Art That Moved Me in 2016

Robert Boyd

I included three art things that I saw in 2016 in Houston and vicinity in Glasstire's "Best of 2016" list. To narrow it down to those three, I had to start from a larger list. It was hard to choose the final three--indeed, my top three changed several times.

In the Glasstire list, I included

Various works by JooYoung Choi in various Houston venues
Pat Palermo's Galveston Drawing Diary by Pat Palermo
The Color of Being/ El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood (1918-2000) at the Art Museum of South Texas

The Glasstire list has a lot of good exhibits that made my long list. I don't want to repeat their work, so here is a brief list of events I liked that Glasstire included in their long list:
Andy Campbell, PoMo Houston Bus Tour
Jamal Cyrus, Untitled, 2010 
Joey Fauerso, A Soft Opening at David Shelton, Houston
As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither, The Menil Collection

And here are the some more that I liked that did not make the Glasstire list:

Holy Barbarians: Beat Culture on the West Coast at the Menil featuring John Altoon, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Edward Keinholz.

Part of the reason I was so intrigued by this inventory exhibit was because I recently read Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association by Anastasia Aukeman. This book dealt with most of the artists in the exhibit--a group of San Francisco artists who mostly lived in the same apartment building, along with beat poet Michael McClure. We don't think of the beat movement has having a visual arts component mainly because for a long time, artists like Jay DeFeo and George Herms were ignored by art history. They were out of the mainstream art-historical narrative that was built up in the 60s and 70s, plus they didn't particularly want to be lumped into the beat category. Connor actively resisted it because in his view, "beat" had become a derogatory term used by the mass media to exploit their thing. Furthermore, few of these artists tried very hard to get noticed. They didn't care about being in museums or high-end galleries. All the galleries in San Francisco where they showed their work were small-scale artist-run spaces that lasted a few years at most then disappeared.


George Herms, Greet the Circus with a Smile, 1961,  mannequin torso, salvaged wood, feathers, tar, cement, cloth, plant material, paint, crayon, ink, paper, photographs, metal, plastic, glass, cord, mirror, electrical light fixture, and phonograph tone-arm, 68 × 28 1/2 × 20 in.

The odd men out in this collection are Kienholz--who really was a beatnik of sorts but much more ambitious than DeFeo or Berman--and Altoon, who lived like a beatnik but never was, as far as I can determine, associated with the movement.

In addition to showing a bunch of extremely choice artworks, it also shows several issues of Wallace Berman's early poetry and art publication Semina. Each issue was printed with letterpress on unbound slips of paper. It was truly a 'zine avant la lettre. 

The exhibit will be up until March 12, 2017.


Jay DeFeo, Untitled (cross), 1953, wood, cloth, plaster, synthetic resin, and nails, 28 1/2 × 16 1/2 × 4 in. 

Earl Staley designs for Faust at the Houston Grand Opera. These designs (sets, backdrops and costumes) were originally created by Staley in 1985. He was traveling in Italy and Greece at the time when the HGO contacted him. All his work for it was done abroad. The painted scrims are done in Staley's expressionist style which works wonderfully for this old warhorse. Every few years these costumes and sets are pulled out of storage and performed somewhere--for example, they were used for an Atlanta production in 2014.

The photo below is of the scrim you see before the opening and between acts. It looks a bit washed out compared to the real thing--it's hard to photograph, apparently. The sets had intense color and deep shadows. This infernal scrim was a remarkable depiction of hell and Satan.


Earl Staley, scrim in the original 1985 production of Faust (courtesy of Earl Staley)

Sharp by Havel+Ruck in Sharpstown.

I wrote about this work in Glasstire. If you haven't seen it, they're tearing it down January 1. (Might be worth a trip to Sharpstown to see it town down.)


Sharp by Havel+Ruck

Faith Wilding at UHCL.

I wrote about this exhibit in Glasstire. Nice show in an unexpected location.


Faith Wilding, Flow, 2010-2016, chemistry vessels, cheesecloth, water, ink

Statements at MFAH featuring Mequitta Ahuja, Nick Cave, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, Melvin Edwards, Loretta Pettway, Louise Ozell Martin, Gordon Parks, Ernest C. Withers, Lonnie Holley, Jean Lacy, Thornton Dial, Sr., Jesse Lott, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Michael Ray Charles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robert Pruitt, Mark Bradford,  and Tierney Malone. This inventory exhibit got a certain amount of criticism for not having a very interesting curatorial idea. The only thing the artists necessarily had in common was that they were African American. Sure, you'd like an exhibition to have a stronger theme than "here's a bunch of stuff we had in storage by African American artists", but the pieces they displayed were really exciting. The show might not have been greater than the sum of its parts, but did it need to be when the parts were this good?


Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Twinkle Twinkle Little Tar, 2009, 72 x 48 inches, latex, acrylic, pen and ink on paper

What I especially liked was the inclusion of Houston area artists, like Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Robert Pruitt, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Tierney Malone. In a show like this, you expect a clever Glenn Ligon, a striking Nick Cave, a powerful Thornton Dial, etc. But when it makes me feel good to see the local guys work side by side with such giants.


ILYB, Head

I Love You Baby at GalleryHOMELAND, Gspot and Cardoza Gallery.

I Love You Baby (ILYB) was an artist collective started officially in 2002 but unofficially in 1992. It consisted of Paul Kremer, Rodney Chinelliot, Will Bentsen, Chris Olivier and Dale Stewart and included occasional collaborators. They had a three-venue retrospective called We’ve Made a Huge Mistake at Gallery Homeland, Gspot and Cardoza Gallery. I reviewed it and interviewed the surviving members for Glasstire.


ILYB, Boot Face


Michael Tracy, August #2, 2013-2015, Acrylic on cavas over wood, 54 x 48 

Michael Tracy at Hiram Butler

This was a very small exhibit--four almost monochromatic canvases--two mostly black and two (like the one above) mostly orange. My knowledge of Michael Tracy's work is quite limited--I've seen a catalog from a P.S. 1 show, Terminal Privileges, and a book from 1992 showing images and writings about a 1990 performance, The River Pierce: Sacrifice II. I'd never seen work of his in person until I saw this show. Tracy had done monochromatic canvases before (as seen in Terminal Privileges), so that part wasn't a surprise. And his performances seem ritualistic and shamanistic, not unlike Yves Klein's, so the existence of monochromatic paintings has perhaps a connection to the void or the infinite.

But these paintings, as well as a series of painted drawings that Mr. Butler showed me, feel like very specific objects instead of representations of abstract ideas. It was ultimately that specificity that appealed to me.


Katie Mulholland, Mad Rad, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Kate Mulholland, Apocalypse Dreams at Scott Charmin.

Kate Mulholland's paintings are created by building paint up then sanding it down, over and over, to create images similar to topographic maps.  I saw her show at the Scott Charmin gallery early this year and was so taken by these paintings that I bought the one shown above, Mad Rad. The red and blue parts are so close in value that they vibrate slightly (an effect impossible to capture in a photo). The title made me think of rads as a measure of doses of absorbed radiation. I don't know if that occurred to Mulholland when she titled it Mad Rad, but when I see it, it feels like I am looking at dangerous, radioactive chemicals.


Emily Peacock, Your Middle Class is Showing, 2016, archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum

Emily Peacock, User's Guide to Family Business at Beefhaus.

I was up in Dallas to see Jim Nolan's show Welcome Stranger (which was quite enjoyable), and Beefhaus across the street was showing Peacock's User's Guide to Family Business. The pieces in the show, which were made from a variety of media above and beyond Peacock's signature photography, all dealt with death and mortality--specifically with the death of Peacock's mother.

I you had (as I have) been following her work for years (since at least 2011, when I saw work by her in the UH MFA show), you would have seen Peacock's mother and other family members guest-starring in her photos. Whether recreating Diane Arbus pictures or posing as Mary with Peacock as Jesus in Pieta poses, her mother has been a major subject of Peacock's work, and a major collaborator.

But then she died. This show touches on that in various ways. For the Groundbreaking Ceremony is a very black shovel leaning against a wall. Its blackness is achieved by flocking (I suspect that if she could have gotten her hands on some Vantablack, she would have used that instead). In her photo Your Middle Class is Showing, Peacock has taken a picture of her own belly sunburned so that the words "Middle Class" are spelled out in un-sunburned skin. On one hand it's witty--it plays with skin color and by using old English style letters, recalls low-rider lettering. But as I looked at it, I also thought of mortification of the flesh, practices of early Christians to subjugate their sinful flesh. Could deliberately burning herself be a sign of guilt? Whatever the motive, the image is one that stays with you.

Poems & Pictures at the Museum of Printing History

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946-1981) at the Museum of Printing History is probably the best exhibit you have never heard of going on right now. The Museum of Printing History is a low key (but wonderful) institution--indeed, unless you are specifically looking for it, you are very unlikely to stumble across it accidentally. Make an effort to find it for this show, though.

I made that effort on Friday for the opening. When I showed up, there were so few cars in the parking lot and so few people inside that I thought I had missed the opening. But no, here it was.



This is what the exhibit consists of--lots of cabinets displaying magazines and books. These are books that were the result of collaborations between artists and poets (and poet/artists). They range from quite elaborate productions--"printing orgies" (as someone once described Raw)--to mimeographed 'zines. Generally speaking, the curator has chosen work where the poet and artist worked in collaboration, although there are some cases where the poem preceded the art. Obviously this made me think of comics, but very few of these items are comics or even comics-like. Still, many feature an interweaving of text and image to a degree that recalls comics.

A lot of these pieces are printed with letterpress. If you come across letterpress printing today, it's likely to be on a wedding invitation. In the art/poetry/small press world, it is a sign of quality, a kind of old-fashioned hand-made printing job one occasionally sees in chapbooks or small press poetry books. And a lot of the books and magazines in this exhibit are printed on letterpress. But as one of the publishers included, poet Tom Raworth, was quoted in the catalog, "I mean, letterpress wasn't particular and arty, particularly in those days, it was just another way of printing." Raworth was speaking of the 1960s, and the impression one gets from the catalog was that there were a lot of old letterpresses around--some over a hundred years old--that one could pick up cheap in junk shops. So while there is an art to letterpress (and certainly a skill), these publishers were using it for much the same reason that 'zinesters of the 80s and 90s used photocopiers, and why I write a blog on Blogger--it's an economical way to communicate with a small number of like-minded individuals.

So you see in this exhibit extreme rarities like Wallace Berman's Semina 2.


Wallace Berman, Semina 2, letterpress handmade magazine

Berman was one of the Ferus artists. In his one and only Ferus show, an illustration he had drawn for Semina was declared obscene by the ultra-reactionary L.A. police. This experienced soured him on working with commercial galleries for life, and also made him very wary of printing up loads of copies of Semina. He only printed enough to give to sympathetic souls. He didn't want a bookstore or art gallery to be busted because of his work ever again. And having loads of people see it was not important to Berman. He was one of those people who is very rare today--an artist who cares not a jot for fame or success or even praise. He was a shamanic character, and only needed to communicate with a select few who were on his wavelength.

This indifference to large print-runs and fame is something pretty common among the poet/artist/publishers here. Not necessarily because they were all like Berman--but they chose a life of poetry and of working in a small-press environment. It is inherently a life and medium for a select few. So if the work was produced on something like a mimeograph, that was OK.

I think when comics fans think about the evolution of minicomics, the small-print-run art-comics that are almost always handmade items, we think about 'zines. And 'zines have a well-established history. But when I think of some of the elaborate comics produced by Fort Thunder and other art-comics publishers, and when I think about their approach to comics as an art, it feels a lot closer to Wallace Berman and Joe Brainard and the teams of Alastair Johnson and Frances Butler or Bill Berkson and Philip Guston than to any zinester.

Of course, Brainard was really into comics, and he roped his friends--basically a bunch of poets who came to New York from Tulsa, OK (weirdly enough)--into doing comics with him. Brainard's big obsession was Nancy (see The Nancy Book for the results of his obsession). His friends played along.


Ron Padgett, Nonsense appropriation of Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

Brainard published two full-on comics, with contributions from John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, and others.


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966

There are several avant garde experiments with comics that were published in the 60s and 70s, far outside the mainstream of comics (and even outside the world of underground comics). Martin Vaughn-James, Jess (whose illustration work is represented in this show), and Brainard of course. Probably others as well. I really wish some publisher with an eye towards the art history of comics would bring these back into print.

This all barely touches on the riches here. I plan to revisit the show and soak it in some more. It's a little much to absorb in one trip. The curator, Kyle Schlesinger, has a highly personal take on all this. He is one of those poet/publishers. His small press is called Cuneiform Press--indeed, he has one of those 100+ year old letterpresses. (But perhaps the oddest thing about him is that he is a professor at the University of Houston-Victoria. You never know what kind of talent is hiding away in our more obscure universities and colleges.)

The Cool School

Robert Boyd

In 1992, I saw an art exhibit in Los Angeles called "Helter Skelter," which was devoted to Los Angeles art. From that moment, I became interested in art from L.A., an interest that deepened when I lived in L.A. for a couple of years. And I already had a long-standing interest in the work of Edward Kienholz, dating back to when he had a show at the late, lamented Rice Art Gallery, where a bunch of us film class students saw a couple of films with him and Nancy Reddin dating from the early and mid-60s, one a television documentary about him and one an incredible documentary of the reception of his show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. Of course, Kienholz had started the Ferus Gallery with Walter Hopps, who was the founding director of the Menil Museum and an important person in the art scene in Houston in the 1980s. All this is just to say that the L.A. art scene has long been a fascination of mine. So when I heard about Ferus Gallery documentary, The Cool School (2007), I had to check it out.




The documentary starts with a description of the Watts Towers (which was one of the first things I went to see when I moved to L.A. the first time). This struck me as a bit contrived, but at the same time typical. Advanced, alternative art scenes always reach out and try to include outsider or vernacular arts. Look at Picasso and his gang bringing Henri Rousseau into their fold, or here in Houston, the way the recently closed show "No Zoning" included Cleveland "The Flower Man" Turner as part of the show. I am really torn by this because it seems to have a touch of slumming about it, but at the same time I love these outsider, vernacular works. It is often the alternative arts community that finds and embraces these works and recognizes their creators. (Think of how Henry Darger's work was saved, for example.) Anyway, this has little to do with the documentary--it's in my mind because of a conversation I had Saturday night with Matthew Guest (who is, not surprisingly, also interested in outsider art). The filmmakers seem to be suggesting that artistically, L.A. was kind of barren except for the Watts Towers, which were decidedly out of the mainstream.

There were a few collectors who were into modern art, and a few artists who were trying things here and there, but no art infrastructure. Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps had each tried to start galleries without much success. So the decided to join forces. They were definitely an odd couple. Kienholz was a burly, working-class beatnik rebel, Hopps a skinny nervous egghead with thick glasses. They founded the Ferus gallery on La Cienega. The problem was that they really weren't great partners. But they both had a great vision for art in L.A. and a recognition that cutting edge artists needed a place to display their work.They founded the gallery in 1957, opening with a group show of abstract expressionist painting by San Francisco and L.A. artists. This is something the movie underscores--the early days of Ferus were somewhat dominated by San Franciscans, because San Francisco had a much better developed art scene than L.A. Obviously Clyfford Still was the biggest name there--he was one of the most important abstract expressionist artists. But it seems that there was a whole beatnik art scene there that was vital and healthy. It is also my impression that only in San Francisco was the visual art scene dominated by beatniks. The beats were literary and a lifestyle, and the only artists that I think of part of that subculture were San Franciscans like Jay DeFeo (who had a solo show at Ferus in 1960).

But the presence of Ferus really energized L.A. artists. Many of them lived in Venice, which was a slum at the time. They mostly came out of abstract expressionism, but moved towards other styles in the late 50s and early 60s. For example, Robert Irwin (another artist who visited Rice while I was there--I wonder if Walter Hopps was involved in bringing him and Kienholz to the campus?) started off as an abstract expressionist, but apparently decided his paintings were no damn good after seeing some Philip Guston abstract paintings. So he pared back the expression to some very simple geometric paintings, that evolved into nearly invisible painted objects that were all about light.

This move away from abstract expressionism to minimalism was happening in New York, too. Ditto with the Pop idea, which at Ferus was exemplified by Edward Ruscha's paintings and photos. Ditto with assemblage, with Kienholz as a leader. I think this may have led New Yorkers to look on L.A. as just a bunch of copycats (this point of view was represented by Ivan Karp in the movie). But I think it was in the air--the L.A. artists were working their way out of abstract expressionism just as the New York artists were, and these routes were logical reactions to that older style.

And there were also things in L.A. that really had no counterpart in New York, like Ken Price's ceramic pieces. Clay just wasn't taken seriously in most places as a legitimate medium for a fine artist.

The first year of Ferus had its first controversy--a Wallace Berman show that was busted for being pornographic. Berman was one of those shamanic figures in art who is better known as an influence than as an artist--but his art is astounding. Unfortunately, the experience of being busted made him swear off working with commercial galleries.

What happened next is unclear. The movie suggests that Hoops convinced Kienholz to spend more time on his art and bought him out, and that later Irving Blum entered the picture as a new partner. But the book Ferus says that Kienholz was getting burned out and that Blum was brought in to buy him out. Either way, the net result was that the rough-hewn Kienholz was out and the suave Blum was in. (Whatever the reason, Kienholz started exhibiting at the Dwan Gallery in the early 60s. Did he harbor a grudge against Ferus?)




The still above in the movie was actually taken from the T.V. show at the time about Kienholz. It's worth mentioning that Kienholz wasn't chosen because the producers necessarily thought he was a great artist, but because he was sort of a living embodiment of the cliches that viewers might have about "beatnik artists." The TV series itself focused each week on a different profession (this week, and artist, next week, a hotel chef).


Barney's Beanery was their hangout--it was located right around the corner pretty much. I ate there a lot when I lived in L.A. (It was founded in 1920 and is still there.)



sign on the outside of the Beanery

Irving Blum was exactly what the gallery needed. He was seriously into avant garde art and had a great eye, but he was also the kind of personable, sophisticated fellow who could chat up well-to-do collectors. A gallery is a commercial enterprise, and while history (if you're lucky) remembers the artists, the collectors are every bit as important.



(Walter Hoops is the second from the left, and Irving Blum is the smiling man with the crew cut standing to Hopp's right.)

Hopp's story of how he met Blum and brought him on board is amusing but a little hard to believe. As Hopps would have it, Blum comes into the gallery one day with a group of swell friends and starts explaining the art as if he owns the joint. Hopps pulls him aside and says, hey buddy, I think you and I should go have a drink. I couple of drinks later at the Beanery, and Blum is officially on board.

Blum brought a fundamentally more professional outlook to the enterprise. Hopps and Kienholz had exhibited something like 70 artists year (lots of group shows), but Blum cut it down to a core group of L.A. artists, which would be supplemented by the occasional New York artist and group shows. The key Ferus artists were John Altoon, Craig Kaufman, Ken Price, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha. The interesting thing is that many of these artists are not particularly well-known today. The only ones who I'd say are part of the standard art history of the '60s onward are Kienholz, Irwin, Ruscha, and maybe Bell. (Your mileage may vary, however.) This may be a result of the lingering bias against non-New York artists, or may be because art by, say,  Craig Kaufman wasn't as interesting as, say, Donald Judd's art. On different days, I can lean to different explanations.

But what is important is that while Ferus was there, these artists had a leg to stand on and were able to develop (which they did--a lot). That period in L.A., from 1957 to 1967 saw an explosion of modern art. Hopps left Ferus in 1962 to become curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum--where he put on a bunch of cutting edge shows. The L.A. County Museum was opened (next to the tar pits!) and it had some important shows, including the controversial Kienholz show. Other galleries opened. Artforum moved from San Francisco to L.A. But as John Baldessari comments in the film, it all wound down in the late '60s. Ferus closed, Artforum moved away to New York. Despite Blum's best efforts in cultivating collectors (including Hollywood types like Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, both of whom are in the documentary), he apparently wasn't doing that great. He eventually moved to New York. (He did make one absolutely amazing art purchase in L.A.--he gave Andy Warhol his first gallery show--a bunch of painted Campbell's Soup cans. A few people, including Dennis Hopper, bought individual paintings for $100 each. But Blum decided at the end of the show that he wanted them all as a set--so he asked his collectors if he could return their money, and paid Warhol $1000--in installments--for all of them.) Baldessari describes modern art in L.A. as a boom and bust phenomenon--although he adds hopefully that it seems like the scene in L.A. now is fully self-sustaining.



Dennis Hopper and Irving Blum

One thing that killed the Ferus vibe for everyone, apparently, was the death of John Altoon in 1968. The Ferus guys had more or less been a bunch of buddies hanging out together, and at a reunion filmed for this documentary, they seem to say that Altoon's death ended that. Irwin doesn't totally agree--he thinks that they were all evolving as artists in different directions and moving out of Venice and even out of L.A. But Altoon's death certainly provides a sense of finality to the Ferus era.



Surviving Ferus artists posing for a photo

Indeed, this film is haunted by death. The one guy you would like to hear from most, Ed Kienholz, had died in 1994. There is some archival footage of him, but not enough. And Walter Hopps died while this film was being made.



Kienholz being buried in his classic Packard--even his funeral was a work of art

Because you can see how important Ferus was to the ecology of art in L.A., it is kind of an exemplar for any provincial city that is growing an art scene. Houston lucked out a bit by having two very sophisticated collectors, John and Dominique De Menil, who were also really into social engagement. What Ferus (and Hopps, Kienholz, and Blum) were to L.A., the Menils were to Houston. The Cool School is a good way to experience a fascinating bit of American art history.