Zombie Formalist Shootout in Galveston

Robert Boyd


William Powhida and Jade Townsend, Map of the town of New New Berlin

This map greeted visitors to New New Berlin and the Nevada Art Fair, an installation by William Powhida and Jade Townsend, at the Galveston Artists Residency last weekend. Bill Arning is identified as mayor. Given that this entire installation is a satire of Houston and of the art world, it's not exactly a compliment. But why Arning and not, say, Gary Tinterow? Because back in 2012, the following quote appeared in Art in America:

“Moving to Houston four years ago I had no idea I would find an art scene so vibrant, international and spirited,” CAMH director Bill Arning told A.i.A. over the weekend. “I keep telling artist friends that it's the new Berlin: cheap rents; great galleries, museums, and collectors; and a regular flow of visits from the best artists working today.” [Paul Laster, Art in America, October 21, 2012]

Or maybe they were thinking of this quote:

First off I tell artists it's the new Berlin: cheap rent, a global audience, scores of supportive venues. It's an amazing life for art makers.  ["Interview; Bill Arning Director Of The CAMH HOUSTON the `New Berlin`", Maria Chavez, Zip Magazine, August 28, 2013]

First Arning is stabbed in the back by an artist he's exhibiting, now this: Arning portrayed as the huckster selling Houston to the art world, not so different in the spirit from the ad the Allen Brothers placed in newspapers across America in 1836.



The installation makes snotty fun of Houston, but isn't very deep. I'll outsource most of my opinions to Bill Davenport's great review in Glasstire, which can be summed up with one phrase: "simplistic carpetbagging."


entryway to New New Berlin



New New Berlin had privatized security, of course.



A saloon/whorehouse (where the warm whiskey was free if you were wearing a cowboy hat). The bartender was artist Brian Piana.



And David McClain played the reactionary newspaperman, who from time to time came out to read what seemed like a completely unhinged rant. It turned out to be from "The Alamo," Michael Bise's passionate but confusing editorial that ran in July in Glasstire.



And naturally there was a money-grubbing church complete with a Dan Flavin-style cross. The preacher was Emily Sloan, who has a lot of relevant experience given her "Southern Naptist Convention" and "Carrie Nation" performances.


William Powhida & Jade Townsend, ABMB Hooverville, 2010, Graphite on paper. 40 x 60 inches 

It was the "Flavin" cross that caught my eye. As satirists of Houston, Townsend and Powhida aren't brilliant. But as satirists of the art world, they're quite clever. Their collaborative drawing ABMB Hooverville imagined the glitterati of the art world living in a shanty town on the beach, for example. Much of Powhida's solo work spells out (quite literally) his disgust with the crass Veblen-esque corruption that typifies so much of the upper level, blue chip art world. 

Typical of his work is to make a list--"Why You Should Buy Art", "Some Cynical Advice to Artists", "What Can the Art World Teach You", etc.--and then carefully draw it. I don't mean calligraphy (although that is a part of it). What Powhida does is to make a list or piece of text or diagram on a piece of paper and then carefully draw the piece of paper as an object.


William Powhida, What Has the Art World Taught Me

New New Berlin and the Nevada Art Fair are full of lists and signs.



The newspaper's editorial policy is a satire of corporate media.



The military/police/prison industrial complex gets the works, too.



And here is a map of the Nevada Art Fair.

And you can see Powhida's hand in them. The content is sarcastic and the writing is recognizable. But while the newspaper editorial policies and White Horse Security Services seem obvious and heavy handed, the more art related stuff seems funnier and stronger. Like the fact that you in the floor plan for Nevada (itself a take-off of the NADA art fair), the booth for Non-Profits is completely closed off.



The one building in New New Berlin that really works on this level is the Livery Stable. It reflects a common trajectory of post-industrial structures. First a structure may be a factory or a warehouse--a working building. Then after a while, that function no longer exists (in America, at least). The building becomes derelict until someone has the bright idea of handing it over to artists for studios. The artists move into this shitty but indestructible structure and turn it into a lively space for art. The once derelict neighborhood the building occupied gets a few bars and restaurants and becomes "hip." The owner of what was a white-elephant can now sell out to a developer who will put condos in the old warehouse after giving the artists the boot. It's an old story, and what I like about Townsend and Powhida is that they relate it to the old West (a livery stable being the nastiest building in town, and one devoted to work) and include the whole cycle in a series of overlapping signs--the "Artists Studios" banner that overlaps the "Livery Stable" sign, the "Luxury Condos" sign that is pasted on top of the "For Sale Sign".


Nevada Art Fair shooting gallery

The best part of the installation was the shooting gallery. Several "artworks" were hung on the far wall of the GAR gallery, and visitors had the opportunity to fire paintball guns at them. They were in "booths" for various galleries, such as David Zwirnered and the Joanna Picture Club (to give it a little local flavor).





Participants could fire paint guns at the pictures, which over the evening became encrusted with paintball residue. Shooters were in theory limited to five shots each, but many of these nice, liberal artsy types went hog wild as soon they got a gun in their hands, firing dozens of shots while Jade Townsend yelled "Only five shots per person!" in irritation.


 Jade Townsend firing in the shooting gallery


David McClain takes a shot

Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian was there, and he commented that the paintings almost looked like contemporary abstractions one could see at a real art fair. That made me think of"zombie formalism," the term that Jerry Saltz recently applied to so much contemporary abstract painting. So what do you think, readers? Could any of these paintings go toe-to-toe with Lucien Smith, Dan Colen, Parker Ito or Jacob Kassay?







So New New Berlin and the Nevada Art Fair weren't entirely successful as works of participatory art, but shooting paintballs at canvases was a whole lot of fun. All art fairs should include a paintball firing range.

The Pan Review of Books: 9.5 Theses on Art and Class

Paul Mullan


Ben Davis , 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2013. 228pp., $16.00 pb. , ISBN 978-1608462681). Cover by William Powhida. (Click here for a larger version of the cover drawing.)

In 1937, the Spanish Civil War was raging. On one side, the insurgent army of fascist General Francisco Franco received ample support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, in the form of both expeditionary forces and massive arms supplies. On the other side was the democratically-elected Republican government in Madrid, and allied militias organized by an assortment of socialist, communist, and anarchist parties – all of which Franco wanted to utterly demolish. Western powers, including the US, Britain, and France, nominally had a policy of “non-intervention”, which meant that the Republicans received material aid from only from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Volunteers from around the world – through, for example, the International Brigades – arrived in Spain to fight for the Republican cause. The conflict was, legitimately, understood by many as the front-line in the battle against encroaching fascism and as the opening guns of a second world war in Europe.

In January of that year, representatives of the Spanish government visited the prominent Pablo Picasso, then living in Paris, and asked him to create a mural in support of the Republicans and for exhibition at the upcoming World’s Fair. Picasso was sympathetic to their struggle in his native. However, he was initially uncertain as to how the war should be represented in the planned large-scale work.

In an attempt to terrorize and demoralize the Republican population, the German Condor Legion, at Franco’s behest, carpet bombed the Basque town of Guernica in April, destroying large areas and reportedly killing or injuring thousands. This indiscriminate slaughter of civilians was one of the first instances in Europe of such air attacks (though not elsewhere). News reporters covering the conflict in Spain arrived on the scene the same day, and their dispatches spurred international outrage. Picasso now had the impetus for the final mural.

Guernica was seen in the Spanish Pavilion later that year in Paris by hundreds of thousands of World’s Fair attendees; in early 1939, it traveled to London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, where it was seen by tens of thousands more. The British tour was supported by the Artists’ International Association (AIA), local trades councils, and other organizations raising political awareness of the Republican cause and providing aid (ambulances, field kitchens, and refugee relief, for example). The London opening featured a talk, not from any conventional artworld figure, but from the leader of the left-wing Labour Party. The price of admission was a pair of boots, which were to be sent to fighters in Spain; rows of boots were left at the base of the mural by workers – many from the nearby, working-class East End – visiting the exhibition.

In his recent 9.5 Theses on Art and Class– a collection of essays written over the past seven or eight years, with some new, some old, and some reworked for the publication of the book – Ben Davis remarks that little depicted in the renowned Guernica is specific to the bombing itself. Particularities of the doctrine of total warfare, the political context, the global struggle against fascism, and even modern life in general (excepting the lightbulb at the top-center of the canvas) are mostly absent from the work. Instead, Picasso used archaisms, such as the oil lamp and the shattered blade of a sword, and many of his traditional motifs, such as the bull, the horse, and the corrida. From the paradigmatic instance of engaged, militant art, Davis reasonably concludes that “in the relationship of art and politics, the political movement of which an artwork is part determines its overriding power, trajectory, and meaning”.

Davis is a Marxist, as well as until recently the executive editor of Blouin Artinfo, and became a political activist in New York City when he also began writing professionally about art, in the middle of the last decade. He describes, at a time when major anti-war protest was still a presence, inviting an artist he had met recently to an upcoming organizing meeting; the artist declined, saying that his painting was a sufficient “contribution to making the world a more peaceful place”. 9.5 Theses is deeply critical of the tendencies in contemporary art, and their theoretical edifices, that claim in different ways to substitute on-the-ground political mobilization with art and its practices.

In a discussion of the 2007 book Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited and introduced by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, Davis argues against, for instance, collective artistic labor becoming the “template” for committed art or assuming the “dignity of a full-blown alternative politics”. He caustically points out that musicians have routinely formed bands, without that collective labor being philosophically elevated into a putative political model, and that, indeed, most creative labor outside of the insular “artworld” is already performed, in a capitalist society, by anonymous workers in teams.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla were selected to be the official US representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale in Italy. Their contribution to the US Pavilion included the installation Track and Field, an overturned fifty-ton tank with a exercise treadmill atop one of its tracks and a real Olympic athlete jogging on the treadmill. The artists viewed their piece as “critical” of US militarism. However, the US government itself, which had approved their proposal, found that piece far more conducive to its agenda, at a time when US armed forces were still occupying Afghanistan and intervening elsewhere. One State Department official referred to the use of “smart power” and a “softer image” internationally, which Allora and Calzadilla’s installation helped enable.


Allora & Calzadilla, Track and Field, 2011. U.S. Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

Another chapter suggests that these two wildly disparate interpretations of Track and Field demonstrate the limitations of an “aesthetic politics” disconnected from the particularities of the actually-existing situation. By way of the theories of hegemony as put forth by Antonio Gramsci, a leader in the early Communist Party of Italy, Davis argues that “modern capitalist states rule via combining direct force with efforts to gain ideological legitimacy” and that the artwork ended up well serving the latter purpose. For in 2011, the particularities of the situation included the Obama administration’s “new” approach and rejuvenated efforts to globally shore up the ideological legitimacy of the US; this was understood by many as very different from the overtly-belligerent approach of the immediately-preceding Bush administration. Also, by that point, the antiwar movement had long since ceased to bring enormous number of people into the streets; a concrete foundation for the artists’ “critical” aims was thus lacking..

These concerns drive Davis’ perspective that art’s political meanings are determined by the real, specific political situations – not just by the abstract properties of a form, medium, or practice – and, as well, that artists should engage with real, on-the-ground political movements. While certain projects are suggested, such as agitating for increased funding for arts education in conjunction with the defense of beleaguered public school systems, 9.5 Theses mostly leaves open the question of how exactly those should happen going forward. The book is primarily about contemporary art and not historical instances of art’s engagement with such movements. The concluding chapter has only a brief on three of those instances: the Great Depression era in the US, when early modernists, such as Stuart Davis, and social realists made committed art and actively supported the labor struggles raging around them; Womanhouse, a highly-influential installation organized in Los Angeles in the early 1970s by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and which was a popular conduit, with ten thousand attending over the span of a month, for the then-new practice of feminist consciousness-raising; and Gran Fury, a key arts-and-graphics collective in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which was battled criminal government neglect of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This need for greater involvement with broader movements outside of the “artworld’s” confines is a perspective further buttressed by Davis’ definition of artists as middle-class and not working-class.

A Marxist definition of class is not based upon income (as to do so would have strange effects). For instance, a middle-class person who is not a member of a union can easily make less in wages than a working-class person who is in a union; a member of the petit-bourgeoisie, i.e. a small business owner, can have employees but still be poor. Davis is not claiming that artists are making a good living from their art; ample evidence he cites indicates their real, onerous conditions. One widely-circulated estimate in the early 2000s (from Dan Thomson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art) was that, out of 80,000 or so visual artists in New York City and London combined, there are 75 superstars with incomes above one million and 300 “merely” successful artists with incomes above 100,000. Making a living from their art is only a “dream” (the term in Davis’ little pamphlet from which the book gets its title) for the significant majority of everybody else, who require other jobs or supplemental income; these other jobs will make them (in most cases) working class.

What, then, drives Davis’ particular definition of artists’ class position?

First, there is the question of the labor process. Middle-class labor is performed with greater creativity and autonomy; working-class labor with lesser. Davis notes of the first type: “artists function as their own … franchises, and are expected to have their own … signatures or styles”. Moreover, “uniqueness and independence of mind are selling points when it come to art”. Of the second type, with which most of us are quite familiar, he notes that the working-class “must take direction”, via regimentation, “corporate mandates”, and other mechanisms. Workers are also “ever more disposable”; they must “sell their labor power as an abstract thing in order to earn a wage”.

Second, there is the question of the final product of the labor process. The working-class, obviously, is strictly exchanging its labor power for a wage and has no control or claim over the final product of that work, which is sold by a boss for profit. However, artists, paradigmatic of the middle-class, have a much greater degree of control over the final product of their work. Davis points to the examples of longstanding “struggles over intellectual property” law, as well as “contemporary debates over whether artists deserve ‘resale royalties’ for works sold on the secondary market”.

Of this distinction between middle-class and working-class creative labor, Davis draws a useful analogy: “The difference between a visual artist and a commercial artist is not unlike the difference between someone who owns their own food stand and a cook who works at a restaurant. Both make food. One has more say over what, how and when it is made and to whom it is sold”.

9.5 Theses posits a working-class artistic ideal, which “represent[s] a form of labor that is opposed to the demands of work, as freely determined expression, whether private or political. Viewed from this angle, art is deprofessionalized and in this sense is actually more ‘free’ than the middle-class ideal of personal-expression-as-career”. The significant majority of artists have minimal, or zero, material encounters with the markets or other institutions. In many cases, there are no transactions; nothing is sold; and work is never exhibited in a museum, gallery, or alternative space. Artists are already – whatever their “dream” may be – effectively making art solely as a free creative act and for their personal satisfaction. This real position, even though Davis has classified artists qua artists as middle-class, is already very close to the working-class artistic ideal he articulates. There isn’t a great leap from the former to the latter, and this leaves Davis’ class analysis feeling rather strained.

That said, the call for artists to relate more closely to actually-existing political mobilizations, and the critiques of those who propose to substitute such mobilizations with art and its practices, are a strength of the book. As Davis states: “There are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces – only political and economic solutions”.

What You May See at the Houston Fine Art Fair

Robert Boyd

I haven't been to HFAF yet. But I suspect you will see some artworks like these:


Williams Powhida, A Subjective Classification of Things, 2013 

William Powhida, courtesy of Hyperallergic. 

Artists Getting Paid

by Robert Boyd

Hyperallergic has a couple of really great posts about artists not getting paid. The main article is by art provocateur William Powhida. The title is suggestive: Why Are (Most) Artists (So Fucking) Poor? But the post doesn't address this question in a general sense, but rather discusses a small but obvious part of it. In this article, he talks about a survey of artists who displayed work in New York non-profit spaces between 2005 and 2010 by W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the General Economy).

On Friday evening W.A.G.E. presented the results of its 2010 survey of payments received by artists who exhibited with nonprofit art institutions in New York City between 2005 and 2010. The survey found that 58% of artists who responded received “no form of payment.”  The audience, including Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár, asked questions critical of the survey methodology, but did not refute the group’s findings. W.A.G.E. has partnered with Artists Space to explore the development of a self-regulatory model, mandating the implementation of a fee schedule within the institution. Presenter A.K. Burns explained one of the rationales for artists fees, “nonprofits get money from different sources for public education, and the artist is the educator. We are wondering why the artist isn’t being paid?”  That artists should be remunerated for their cultural value in capital value is one of W.A.G.E.’s positions from its statement and one that remains controversial. [William Powhida, "Why Are (Most) Artists (So Fucking) Poor?", Hyperallergic, April 23, 2012]

When you think about this, it's kind of weird. I am on the board of Frenticore/Frenetic Theater. I've looked at our books in great detail. When we put on a show (for example, the Houston Fringe Festival), we pay the performers. We are a non-profit, so we get our money from donations, grants, and charging folks to see the shows we produce or charging folks to use our theater space for their own shows. Why would an art exhibit at a non-profit space be different? (By the way, if you have an act and want to be in the Houston Fringe Festival, the deadline for submission is May 1, so get to it!)

But a theatrical or dance performance is different. First, it's expected that the theater will charge people to see it. And more important, with a performance, the performance itself is the work. And so we pay for the work. A visual artist, by contrast, has something physical to sell (I'm not going to get into the issues around installations or other temporary/immaterial artwork). So the theory is that for an artist, being in a show at a non-profit space gives you exposure with which you can then leverage to sell physical artworks. An exhibit at such a space is like a really long television commercial for your work. And there is some truth to this. Greater exposure in high-profile venues makes selling work easier, on average.

The question is whether this justifies no payment at all from the non-profit venue. I don't think so. Sure the artist gets a small, indefinable benefit, but so does the institution. They aren't showing this work as a favor to the artist. So in a way, they are like any other venue for creative work. If a magazine or newspaper publishes your work, they pay for one-time rights. A non-profit venue should do the same.


Hans Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor?: the Exceptional Economy of the Arts. I have no idea if the contents of this book, which I have not read, are relevant here, but it seems apropos.

One argument that a non-profit might make is that they don't have a lot of money. And with certain exceptions, this is true. I don't expect non-profit art spaces, as a class, to suddenly conjure thousands of dollars out of thin air to pay artists. But they should pay artists, and the money needs to be taken from within the institution. Maybe this means fewer shows per year, or a smaller staff or less marketing. It would be a real sacrifice. I'm not denying it. But as someone who sits on the board of a non-profit that pays its artists, I know it can be done.

One wonders how it got to this state. But the answer is economically obvious. More people want to be artists than there is demand for art. In fact, people are willing to be poor if that's what it takes to be artists. It's one of those professions that attracts way more people than can be reasonably paid. So this makes it a buyers market--and non-profit art spaces are, essentially, buyers of art. I don't mean that that they have collections, but they do essentially rent art for six weeks or so at a a time. And right now, the rent they pay is close to zero. That should change.

To see a bunch of infographics put together by W.A.G.E. on this topic, see this post.

(Fair disclosure. The Great God Pan Is Dead doesn't pay a piaster. Dean Liscum is being totally exploited by me. I am an utter hypocrite. Just thought I should point that out.)

The Texas Contemporary Art Fair part 2

by Robert Boyd

The Texas Contemporary Art Fair had the disadvantage of being second, and in consequence seemed to try much harder. The Houston Fine Art Fair was big and varied, and its size allowed it to contain multitudes. It hit higher highs and lower lows. It had pieces of art that were astonishing to behold--great early to mid-20th century Latin American art, for example. It also had booths that seemed shamefully kitschy. TCAF was more carefully curated. The work was tasteful and very contemporary. It leaned towards eye-candy--as you would expect at a commercial enterprise like this. But its idea of eye-candy was right up to the minute.


Leo Villareal, Firmament II, computer controlled lights

For instance, this piece by Leo Villareal at Gering & López. It was cool and a bold move for the gallery. It was the only piece they showed--you walked into their booth, and there were a series of couches designed for people to look up at the ceiling. (One can imagine spending a few hours of quality time on one of these couches with this piece and a bag of 'shrooms.) There might be a theoretical explanation for this work--maybe Villareal's work has been closely examined and pondered over by critics. But there's no denying that this light show is eye-candy.



Chris Crites, Burglary, acrylic on paper bag, 2011

The folks at Jack Fischer Gallery knew they had eye-candy with the work of Chris Crites, so the brought a lot of it. The limited palette of intense acrylic colors (5 for each work) gives these images a poster-like quality--one might be reminded, for example, of the rock posters of Frank Kozik. And using old mugshots has an attractive outlaw vibe. I don't want to accuse Crites of pandering to a certain kind of viewer (me, for example), but he pushes the right buttons and the work jumps off the wall.



Chris Crites, Larceny, acrylic on paper bag, 2011

 
Chris Crites, a variety of smaller bag paintings

Some galleries were determined to grab your attention with work that superficially felt edgy and outlawish. If Crites' rogues gallery didn't grab you by the nuts, then how about an American flag made out of safety razors?



Michele Pred, Red White and Black, safety razor blades confiscated from air travellers

Michele Pred's work (at Nancy Hoffman Gallery) grabs you by consisting of important, instantly recognizable icons (like the American flag) made out of literally contraband material. It tempts you with its danger and its cleverness, but once wonders if it could possibly stand the test of time. Or, to put it in terms of an art fair, would a collector experience buyer's remorse after a year or two of this on his wall?



Michele Pred, American Red Cross, pocket knives confiscated from air travellers

That's my question about a lot of the art here. And I'm even talking about art I liked (like all of the pieces above). The work strikes me as entirely enjoyable when encountering them in the environment of an art fair. But in a museum, they might seem a bit trite. In someone's home, they might seem gimmicky. Context matters a lot.



SuttonBeresCuller, Masterpiece, polished bronze with patina, 2009

I'm a small scale collector--at this show, my sole purchase was a $5 painting from the Rice Gallery--but I try to put myself on the mind of collectors with more spare cash to spend. I can see someone looking at this piece by SuttonBeresCuller and thinking, "oh, clever!" And it is clever. But I also imagine that buyer's remorse would set in seconds after the ink on the check dried. This is a bit unfair to the Seattle-based artists, who are a three person team of prankster/performers--they remind me a bit of The Art Guys. But this piece is like a performance--it only makes sense for a limited period of time. The idea can't really sustain an extended existence. But being made of bronze ensures a fairly long existence (potentially). The gallery, Lawrimore Projects, even emphasizes that quality in their wordy information card. It tells us that "The work is suitable for outdoor installation."



Cris Bruch, 93 Pieces, hammered shopping cart, 1988

Lawrimore Projects doesn't leave anything to chance--the informational card tells us that one of Cris Bruch's pieces has just been acquired by the Yale Art Museum. That conveys his importance as an artist. Still, you have to admire them for including this piece. It is definitely not eye-candy.



Carolina Silva, Here, clay and wood, 2011

Carolina Silva's piece Here is unusually creepy. Collector--if you buy this piece, I recommend that you not hang it in the children's bedroom.

Lawrimore Projects tended to show artists either from Seattle or who otherwise had a connection with the city. I like that. I think one benefit of an art fair is the possibility of seeing work from different locations--not just New York. The Houston Fine Art Fair was strong in Latin American art. Of the 55 exhibitors in the catalog for the Texas Contemporary Art Fair, 17 were from New York, 11 were from Houston, five were from Los Angeles,  five were from San Francisco, four were from San Antonio, two from Seattle, and one each from Marfa, Milton Village, MA, Austin, Buenos Aires, Miami, Annapolis, MD, Bloomington, IL, St. Petersberg, FL, Tokyo and Santa Fe. The relative lack of Miami galleries and Latin American galleries gives this show less of an international feel than last month's fair. But it's still a nice mixture.



Wayne Thiebaud, Candy Trays, oil on canvas, 2010

So we get a great west coast artist,Wayne Thiebaud, exhibiting pieces at San Francisco's Paul Thiebaud Gallery. The names are not a coincidence--Paul was Wayne's son (Paul Thiebaud died earlier this year). I've always loved Wayne Thiebaud's painting and this one is not bad at all. It is all the more amazing for having been painted in Thiebaud's 90th year. However, it was unusual to see work from an artist of this generation. One exhibitor had two Rauschenberg prints, but everything else that I saw seemed to be quite current.



Cordy Ryman, various pieces

And speaking of nepotism, what about Cordy Ryman, son of famous minimalist painter Robert Ryman? I like his work OK, but I have to wonder if his path wasn't smoothed considerably because of who his father is. DCKT Contemporary seems to like artists with famous artist parents--it also represents Sophie Crumb, Robert Crumb's daughter.



William Powhida, LA Makeover Chart, archival pigment print, 2011

William Powhida is not a Los Angeles artist, but Charlie James Gallery made certain that the one piece by him that they showed was Los Angeles-centric. Powhida is an artist I like a lot, but it's not obvious why he is a gallery artist. In an earlier time, he would have been an artist for Spy Magazine or The National Lampoon. Perhaps it is the lack of a clever satirical magazine as a venue that drives him into the art world.

This gallery had a whole bunch of cartoonish or otherwise silly art. For instance, this piece by Nery Gabriel Lemus.



Nery Gabriel Lemus, Qué Barbaridad!, acrylic on canvas, 2011

(Lemus co-curated a Project Row Houses thing last year, by the way.)

These Lizabeth Eva Rossof sculptures go for an easy laugh, combining ancient Chinese terra cotta warriors with Bart Simpson, Spider-Man, Batman and Mickey Mouse.



Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Kneeling Archer Bart (large), terra cotta, 2011



Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Terra Cotta Warriors, terra cotta, 2011

Also on the silly side of things (but funny) was this piece.



Panni Malekzadeh, It's Beautiful Here, oil on linen, 2010

RH Gallery from New York had several pieces by Panni Malekzadeh, but this one was the best. It made me laugh.

To be continued...

New Acquisitions--Chad Hagen, William Powhida, and Ward Sanders

I mentioned a while back that I had bought a William Powhida print through 20x200. This is the one I bought:



William Powhida, Why You Should Buy Art, archival ink print, edition of 500, 14" x 11", 2010

The concept behind 20x200 is to create artworks that are cheap enough for non-wealthy collectors to buy. The add two pieces every week (one photographic, one not). The prices range from $20 to $200. I recently bought two more pieces from 20x200.



Chad Hagen, Nonsensical Infographic No. 3, archival in print, 10" x 8", 2010



Chad Hagen, Nonsensical Infographic No. 4, archival in print, 10" x 8", 2010

I got these because not only are they beautiful to look at, they also deal with one of my favorite subjects--the visual representation of data. Of course, these are ironic because they are visual representations of no data. But let this be a warning. I intend in the near future to write something about data, statistics, and data visualization as art.

Chad Hagen is a designer, the profession that has been most deeply involved with data visualization.

One thing I  don't like about the 20x200 pieces is that they aren't signed on the artwork. I was taught that when you do editions, you should sign and number them, usually in pencil, on the front underneath the image. But 20x200 has the artists sign little slips of paper that come with the prints.



My problem with these is that it separates the signature--which is the thing that authenticates the work--from the physical piece. It also places a burden on the collector. He or she needs to keep track of this little slip of paper from now on.

Anyway, these are my recent budget fine art buys. Small inexpensive limited editions, offered through an internet store, are a great way to get involved with collecting. It's definitely a lot less intimidating than the alternatives. Like going into a gallery and buying a piece. If one is not an experienced buyer from galleries (and I am not), one always wonders what the etiquette is. In almost any other retail establishment, you don't have to worry about this. But art is a luxury item, and buying it seems like it should involve certain rituals and niceties.

Here's what I bought recently at Hooks-Epstein. It's called Zarzuelas and it is by an artist named Ward Sanders.


Ward Sanders, Zarzuelas, assemblage, 11" x 16" x 5.5", 2010


Ward Sanders, Zarzuelas detail, assemblage, 11" x 16" x 5.5", 2010

Sanders' exhibit consisted mostly of wooden boxes with mysterious things in them. The obvious antecedent is Joseph Cornell.


Ward Sanders, Zarzuelas, assemblage, 11" x 16" x 5.5", 2010


Ward Sanders, Zarzuelas detail, assemblage, 11" x 16" x 5.5", 2010


Ward Sanders, Zarzuelas detail, assemblage, 11" x 16" x 5.5", 2010

I had, buying Zarzuelas, a slightly amusing experience. I asked a question about the piece--what was the liquid in the test tube. They shrugged their shoulders--"Eh, I dunno." But once I made my interest in buying clear, they quickly got the artist on the phone! (I'll leave the contents mysterious for you.)

One thing that distinguishes Sanders biographically is that he has no formal art education, as far as I know. He has a BA in biology and did some graduate level work (but I don't know if it was in art or not). These days, when so many artists are credentialed professional (an absurdity when you think about it), it is kind of a novelty to run across one who doesn't have an MFA. In any case, his lack of education hasn't hurt him none. His pieces in this show were beautiful, mysterious, full of hidden antique knowledge. I'm reading Winters Tale by Mark Helprin right now--Sander's assemblages remind me a little bit of Helprin's novel of a fantastic turn of the century New York.