You! Yes, you! You can be an art collector!

Robert Boyd

When we think about art collectors, we are likely to think about people like Eli Broad.


Eli Broad (right)

People who, unlike me and probably you, are very rich. Not that I have anything against rich people. The Menils were also loaded, and we Houstonians benefit from their willingness to share their art collection and to fund the Menil Foundation. (Or maybe when we think about collectors, we think about people like the Vogels, who armed with a good eye and a very tight budget managed to gather a huge, significant collection of contemporary art.) But there is something discouraging when one reads about Christie's auctioning off $745 million worth of art (at an average of $11 million for each piece sold). Or when you stroll through the Frieze art fair. It makes you feel that collecting art is only for the very rich.

But you don't have to be as rich as Eli Broad or as fanatical as the Vogels to acquire art. In the past two months, without exactly intending to, I have acquired 16 pieces of art. They are pieces by long established Houston artists as well as very young local artists. Pieces from Houston, from other parts of Texas, from around the country and even one from France. They are sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints. The ways I got them varied, but what's relevant here is that they were all pretty inexpensive while also being work that really interested and appealed to me.

Earl Staley is a long-time Houston painter and teacher. He came to Houston in the 60s to teach painting at Rice University, had a great deal of success as a painter in the 70s and 80s, moved away for a while and now is back, still teaching, still painting. He went to live at the American Academy in Rome for a couple of months last year, and came back with lots of ideas for new paintings.


Earl Staley, Pavement 8, 2014, acrylic, 22 x 31 inches

Staley had an open studio event and showed some of these new paintings, based on pavement designs in Rome. In addition to his paintings, he also had a slew of new watercolors (in addition to his extensive selection of older pieces). I found this beautiful Grotesquery 2 from his Rome watercolors.


Earl Staley, Grotesquery 2, 2013, watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 inches

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #1: Buy directly from the artist. When you can avoid a middle-man, you save money.

(Nothing against galleries, as you will see below. Galleries are wonderful institutions --they take a lot of risks to support artists and act almost like free museums for the average lookie-loo like me. I love art galleries.)

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #2: Works on paper are often less expensive than larger works. Drawings and water-colors can make accessible the work of an artist whose paintings, sculptures, installations, etc.,  might be out of reach.

That's how I was able to afford a piece by Mark Allen that I got from Front Gallery. Mark Allen runs the Machine Project, which I'll let him explain:


Machine Project Documentary Portrait by David Fenster from machine project on Vimeo.

Allen was also a Core fellow back in 1993 to 1995. He came to Houston recently with two shows--one a bunch of eye-popping posters for various Machine Project events at the Brandon.


Machine Project posters


Machine Project poster

His show at Front Gallery was quite different--a bunch of little drawings that I would characterize as almost cute. I liked the little furry fellow below, so I bought it.

 
Mark Allen, One Friend, color pencil on paper, 2013

BlueOrange gallery was approached by the family of the late Charlie Carper about selling some of his art collection. Disposing of art for estates is a common practice for art galleries. In this case, Carper had collected a lot of silkscreen prints by the Hancock Brothers, and his estate was selling them to benefit ArtBridge, a local non-profit organization that provides opportunities for homeless children to make art.

I didn't know Charlie Carper all that well, but we were Facebook friends and chatted occasionally when we ran into one another at openings. I was sorry to hear that he had died early last year. But I'm glad that his collection was being used to help fund a really great cause. So I bought a print.

 
John Hancock, Prince Randian, screen print 5/10, 16 x 20 inches

Prince Randian was a famous sideshow freak who appeared in the movie Freaks. I wonder if by portraying him in blackface, John Hancock is suggesting that freakshows were to people with disabilities what minstrelsy was to African-Americans. Or maybe he was just being provocative.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #3: Prints/multiples are cheaper than unique items, on average. And a lot of really good artists make limited edition prints.

While I was at BlueOrange, I saw some other work, including an amazing installation, by Brock Caron, a young artist (born 1987, according to Facebook) from Austin. He works in a style that I would call streetwise redneck lo-brow. Imagine the kind of art Southern Culture on the Skids would do if they were visual artists and about 20 years younger.

 
Brock Caron installation (photo courtesy of BlueOrange Gallery)

This is Brock Caron's installation in a big gallery space. In BlueOrange's tiny gallery, it is so large it takes up an entire room with not enough extra space to step back and take a photo.

I liked Caron's art a lot, and it was priced to move. So I got a piece called Mama Tried (named after the classic Merle Haggard song, natch).

 
Brock Caron, Mama Tried, 2014, mixed media on panel, 12 x 16.5 inches

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #4: Buy art by young, emerging artists. Nothing against art by older artists, obviously. But the more established an artist is, on average, the more expensive the work.

The corollary to this is that you may end up buying a lot of work by artists who go on too have not much of a career. But if you want to buy work by artists who have established careers and who have major gallery representation and museum shows and monographs, etc., be prepared to pay a large premium for the privilege. Buying art early in someone's career is more of a "risk," but only if you look at it in terms of a financial investment. If you look at it in terms of acquiring art because you like it, you've taken on no risk at all. I have no idea what the future holds for Brock Caron. It would be cool if 15 years from now I could say, "Yeah, I bought a Brock Caron before he got famous." But that's not why I got it.

You wouldn't think so, but selling art at auction to benefit non-profits is controversial. For one thing, if you give $500 to a non-profit, you can deduct that from your income for tax purposes, but if you give a $500 painting you made, you can only deduct the cost of the materials. For another thing, people often go to these auctions looking for bargains, which may depress the market price for an artist's work. I'm not sure that there is an easy solution for the former issue, but for the latter, there are ways around it. For example, the Box 13 silent auction allows the donors (i.e., artists) to set minimum bids on their work. Diverse Works dispenses with individual bidding all together--you just buy an opportunity to be in a raffle and then buy raffle tickets. When your number is chosen, you get to choose any of the artwork you want, unless it has already been chosen by someone else. Diverse Works also has a regulation size, 7 by 9 inches. These are tiny pieces that probably won't be mistaken for an artist's main work.

I attended both of these fund raisers and walked away with several pieces. Here's what I got at Box 13's Empty Box fundraiser.

 
Kathryn Kelley and Anila Agha, Cohesive Discord (1 of 2), 2008, tires, dyed papers and thread 

This is my second Kathy Kelley piece I've gotten from Box 13. She is an artist whose fascinating work I have been following for quite a while.


Paul Middendorf, Jog My Memory Again, ax, wood

Artist/curator Paul Middendorf is also someone whose practice I've followed for a while now, mostly through his curatorial activities.


Maggie Fuller, The Heart with No Companion, 2011, porcelain

On the other hand, I know nothing about Maggie Fuller and can't even find much about her online, except that she is a Galveston artist. But as soon as I saw this disturbing but beautiful creature, I knew I wanted it!


Dennis Harper, Offering, 2013, metal, fabric and wood

Dennis Harper is a former underground cartoonist and current sculptor, now living in Austin. I've written about his work before, included a large sculpture of his in a show I curated, and finally ended up with another sculpture of his at last year's Box 13 fundraiser. I was happy to get this small but elegant object.


Guillaume Gelot, Louise Bourgeois, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 8 x 6 inches

I was critical of Guillaume Gelot's "panty shot" paintings in a recent review, but I also liked them (for all the wrong reasons). This one seems especially offensive while being simultaneously cute, sexy and lovable. I couldn't resist. Damn you, Gelot! (Check out that insane thigh gap!)


Hillaree Hamblin, A Glimmer & a Rustle, 2013, acrylic and water-based oil on panel, 14 x 11 inches

Hillaree Hamblin was part of a group show at Gallery HOMELAND! that was the subject of an unusually controversial Glasstire review. I liked her work in that show and I liked this piece here.

And here's what I got at Diverse Work's Luck of the Draw fundraiser.


David Reed, Color Study #32, 9 x 7 inches

David Reed is a writer/painter from New York. Looking at his website, I realized I had seen his paintings before and liked them, but had forgotten his name! Choosing this work at the Luck of the Draw was a happy coincidence.


K.M. Mullins, DWI, 7 x 9 inches

Kevin Mullins is an artist based in Kansas City. Beyond that I know nothing, except that I was hypnotized by this pattern. It would be nice to stare at while listening to György Ligeti's "Volumina" on headphones real loud.


Ryan S. Humphrey, untitled, 7 x 9 inches

I saw a Ryan Humphrey show in New York last year and it made me laugh (which I think was the intent). It's hard to look at watercolors of breaking waves and not think of Raymond Pettibon, which may be what Humphrey wants.


Tatiana Istomina, Alissa Blumenthal, untitled, date unknown, 9 x 7 inches

Tatiana Istomina was another Core fellow whose studio I visited last year.The title of this piece indicates that it is meant to be seen as the work of her fictional alter-ego, Alissa Blumenthal, a Russian modernist who immigrated to the US in 1925.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #5: Buy art at fundraisers for non-profits (particularly those that are run on a ethical basis vis-a-vis the participating artists).

Now buying this much work in a short period of time is not something I planned to do. In all these cases, relatively inexpensive artwork became available more or less by chance. It wasn't enough that the opportunity was there, though--I had to grab it.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #6: Be prepared to acquire art on a moment's notice because you never know when the opportunity will arise.

Stéphane Blanquet painting

That's what happened when I went up to New York earlier in May to check out the big art fairs. I never go to these things with the intent to buy art because 99.9% of it is out of my league. (I usually get some books at DAP and Printed Matter, who exhibit at Frieze and NADA respectively. And this year Raw Vision exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair; I got two books and the latest issue of Raw Vision there.) But as I mentioned in this post, I happened on a Stéphane Blanquet painting that was within my price range. I wasn't expecting it and indeed hesitated at first. I left the Fuman Art booth and walked around the fair looking at other stuff, but ultimately I returned and pulled the trigger. The opportunity presented itself and I took it.

 
H.J. Bott's studio on July 1, 1979 (photo by H.J. Bott)

The craziest art acquisition this past month was But Still First, a piece made of wood and cast aluminum by H.J. Bott in 1966. Bott had a massive studio space that had morphed over the years into a cluttered storage space.

 
H.J. Bott's former studio on April 6, 2014 (photo by H.J. Bott)

But the land under the enormous metal shed became too valuable to remain a warehouse space, and Bott had to move years of accumulated stuff out. Some he carefully put into climate controlled storage. Some was certainly going to be thrown away. But there was some stuff he was giving away, so he invited a group of us to come over and take what we wanted.


 
A public comment on the building's future (photo by H.J. Bott)


H.J. Bott and But Still First


H.J. Bott, But Still First, 1966, sand-cast aluminum, wood, 14 3/4 x 22 inches

That's how I got this early Bott, created long before he came up with his DoV system. It obviously comments on the then current space race and the unspoken violence that lay behind it. (The space race, like much of the Cold War, was war by other means.) I feel extremely privileged and grateful to have it. And that leads me to my final tip.

• COLLECTING ON A BUDGET TIP #7: Become friends with someone who may someday, when you least expect it, give you a piece of art for free.

A corollary to that one is that you have to pay it forward. Buy art and give art to the people you love.

For these 16 pieces of art, I paid a total of $3264, which is by no means a trivial amount of money. But it comes out to a mere $204 each, which is pretty damn affordable. You don't have to be Eli Broad. You, too, can collect art.

Pan Recommends for the week of April 4 to April 10

Dean Liscum and Robert Boyd

There is a hell of a lot of interesting, diverse art events and exhibits happening in town--way more than what we have listed here.  Check Glasstire for a much more complete listing. It's exciting but also a bit depressing that it is getting hard to actually see everything in Houston. Here are a few things to see this weekend.

THURSDAY


This isn't the sculpture Jonathan Clark is unveiling Thursday night--but it's similar!

Jonathan Clark at Skyline Art Services, 5 pm. Clark's sculpture is just exhilarating like a high school stage band with a groove. Plus, music, food, drinks and art featuring the Kashmere Stage Band!

FRIDAY

8th Annual Frida Festival 2013 at the East End Studio Gallery, 6–10 pm.  With a 

an adult Frida look-alike contest Friday and a kids Frida look-alike contest Saturday afternoon.

We have no idea who these people are!

Liz Magic Laser: Tell Me What You Want To Hear at Diverseworks, 7-9 pm. Art that explores interview techniques? We may try these out on some unsuspecting artists.


Alissa Blumenthal courtesy of Tatiana Istomina

Alissa Blumenthal: A small retrospective at Art Palace, 6–8 p.m. The fictional artist gets a non-fictional gallery exhibit.


Matt Messinger, Dancers, 2013

Matt Messinger: New Paintings at Devin Borden Gallery, 6–8 p.m. The low-key Houston artist gets a well-deserved gallery show.

SATURDAY



"The Challenging Phenomenon of Jermayne MacAgy," lecture by Chelby King at William Reaves Fine Art, 2 pm. The first professional director of the CAA (which later became the CAMH), MacAgy is a key figure in Houston's art history. William Reaves Fine Art is currently showing a group show of Houston Modernist painters from the 50s and 60s (the MacAgy years).


Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman

Eric Fischl: Cast & Drawn at McClain Gallery, 2-4 p.m. The figure in bronze, glass and watercolor,. Just so you can say, "Yeah, I saw that."



Earl Staley: The Speed of Life at New Gallery/Thom Andriola at 6–8 p.m. Professor Art returns with a show of new work. 

Illustrate the End: The Art of Vincent Fink at El Rincón Social,  8 pm – 12 am. Because the folks at El Rincon always keep it interesting.

In the Studio with Alissa Blumenthal

Robert Boyd



After I discussed some of her paintings from the Core program show, I got an invite from Tatiana Istomina to visit her study where she produces paintings by "Alissa Blumenthal." I had never visited a Core studio, so I was quite eager. Long and thin, it seemed functional and less grungy than some studios I've seen. I guess the glass bricks are handy if you like to work with natural light. We settled in to talk as I tried to take it all in. I'm not a polite interlocutor when I'm surrounded by art--my eyes keep wandering. And this is especially true in an environment full of work like this that I find fascinating.



I didn't turn on the recorder on my phone--I wanted the conversation to be natural and unforced. (I also hate transcribing.) So this is all from my own imperfect memory. I wanted to discuss Alissa Blumenthal with Istomina. Blumenthal is the fictional painter to whom Istomina credits her work. Blumenthal is a painter who was born in Russia in 1899, studied with Malevich, immigrated to the U.S. in 1925, and lived a long, uneventful life in New York until her death in 1995, achieving very modest recognition for her art only occasionally, and dying completely unknown as an artist.



My main question was why create this alter-ego? Why not just do the paintings and claim them as your own? A curator who visited Istomina recently inadvertently answered that question. Looking around Istomina's studied, she declared "Painting is dead." "Blumenthal" shifts the time frame back to a period when painting was most certainly not dead--far from it.



But Istomina told me an interesting thing. She said that when she did the first Blumenthal paintings, she hadn't created Blumenthal yet. Blumenthal the fictional character was only a month old. What this suggests is that Istomina just wanted to do some abstract paintings--indeed, maybe felt compelled to do them--with no theoretical apparatus justifying their existence. She says that while she was doing them, she was so deep into them that such thoughts were banished. Jackson Pollack wrote,"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing." The problem is, what happens when you are no longer "in the painting"? Istomina would move from the trance-like state of total engagement to self-doubt--is this just a piece of merchandise for sale? Does it have any other meaning? Blumenthal was a way to deal with those questions once she finished the work.



Of course, once you start down that road, Blumenthal takes of life of her own as Istomina adds new details to her biography. The paintings came first, but another approach would have been to make up a fictional painter, give her a biography, then paint paintings that seem to fit who she was. The paintings would then be, in a sense, illustrations for the biography of that painter. That is not what Istomina wants to do, but I wonder if it will be possible to avoid it. She created Blumenthal so she wouldn't have to think about the issues of what it means to be a painter in 2013. But now, can she paint without thinking about being a painter in 1940? 1924? Etc.?



I think so far, she has been able to resist becoming an illustrator of Blumenthal's life. For one thing, these paintings don't resemble paintings from Blumenthal's era. Someone for whom the creation of the fictional painter is the main thing wouldn't necessarily come up with such ahistoric paintings. Blumenthal is not just a painter of the 20s or the 40s, she is a highly eccentric painter from that period, doing work quite unlike her peers. That suggests a reason why her work was neglected--it didn't fit in with the narrative that was forming about modern art at that time. Another reasons for its neglect would be her sex. (One of the most exciting developments in recent decades has been the rediscovery of many women painters whose work was somewhat overlooked in their time--for instance, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010. I was pleasantly surpirsed to see a large piece by Chryssa hung at the Menil this weekend.)



We discussed many other things that afternoon--Yves Klien, Thomas McEvilley, curve-fitting, etc. I tried to find a link between her training as a geophysicist (she has a PhD in the discipline from Yale) and her art, but she mostly shot this down. It was while she was getting her PhD that she became interested in art--by taking art classes at Yale. I am still astonished that someone would spend so much time and effort reaching the pinnacle of a notoriously difficult area of study (geophysics is geology with huge extra dollops of math) only to change courses so drastically. It's a powerful statement about how important art must be to Istomina.



On April 5, an exhibit, Alissa Blumenthal: A small retrospective, opens at Art Palace. I anticipate that it will be excellent.

Jolly Good Core Fellows

Robert Boyd

The annual Core exhibit is always a bit incoherent. After all, the only thing that links these artists is that they happen to be in the same residency program at the same time. But one can say that except for work by one artist, all of the pieces in this exhibit are non-paintings. And even the artist who paints does so somewhat apologetically, by inventing a much older alter-ego to be the putative author of the paintings. So without curatorial oversight, these disparate artists nonetheless managed to create create a show that once again declares the death of painting.


Tatiana Istomina, Alissa Blumenthal, "Small Abstractions," early 1950s, 2012, oil on canvas

Even Tatiana Istomina's oil paintings speak to that. The work was described like this in the press release for the exhibit:

The three abstract paintings in the show are attributed to Alissa Blumenthal, a little-known American artist of the 20th century. Born in Russia in 1897, she studied art at Vitebsk Practical Art School in 1920-23 and in 1925 emigrated to the United States. Schooled in the tradition of Russian Constructivism, by the mid-1930s Alissa developed an individual style, which reflected her preoccupation with cinematography and language. Although virtually unknown until her death in 1995, Alissa Blumenthal was one of the first American painters to work with abstraction, her geometric compositions predating those of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko by more than 10 years.

Of course, Alissa Blumenthal is a fictional character, an alter-ego. Istomina describes her as a "cover," a way for her to do abstract easel painting. Because in some ways, doing abstract paintings now feels awkward and retrograde. (I write this knowing that there are many abstract painters working whose paintings I admire and who, as far as I can tell, suffer no particular angst over doing abstractions after the "demise" of Modernism. People keep on painting despite painting's many obituaries.)

This awkwardness and even coyness about abstract paintings was one of the subjects of Exile's Return by Thomas McEvilley. He basically posited that Modernism reached an ultimate crisis point in the 1960s, and painting was overthrown as the most important Western visual art form. The theories of historical progress that underlie the expansion of the West (the good--expansion of democracy, citizen rights for women and others, etc.; and the bad, slavery, colonialism, environmental degradation, totalitarian governments, etc.) worked hand in hand with the theories that underlie modernism.  As he pungently put it,

Abstract art came to seem the ultimate self-delusion of Euro-Modernism, no longer to be viewed with a reverent gaze but with a knowing smirk. Malevich's Black Square became the flag on the masthead of the slave ship, flapping sinisterly in the breeze of history. [Thomas McEvilley, The Exile's Return, p. 6, 1993]

McEvilley's problem, as for so many of us, was that he really loved paintings, including abstract paintings. So the entire book is about strategies that painters used to redeem their practice after Modernism foundered on the shoals of history (to mix up the metaphor).

This seems to be what Istomina is doing. By creating a fictional counterpart, she gives herself permission to explore Modernist abstraction without being a modernist. She doesn't have to dive into the quasi-religious sublime of the indistinct space of abstraction or color-field painting. She is one step removed. That remove could result in a "knowing smirk," a parody of the earlier forms. But I don't think that's what's happening. I think the remove allows Istomina to explore abstraction as if she were Blumenthal while remaining historically aware. These are the paintings of an artist named Blumenthal while simultaneously being the biography of an artist named Blumenthal.


Tatiana Istomina, Alissa Blumenthal, "Small Abstraction," early 1950s, 2012, oil on canvas


Tatiana Istomina, Alissa Blumenthal, "Untitled," late 1930s, 2013, oil on canvas

Istomina has another piece in the show as well--a video made from found footage from the Yalta Conference. As in her Blumenthal paintings, she creates a fiction here--through the addition of narration, the film tells the story of a person who disappeared. The video is titled Yalta:A Story of disappearance, and it can be seen on Istomina's website.

Another work that deals with art history (a favorite subject of contemporary artists) is Object with the Sound of Its Own Discourse by Anthea Behm. The object is an Amazon box addressed to Behm with a speaker hidden inside.


Anthea Behm, Object with the Sound of Its Own Discourse, 2013, cardboard Amazon box, internal speaker, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJlwwJLNZbI, pedestal

The sound the box is making is from a video on YouTube showing a protest by a group of Peruvian indigenous people against laws that would open up more of the Peruvian Amazon to mining and agriculture. The spoken part is in Spanish, which I can only understand a bit of. One can get the gist of what is happening by watching the source video itself.

The piece references Box With the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) by Robert Morris. Morris's piece is a key work of conceptual art but could also be seen as a bit of solipsistic cleverness. So perhaps Behm, by including the sound of a political protest, is trying to use conceptual strategies to engage the world instead of navel-gazing.

If so, this seems like a pretty bad way to do so. I take no position on the Peruvian protests. I don't know if the protesters in this video represent a majority of the indigenous Amazonian Peruvians, or if most indigenous people welcome increased opportunities for economic development, for example. So in terms of educating a viewer about a political situation, this is not particularly successful unless you are already know something about this situation.

In any case, I don't think Behm had anything as simple in mind as consciousness raising. If that was her purpose, she could have picked a less obscure way to present it. (After all, how many people are going to see Object with the Sound of Its Own Discourse? And of those, how many are going to follow up and watch the video? And of those, how many are going to follow that up and research the situation? And of those, how many are going to take concrete action to help affect the situation?) It may be that this piece is simply a critique of the hermetic quality of 1960s conceptualism (and minimalism and post-minimalism)--its refusal to engage the world. And certainly, engagement, participation, and collaboration are important aspects of art today, with critics rewriting the history of art through the lens of participatory art (Artificial Hells by Claire Bishop), compiling interviews exploring the various approaches to participatory art (What We Made by Tom Finkelpearl) as well as participatory art projects happening (City Council Meeting, Hear Our Houston) here in Houston. But if critiquing conceptualism's lack of engagement is what Behm is about, why make another object in order to critique Morris's object? In other words, I feel like I'm probably misreading it in some fundamental way.

But so what? It caught my attention and made me think quite a bit. I was fascinated by it on opening night, so much so that I returned the next day so I could record the sound it made (without the noise of a crowd of culture vultures drowning it out). This Amazon box induced me to watch a five minute video of a Peruvian protest in Spanish that I would certainly have never watched otherwise. And I felt like I had to make a little video (above) to properly convey the experience of the box. I put a surprising (to me) amount of time into thinking about this piece. In this regard, Object with the Sound of Its Own Discourse has to count as one of the most successful pieces in the show.

Ronny Quevedo just got his MFA last year, but he got his BFA in 2003 and has been exhibiting throughout this period. His piece in the Core exhibit is an installation in a darkened room. There are two conga drums in the room. One of them is missing the drumhead. It has a group of colored lights inside it. The other has colored lights resting on top of it. The room also has some other stuff in it, but it's hard to see what that other stuff is in the dim blinking light.


Ronny Quevedo, el hijo de la gran..., 2013, linoleum tiles, wooden studs, conga drums, 11 watt light bulbs, milk crates and strip door

The title is amusing. Quevedo leaves it to the viewer to decide how the phrase, "el hijo de la gran..." should end. The answer seems obvious. Google has a suggestion.



 "Hijo de la gran puta" is an insult in Spanish, literally "son of a big whore"--the equivalent of "son of a bitch." But I can't see any obvious connection between the title and the piece. The installation strikes me as an attempt to create an visual analogue to music--an eternal challenge for artists. (I think of the psychedelic posters of artists like Victor Moscoso and Stanley Mouse, for example.) The blinking lights, the congas--one can't help but think of salsa and meringue. (It also made me think of the "melted" conga of Los Carpinteros.)


Miguel Amat, Alter-Door (from the series Imageries of the Multitude/Multitude Imageries), used door received in exchange for a new door

Miguel Amat's pieces are continuations of the installation, Alter Door,  he did at Project Row Houses.  Apparently he traded new doors to people for their old doors and made sculptures, such as Alter-Door above. I like to imagine him walking up to a modest house with an old door, knocking on it, and offering to replace it for free. Do the residents think, is this some kind of scam? I would. So to complete this project, he has to be very persuasive. He has to convince the home-dwellers that he isn't crazy or criminal. It would seem then that the project itself involves negotiation. I think whenever art--particularly contemporary art--has contact with the general public, there is always an inherent negotiation. Contemporary art is always saying, in essence, I'm not crazy and I'm not trying to con you, even though I recognize that you may have a hard time accepting that I'm "art" as you understand it.

In any case, once Amat has the old doors, he alters them in such a way that they are unmistakably art. Alter-Door has rather dangerous-looking wedges cut out of it and reattached. In another part of the exhibit, Amat has created a sculptural group, Uprising,  of giant wedges made out of old doors.


Miguel Amat, Uprising (from the series Imageries of the Multitude/Multitude Imageries), 2013, used doors received in exchange for new doors


Miguel Amat, Uprising (from the series Imageries of the Multitude/Multitude Imageries), 2013, used doors recieved in exchange for new doors

All these wedges made of doors make me think of doorstops, which hold doors open. Amat's first challenge to receive these old doors is to convince the home-dweller to open the door. A door propped open is an optimistic image. It speaks to openness (obviously) and inclusion, to sharing and intercourse.


Anna Elise Johnson, If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it (detail), 2012-2013, center: aluminum, vinyl, plastic, projection; collages: acrylic, archival digital prints, resin

Anna Elise Johnson has made art out of images of world leaders meeting, and there seems like there may be some of that in this large installation, If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it. One of the collages, made of transparent images sandwiched within layers of clear acrylic, shows a pair of shaking hands.


Anna Elise Johnson, If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it (detail--Handshake on the right, Red Banner on the left), 2012-2013, center: aluminum, vinyl, plastic, projection; collages: acrylic, archival digital prints, resin

But the other collages seem at least in part made from well known pieces of art--Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix and The Tower of Babel by Breugel were two I could identify. Both are paintings that could relate to political leaders meeting in summits (Babel symbolizing mutual incomprehension, Liberty being a political goal), but I don't know if that is Johnson's intent.

In the center of the room is a structure with hanging sheets of plastic. Part of the sheets are transparent, while other parts are "frosted" in such a way that they are semitransparent. From either side of the room, projectors are projecting images onto the plastic sheets.


Anna Elise Johnson, If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it (detail--center structure)), 2012-2013, center: aluminum, vinyl, plastic, projection; collages: acrylic, archival digital prints, resin


Anna Elise Johnson, If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it (detail--center structure)), 2012-2013, center: aluminum, vinyl, plastic, projection; collages: acrylic, archival digital prints, resin

It seems like Johnson perhaps wanted a similar effect to the broken up transparent images in the acrylic side objects. But it doesn't really work--you couldn't make out the images being projected against the plastic at all--they just looked like two spotlights reflecting off the plastic. (In order to see the projected images, you have to ask someone to stand between the projectors and the plastic. Fortunately, I had Dean Liscum to act as my human movie screen.)

Johnson created a related project called Congress Applauding as part of Main Street Projects, a series of window installations in a building at 3700 Main. But in that piece, the technical issues were resolved better--the projected image on the glass was hazy but visible.

The pieces speak about political processes (summits, addresses to Congress, etc.) that are at least somewhat staged. The work of politics is done in closed rooms. But what Johnson is saying about these bits of political theater is not clear. The fact that the elements are simultaneously transparent and difficult to read may be important.


Madsen Minax, Built From Memory (Like Some Other Men), 2013, 8 channel video and audio recording

Built From Memory (Like Some Other Men) by Madsen Minax consisted of a pile of big old televisions each showing a short, repeating image of what looked like a drag show. Each screen shows a portion of the show repeating a brief bit, some loops of only a few seconds. There wasn't much there there in this piece. It felt like it maybe a little slice of something bigger. This feeling is amplified when one looks at the projects on Minax's website--they seem so much more complete and accomplished than Built From Memory (Like Some Other Men), which in comparison feels very tentative.


video by Jang Soon Im

Jang Soon Im has a show up right now at the Joanna. He had one piece in the Core exhibit, and like Madsen Minax's, it felt a bit incomplete. However, this video was so visually overwhelming that I can't complain. It consisted of two rectangular sides, each a different, constantly changing color. Within each rectangle were silhouettes that appeared to come from Asian war epics--archers, swordsmen, etc. The fast cuts and changing colors gave the piece a somewhat stroboscopic effect. In terms of sheer visual overload, it was extremely satisfying.


Senalka McDonald, As a Real One, 2012, digital chromogenic print

Senalka McDonald does some freaky photography and video--look at her website for some examples. As a Real One seems like an exception to her usual work--if not a new direction. It appears to be the ghostly remnant of an image of someone running. As a composition, it is elegant and spare. The panel on the left barely has any visible pigment at all. I find it a haunting image--and kind of the visual opposite of Jang Soon Im.