Pan Recommends for the week of February 7 to February 13

Robert Boyd with Dean Liscum

It's Mardi Gras time and there will be partying. Or alternatively, you can discuss public art or go on a long walk or look at a few paintings. It's all cool.

THURSDAY

Slide Jam: Sally Frater and Kimberli Gant at the CAMH, 6:30 pm. It's usually artists who show the slides at CAMH's slide jams, but this time they've handed the projector over to curators to talk about what it is that they do.


Marcelyn McNeil, Crudely Drawn Mimic, Oil on Canvas, 58"x60", 2013

Howard Sherman: Artist's Picks featuring Michael Guidry, Geoff Hippenstiel, Marcelyn McNeil, Tudor Mitroi, Robert Ruello, Howard Sherman, and Shane Tolbert at the Alliance Gallery- Houston Arts Alliance at 5:30 pm through March 26. An artist (with an ego and an opinion and not afraid to sling either) picks other artists to exhibit.



Rebecca Hamm, Ski Hut, watercolor on paper

Toward Substance:Paintings by Rebecca Hamm and Cary Reeder at the O'Kane Gallery, 6 pm, runs through March 14. Rebecca Hamm paints dense underbrush and Cary Reeder paints Charles Sheeler-esque images of cottages--sounds like an interesting combination.

FRIDAY


One of the pieces in Judged and Juried

Judged & Juried with guest juror Alyssa Monks at East End Studio Gallery at 6 pm. Featuring work by Adrienne Wong, Anat Ronen, Angela Obenhaus, Antonio Torres, Aron Williams, Blue OneThirty, Christian Perkins, Claire Richards, Dawn Thomas McKelvy, Diane Gelman, Ellen Hart, Jonathon Lowe, Kevin Peterson, Lacey Crawford, Leslie Roades, Lisa Comperry, Mario Casas, Mark Chen, Marky Dewhirst, Maryann Lucas, Melinda Patrick, Mic McAllister, Rona Lesser, Sacha Lazarre, Saida Fagala, Sam Li, Sarah Cloutier-Houston, Spartaco Margioni, Tatiana Escallon, Tim Walker, Will Brooks. This show seems a bit overwhelming on the face of it--an East Side "Big Show". Look out Lawndale!

SATURDAY


Mac Whitney, Houston, 1982 (in Stude Park)

Public Art and Its Impact Within Houston featuring panelists Michael Guidry (University of Houston), Jimmy Castillo (Houston Arts Alliance), and Cynthia Alvarado (Midtown Management District) and moderated by Paul Middendorf at Gallery Sonja Roesch, 2pm-3pm. Where does Houston rank in terms of public art? And who green-lighted those Jaume Plensa sculptures on Alan Parkway? All will be revealed.

El Rincon Social Music Night at the Art League featuring Ryan Lee Hansson, Lisa Marie Hunter, Josiah Gabriel and Fernando Ramirez at 8 pm. This is interesting not just because of what it is but because it represents a trend I've been noticing recently in Houston--that art exhibits are having continuous related events throughout the course of the show. We saw that with STACKS at the Art League and with Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at CAMH, and we're seeing it now with Tony Feher: Free Fall at Diverse Works. Anyway, go to the Art League early to get warmed up, then head on over to...


Poster by Sebastian Forray

Otis Ike and The Joanna Gallery Present:MARDI GRAS - An Epiphany of Anal Beads with the World Famous CHRISTEENE!!!  at Numbers, 9 pm til 2 am. Promises to feature Human King cakes! Tranny floats! An unmarried gay Tree! Bears! Cubs! Moms! Glory Holes! Shims! Hymns! Kings! Queens! Beads! Altar boy bathroom attendants! Enron! Elrond! & A Barbara Bush invitation to move to HOUSTON!!!

SUNDAY


Carrie Schneider and Alex Tu will apparently be wearing hazmat suits on Sunday

The Human Tour with Carrie Schneider and Alex Tu, 11 am starting at Natachee's in Main. This is the first of 10 walks to be conducted by Schneider and Tu along the path of the Human Tour, an enormous art project originally created by Michael Galbreth back in 1987. The piece was a map of certain Houston streets that formed a crude outline of a human figure.


Michael Galbreth, The Human Tour, 1987

Pan Recommends for the week of November 15 to November 21

Robert Boyd

Lots of interesting shows, including some at highly unusual venues. But why did everybody schedule their openings for Friday? Planning for gallery hopping this Friday will require some serious effort!

FRIDAY

Sojourner at the Menil Collection Bookstore at 5 pm (on view through January 15). I love the notion that the Menil is such a font of art that even the bookstore has art exhibits. This one, on the theme of travel, is curated by Anne Regan and features art by Libby Black, Alika Cooper, Ryan De La Hoz , Rachel Foster , Bryson Gill , HellaCrisis , Isaac T. Lin , Gaelan McKeown-Hickel , Casey Watson and Travis Wyche.

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the CAMH at 6 pm (on view through February 15). Features Derrick Adams, Terry Adkins, Papo Colo, Jamal Cyrus, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Theaster Gates, Zachary Fabri, Sherman Fleming, Coco Fusco, Girl [Chitra Ganesh + Simone Leigh], David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lyle Ashton Harris, Maren Hassinger, Wayne Hodge, Satch Hoyt, Ulysses S. Jenkins, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Kalup Linzy, Dave McKenzie, Jayson Musson aka Hennessy Youngman, Senga Nengudi, Tameka Norris, Lorraine O’Grady, Clifford Owens, Benjamin Patterson, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Rammellzee, Sur Rodney (Sur), Jacolby Satterwhite, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Danny Tisdale, and Carrie Mae Weems. And on opening night, there are two performances starting at 7:30: "The Last Trumpet" by Terry Adkins and "Costuming the Body with Nothing" by PopeL, as well as performances Saturday and throughout the period of the show.

Shane Tolbert: Talk of Montauk at Bill's Junk, 6 pm (on view through December 22). Shane Tolbert spent his summer vacation residency at Montauk, and the paintings on view at Bill's Junk were the result. Come out and see them and pretend you spent your summer in an idyllic seashore setting painting...

Stacks curated by Robert Pruitt at the Art League, 6 pm (on view through January 14). This isn't just a show--it's a series of residencies that will feature performances and installations. The participating artists are Jamal Cyrus, Nathaniel Donnett, Autumn Knight, Phillip Pyle II, and M'kina Tapscott, along with writer Garry Reece and on opening night, poet Douglas Kearney. Opening night will feature the destruction of racist memorabilia donated by the audience, so if any of you have any pickaninny dolls that you are, you know, slightly embarrassed to own, bring it to the Art League Friday.

Franklin Evans: "houstontohouston" at Diverse Works, at 6 pm (on view through January 5). I don't know much about this artist and the show description makes it sound like a hi-brow version of Hoarders, but it's the first official exhibit at the new Diverse Works, and that's pretty exciting!
Wax at Cardoza Fine Art, 7 pm with a performance by V.R.S. and Screwed Anthologies sometime after 9 pm. This show features the work of Bret Shirley, Erin Joyce, and Lauren Moya Ford. Some of Houston's wildest shows are at this funky loft gallery, so you shouldn't miss this one. 

SATURDAY

Cronopios by Seth Alverson and Lane Hagood at Kaboom! at 6 pm. Two of Houston's finest painters read Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortázar and decided to make paintings of all the illustrations in the book. Naturally, they chose a bookstore--the always excellent Kaboom!--to display them.

French Neon and Cody Ledvina at galleryHOMELAND at 6 pm (through December 30). Skydive and galleryHOMELAND are teaming up for this duel exhibit. French Neon is a collective consisting of Daniel Bainbridge, Zachary Bruder, Donald Cameron, Leah Dixon, Erin Lee Jones,David Teng Olsen, Kassie Teng, Adrian Tone, Lauren Seidan, and Mark Sengbusch. Cody Ledvina will be presenting a new video called "Dad Town is an HJ Hub." French Neon will also be presenting an artists' talk at 1 pm at Skydive.

Dennis Harper's Show of Shows

by Robert Boyd



I wanted to lead off with this statement. Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike artists' statements? If you had read this prior to making a decision about whether to go to the Joanna and see this thing, you'd stay home and watch reruns. The problem with artists' statements is that the make even really exciting art sound boring. Fortunately, I didn't read this statement until I got to the Joanna, so I was already committed.

So let me try to give you a flavor of the show--Dennis Harper invited his friends to come together for a one-night only evening of performance on October 22 at The Joanna. The structure was like an evening of broadcast TV, where you might have an Entertainment Tonight-like program followed by some comedy then by a game show, etc. Now The Joanna is a pretty bad place to see performance--it's a house, so the largest room is the relatively small living room. To get around this problem, Harper installed a closed circuit TV system. I think there were four screens in all--two in interior rooms, one on a walled-in porch, and one outside in the back yard. This way, everyone could see the performances. But Harper went an extra step--he created a fake TV studio out of paper--giant paper cameras, lights, microphones, etc. So while he had, in effect, a real TV studio (with tiny modern cameras feeding into Harper's computer, from which he directed the scene and controlled what was seen on the closed circuit monitors), on top of that he had layered a fake 1960s era TV studio.



Dennis Harper, paper microphone at iPageant, paper and PVC, 2011



Dennis Harper, fake TV studio for iPageant, mixed media, 2011

That's sculptor Woody Golden above operating one of the real cameras as various Houston art figures take their places for a game of What's My Line. The camera to the left is made of paper.



Dennis Harper, directing iPageant, 2011



Tina McPherson conducting red-carpet interviews

Tina McPherson, whose day job supervisor of the William R. Jenkins Art and Architecture Library at U.H., is also a local arts scenester. (Lots of local scenesters have day jobs that are tangentially related, at best, to their position within the local art scene.) She conducted interviews of arriving guests (pretty much anyone who came through) similar to those red-carpet interviews one might see on awards shows or celebrity-oriented shows. I've always thought it was weird how the backdrop to these interviews would be wallpaper printed with copies of corporate and/or product logos. iPageant parodied this tendency by putting up Tyvek, the super-strong water-proof paper that home builders use to cover the wooden framing of modern houses. Tyvek has its logo printed in a regular pattern, making Tyvek paper perfect for a red-carpet backdrop. McPherson treated everyone who came in as if they were a celebrity, whose answers to her repetitious questions were actually worth hearing. This went out live on the closed-circuit feed. Lots of people tried to fluster McPherson by giving outrageous answers to her questions, but she never broke character as far as I saw.

Then in the room to the left of the entryway, Herbert Melichar was taking headshot photos of everyone who walked in. He had lights set up and a black background. The photos were dramatic. He put them up in a gallery on his Facebook page and his Flickr page (whichever you prefer).



Nancy Douthey, iPageant perfomance on closed circuit TV

Next up was Nancy Douthey. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this performance was very much based on acting. Douthey was an old-fashioned telephone operator (a job rendered obsolete by technology). You've seen such operators in movies and on TV--they would be sitting before a bank of lights and sockets, and their job was to connect specific callers with specific receivers. Douthey uses practice to engage in a series of one sided conversations. It's not totally clear whether each conversation was meant to be a different person, or if it was the same person, whose personality changed depending on with whom she was speaking. The latter scenario was how I interpreted it, and I saw it as being about how our identity depends so much on other people--and other circumstances. We are not the same person when we are talking to our mother as opposed to when we are talking to our lover.


excerpt from Nancy Douthey's iPageant performance

Then it was time for the main event. both the fake television studio and the real one were set up in the Joanna's living room. A set for a game show was there with seats for four panelists, one host, and one contestant. This was a recreation of What's My Line, which was a weekly prime time game show from 1950 to 1967, and a daily syndicated show from 1967 to 1975. The idea behind the show is that the panelists, who wore blindfolds, would have to guess who the guest was based on a series of yes or no questions. If they failed to guess within a certain number of questions, the guest won (I'm assuming the guest, who was a celebrity, was playing on behalf of someone).



Two of the What's My Line panelists, Dennis Nance and Shane Tolbert

The host was played by Mat Wolf. The guests were Jenny Schlief, Dennis Nance, Shane Tolbert and Lane Hagood. The look was "natty."



It started off a little awkwardly, but as they got into the act, the players got better and better.



The first mystery guest was Blaffer director Claudia Schmuckli. It didn't take long for the panelists to guess who she was. The next contestant was a twist--two people, Cody Ledvina and Brian Rod, the guys behind The Joanna. The panelists never guessed who they were because of their confusing, contradictory answers.

Between each act, the closed circuit TV camera showed this sign.



I left after the "What's My Line" act (which I kind of wish could have gone on longer--how often do you say that about performance art, eh?), and because of this I missed some other things that apparently happened later (to go by the photographic evidence here).

What I didn't quite understand was what all this had to do with social networking. There were a few obvious references (the "like" sign in the place of an "applause" sign), but it seemed to have more to do with television and our shared history of television than anything. But on a little bit of signage showing all of Harper's collaborators, we do get an idea of the interconnectedness of one part of Houston's art scene.




I thought it was fantastic fun, and the format seems replicable. If Harper wanted to host additional performance nights, the fake TV studio with closed circuit monitors would be a good way to structure it. I'd go see them.