which also seemed a little heavy on the surreal/pop elements. By eschewing that stuff, this painting is much stronger. It's my favorite of all the finalists for the Hunting.


Matt Messinger, Sperm Whale

I have a silk-screen of three sperm whales by Matt Messinger printed on ledger paper from Dean's Easy Credit (which Messinger presumably acquired from Jim Pirtle). In my print, the whales are the usual black variety, but in this painting he goes for a singular white whale, perhaps a descendent from Moby Dick himself.


Mira Hnatyshyn, Mortal Immortal

I'm not sure what it is about these two monks (?) and their fans that appeals to me. It seems quite a bit different than the work I saw in Mira Hnatyshyn's studio in San Antonio a few years back.  Her work generally reminds me a bit of Larry Rivers--but not this elegant piece.


Seth Alverson, Useless Foot

This is the kind of grotesque work we've come to expect from Seth Alverson. But I also wonder if it's an homage to the foot paintings of his friend (and previous Hunting Prize winner) Lane Hagood. Whatever its inspiration, it's one damn ugly thing. I can't turn away. I love it. (I should disclose that I own a painting by Alverson.)


Terry Crump, Savannah Bridge

A few years ago, I saw a painting by Terry Crump at the Big Show at Lawndale that I really liked. With his splashy, non-local pastel colors, his work feels like the lite-beer version of Matisse. I guess that at best sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I like Savannah Bridge a lot. It's pretty, and while sometimes I love ugly (as mentioned above), pretty's OK with me, too. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

There's much more. Check out Hunting's Facebook page to see them all.

The Bart Book of the Dead

Robert Boyd

The catalog says it best: "Sketch Klubb is a group of friends who get together every other Saturday morning to draw." It was 12 guys, but one of them, Michael Harwell, recently died. 1,000 Crappy Barts for Michael Harwell plus Klay Klubb is a tribute to their lost compadre.



When you walk into the big back gallery of Box 13, there is a vitrine with an open sketchbook. This is Harwell's sketchbook, and the page we see has 16 drawings of Bart Simpson's head. There are a minimal number of lines in the Matt Groening-designed head of Bart, and Harwell deliberately takes them apart.

Starting from this page, the surviving members of Sketch Klubb--Seth Alverson, Rene Cruz, Russell Etchen, Sebastian Forray, Lane Hagood, Cody Ledvina, Nick Meriwether, Eric Pearce, Patrick Phipps, J. Michael Stovall and David Wang--drew 1000 versions of Bart Simpson, which are on the three walls surrounding the vitrine.







They aren't very memorable drawings. The goal was quantity over quality. This may reflect the ethos of Sketch Klubb. They've put together a few zines and a book before, but I suspect the idea is to get together and draw without having an endgame in mind. Doesn't matter if it's "good."



Not that there weren't a few drawings that were clever. Like this Creature from the Black Lagoon Bart.



Or this Bart who looks a little like Hank Hill crossed with Walter White.



How about an airbrushed Bart with 13 eyes?



Or a sweaty Bart with a beard and boobs for eyes. (There were a lot of mutant Barts in the show.)



The work was hung in a off-hand, unprofessional way--pages curled up in the humidity. But that seemed right. After all, they weren't creating something for the ages--this was a temporary tribute to Harwell that no doubt recalled their casual Saturday morning get-togethers.

Slightly more finished work was on display in the front gallery of Box 13. These were ceramic objects made by Sketch Klubb. None of the work was labeled, so for the purpose of this review, just assume a collective authorship for these bizarre ceramic knick-knacks.





(Thank God the "MAN MILK" jug was empty.)










Some of them are pretty funny, and they seem like a natural extension of the artistic ethos of Sketch Klubb.

The individual artists in Sketch Klubb do a wide variety of work on their own, but as diverse as their styles are, I'd say that what they have in common is an element of humor. The question I have is that was it their sense of humor that drew them together in 2005, or is their sense of humor as artists partly a result of their time together in Sketch Klubb?

I saw this exhibit on opening night. The crowd was boisterous and good humored. I wonder what it would be like to see when the galleries are quiet and unpopulated.

Go Get the Butter (NSFW)

Robert Boyd


Clayton Porter, Trying Hard, 2012, multiple videos on three 32 in. TVs, time variable

Let's get the dick out of the way right up front. In the big downstairs gallery at Lawndale where the exhibit Staring at the Wall: The Art of Boredom is, you hear the words "work" and "hard" being repeated over and over, with slightly varying rhythms. Three 32-inch TVs are facing each other, so that their screens are mostly hidden from the viewer. That's where the sound is coming from.


Clayton Porter, Trying Hard, 2012, multiple videos on three 32 in. TVs, time variable

 Only when you get close and peek through the narrow slits between the TVs do you see erect penises (presumably artist Clayton Porter's penis) being pressed into soft sticks of butter. There are many things one could say to describe this, but "boring" is not one of them. That's the first clue that the title of the exhibit is not really about your boredom. It's more about what boredom unlocks. Being bored is an inducement to do something. For example, masturbation. And if mere masturbation isn't cutting it, why not press your dick into some soft butter? As The Waitresses sang, "It might not be better but I'll settle for different."

 
Clayton Porter, untitled (casts of melted butter), 2012, eight plaster of paris sculptures

Boredom here seems to be the inspiration for new work, a video installation called Trying Hard. And this apparently resulted in a series of little sculptures.

  
Clayton Porter, untitled (casts of melted butter), 2012, plaster of paris


Clayton Porter, untitled (casts of melted butter), 2012, plaster of paris

I had a discussion about these sculptures with a friend last night. He had two thoughts--first, as casts they seemed too perfect. He didn't believe that these were actual casts of butter that had been smushed by Porter's erect penis. He thought the technical challenges of creating such a cast might be too great. And there is nothing in the exhibit that states that what they are casts of the penis-smushed butter sticks--but everyone who sees them jumps to that conclusion. The other thing was that the sculptures were a way to turn this activity--pressing his penis into butter--into a salable object. He felt that detracted from the video installation, that the sculptures were unnecessary adjuncts. Perhaps so, but the fact that he could take this seemingly boredom-born activity and turn it into discreet sculptures is kind of impressive.

The thing about Staring at the Wall: The Art of Boredom is that Clayton Porter is everywhere. His work comes close to overwhelming the show. In addition to the loud dick piece and eight sculptures that seem to be associated with it, he has two more pieces in the exhibit.


Clayton Porter, Anal Patina, 2012, bronze, displayed with stationary bike and photograph, 11.5" x 12" x 2.75" (seat)

With Anal Patina, Porter made a bronze cast of his stationary bicycle seat and rode it naked for 650 miles. The patina (which I couldn't really see) was formed by his butt sweat. Boredom may have played a part (riding a stationary bike isn't exactly exciting). The piece is meant to "focus on the body," according to the notes. But mostly it elicits a laugh. In fact, one thing conspicuously absent in the show's notes (presumably written by curator Katia Zavistovski) about Anal Patina and Trying Hard is that they're funny. Porter is described as being preoccupied "with identity, sexuality and power relations." But the most obvious aspect of these two pieces, humor, is not mentioned.


Clayton Porter, Untitled (Sunlight Across My Face), 2012, video


Clayton Porter, Untitled Drawing (Self-Portrait), 2011, graphite and wax on paper, 9" x 11.5"

His last two pieces in the show are linked to each other. First is a pencil self-portrait--nothing special but well-executed. This is mounted on a freestanding bulletin-board-like structure. On the other side from the portrait is a projection, Untitled (Sunlight on My Face). This one is where Porter brings the boredom to us. This is, apparently, a video of sunlight slowly creeping across this portrait. It's only 19 minutes long, but I suspect no one watches the whole thing--too boring. I was reminded of Michael Snow's Wavelength, another film that few people watch all the way through unless they have to.

The boredom of the artist comes through in Chris Akin's work. Akin is a guard at the Menil Museum and apparently spends a whole lot of time looking at the floor. I can understand why. Standing in one place waiting for the occasional person to illicitly whip out a camera so you can actually do something must be excruciatingly boring. And the worn wood floors at the Menil are admittedly pretty interesting--I notice them every time I'm there.


Chris Akin, from the Menil Floor Drawing series, 2004-2006, metallic paint pen and pencil on paper, 2 5/8" x 4 1/4" each

Akin has taken his boredom and spun it into a body of work--drawings from 2004 to 2006, then collages from 2010 to 2012. Staring at the floors of the Menil has kept him artistically busy for years.


Chris Akin, from the Menil Floor Drawing series, 2010-2012, mixed media on paper, imensions variable

The pieces feel nostalgic, recalling cubist drawings and paintings as well as abstractions from the late 50s and 60s. In this way, they have a secondary relationship to the Menil through the content of its collection.

Another artist whose work references other older artwork is Jenny Schlief. She specifically references a well-known video by John Baldessari called I Am Making Art.


Jenny Schlief, I Am Making Art: After Baldessari, 2010, iPhone video, 29 seconds looped

The show catalog acknowledges that Schlief has humorous intentions. Taking Baldessari's dryly humorous video and replacing it with a baby with ants in her pants is funny. Apparently the link to boredom here has to do with the struggle of a parent to keep her child from being bored. But it could also relate to John Baldessari's ironic artistic statement, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.

Jeremy DePrez evidently kills time doodling on a scratch pad. One of his paintings in the show is based on this material.


Jeremy DePrez, untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 52" x 78"

Boredom is not all that far from obsession. The need to fill the vacuum of time leads us to pointlessly repetitive acts like the careful filling of blank space on this scratch pad that DePrez has expanded and immortalized. Horror vacui also comes hand in hand with boredom. We clutter up our environments to stave off boredom.


Uta Barth, ...and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.1) (left side), 2011, inkjet prints face-mounted against matte acrylic, framed in painted aluminum frames, diptych--each panel 37 1/2" x 55 3/4"


Uta Barth, ...and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.1) (right side), 2011, inkjet prints face-mounted against matte acrylic, framed in painted aluminum frames, diptych--each panel 37 1/2" x 55 3/4"

Uta Barth and Seth Alverson both depict interior scenes (curtains and a chair respectively) which are related to the theme of the show via the idea that loneliness is related to boredom. I think this connection is weaker than what we see in the other works. At least it is for me. Sitting in a chair staring at the light as it plays across the curtains, catching dust particles in the air, and zoning out is not boredom. Being bored is feeling each second pass. Barth and Alverson's pieces make me think of those moments when time ceases to exist. I suppose the question is whether satori comes out of boredom or if it is a banishment of boredom. In any case, I feel these two pieces are closer to depicting a kind of satori than mere boredom. They have a gorgeous emptiness.


Seth Alverson, Chair, 2012, oil on canvas, 30" x 30"

Staring at the Wall: The Art of Boredom runs through January 12 at Lawndale Art Center.

Pan Recommends for the week of November 29 to December 5

Robert Boyd

Another Thanksgiving has passed, and that means we are on the home-stretch for the year and that galleries and art-spaces are putting up their final shows of the season. And that means there's a lot happening this week. Here are just some of the shows and performances we're looking forward to.

THURSDAY

Jamal Cyrus performing "Texas Fried Tenor" at the CAMH at 6:30 pm. Part of a series of performances at CAMH for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, this one was  inspired by Steely Dan's song "Deacon Blues" which may be the only time the oblique-but-smooth jazz-rock stylings of Steely Dan have ever inspired a piece of performance art (although I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).

FRIDAY

A bunch of shows at Lawndale Art Center, tonight at 6:30 and running through January 12. It's the usual grab bag of shows at Lawndale, but I'm looking especially forward to Staring at the Wall: The Art of Boredom curated by Katia Zavistovski because ever since I heard Thomas McEvilley described L'Avventura as "exquisitely boring" in film history class, boredom has been one of my favorite subjects. It includes art by Chris Akin, Seth Alverson, Uta Barth, Jeremy DePrez, Clayton Porter and Jenny Schlief. Also, James Ciosek's HUMAN HAMSTER WHEEL!

SATURDAY 


Theaster Gates performing See, Sit, Sup, Sing:Holding Court at CAMH at 2 pm. Another of the performances for Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Theaster Gates is one of the best-known social practice artists around, so this performance is a "must-see".


Situation Sculpture #1 by the Art Guys at 4400 block of Airline Drive (at East Whitney Street) at 3 pm. This sculpture (which as far as I can tell is a bunch of sewer hook-ups in an empty lot) is part of the Art Guys' 30-year anniversary celebration. This conflicts somewhat with Theaster Gates--tough choice. If you can't decide, let the weather decide for you. If it's nasty, see Theaster Gates. If it's nice, see the Art Guys. (Although if you are willing to discard accepted safe-driving standards, you may be able to see both.)

Demiak at Redbud Gallery, opening at 6 pm [on view through December 30]. Martin Demmink, aka Demiak, is coming back to Houston after participating last year in a pair of group shows at Williams Tower and Box 13. His work in those shows involved photographing dioramas of Louisiana swamp scenes. I wonder if Dutch guys developing an affinity for Louisiana is a thing (I'm thinking of the character "Sonny" from Treme). Anyway, those pieces from last year were great so I have high hopes for this new exhibit.

What are you looking forward to seeing this weekend? Let us know in the comments section.

Wrapped Up In Books with Seth Alverson and Lane Hagood

Robert Boyd


Cronopios installation view at Kaboom Books

Lane Hagood is a bookworm. This was obvious when he won the Hunting Prize for a painting called Books I Have Possessed. Books have remained a subject for his work. And even when books are not directly referred to in his paintings, his work still feels bookish. It gives one the feeling of old libraries or cramped bookstores like Kaboom.

Kaboom is the kind of place where one might find an out-of-print book like Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar, and Lane Hagood is the kind of person who would pick it up. Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was an Argentine writer who was one of the first writers of "el Boom," a flowering of writing in Latin America that reached across borders and languages in the 1960s and 70s. He's best known in the English speaking world for his short stories (his first book in English was Blow-Up: And Other Stories--the movie Blow-Up is loosely based on Cortázar's story) and his novel Hopscotch. Around the World in Eighty Days is an unusual book, a collection of short non-fiction pieces, reviews, essays, etc., that is considered somewhat autobiographical. I say "considered" because I've never read it. (The extent of my Cortázar is the Blow-Up collection.) One thing about it is that it is full of illustrations and collages, some by Cortázar and some chosen by him. These illustrations intrigued Hagood and inspired this exhibit, Cronopios. Hagood and his collaborator in this project, painter Seth Alverson, describe the genesis in this brief dialogue:

Seth- Hey this book has really cool pictures in it.
Lane- Yeah, it’s a good book. That’s why I bought it, idiot.
S- Wouldn’t it be neat if I picked my favorite pictures out of the book and painted them, and you picked your favorite pictures out of the book and painted them, and I didn’t know which ones you picked, and you didn’t know which ones I picked? Then we would see how much we have in common. It would be a fun surprise at the end!

L- That sounds like a good time. I like little paintings.
S- I like little paintings too. How many pictures should we paint?
L- I dunno. Like 15?
S- Sure, that’s enough. 

A "cronopio" is a type of character in Cortázar's stories of the 60s. In this exhibit, Hagood and Alverson claim to be cronopios. Cortázar described cronopios like so:

When cronopios will travel, the hotels are full, the trains have already left, it's raining buckets, and taxis do not want to take them or charge them high prices. The cronopios not discouraged because they firmly believe that these things happen to everyone, and at bedtime they say to each other: "The beautiful city, the beautiful city." And dream all night of the city's fantastic parties to which they have been invited. The next day they rise thrilled, and that's how cronopios travel. [from "Historias de Cronopios y de Famas" by Julio Cortázar, 1962, translated by Google with some help from me.]

A friend of mine recently wrote "One thing about no one reading anymore is I'm somehow more okay with people not reading anything than I was with people reading stuff that was wrong." That he shared this aphorism on Facebook is probably meaningful. It feels as if the age of reading books is ending. That gives this show an elegiac feel. In its content and its setting, it is a celebration of bookishness, a quality diminishing in the modern world.



To see the paintings, one must mimic an activity of browsing in a bookstore. This activity is less adventurous than being a flâneur or walking in a Situationist dérive, but it's related to them. You wander the shelves--so expansive and maze-like at Kaboom--looking for the paintings, but also seeing the spines of innumerable books that you will never read. But, if you are a bookworm, you also know that you will eventually read some of them.



And sometimes you see where Hagood and Alverson have painted their own versions of the same image. Their choices are different for the most part, just as any two readers reading the same book have a different understanding of the book. This was something that Barthes theorized about, and which Borges discussed in a much pithier way. Given the number of potential readers for a number of potential books, meanings multiply explosively. A bookstore is a symbol for infinity.



Bookstores are hangouts for anti-social nerds, for people who would rather read than live. This is what we bookworms sometimes believe about ourselves. But going to Kaboom affords us the chance to speak with someone who is a priest or shaman to our class--the bookstore owner. Kaboom is owned by John and Dee Dillman. They prepared a veritable feast for Cronopios, served out on the back patio of Kaboom.



And John Dillman won't let me leave without telling me what he is reading and asking about what I am reading (biographies of Harold Ickes and Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, respectively). He's the one who told me that Donald Barthelme was great but that his brothers are terrible. I don't totally agree, but as I looked at this show, I thought about Donald Barthelme. Like Cortázar, he favored the short story, and like Cortázar, he occasionally made texts sprinkled with his own illustrations and collages.



Dillman was inspired by Hagood and Alverson and Cortázar. So he drew the following image on the street in front of Kaboom.



An enormous hopscotch court. A beautiful homage to the ultimate cronopio, Julio Cortázar.