Josh Bernstein's Galveston at Bryan Miller Gallery

by Robert Boyd



Josh Bernstein, Non Plus Ultra detail, mixed media on plexiglass, 2011

According to Bryan Miller Gallery's press release about this show, Galveston, a suite of works by Josh Bernstein, is about Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish colonizer who discovered Texas and spent nine years wandering the state and Northern Mexico after most of the members of his expedition died. De Vaca's story is an astonishing tale, an epic odyssey of Europe meeting Native America. De Vaca's account of his journey (variously called The Report and Shipwrecks) is apparently the source for Bernstein's art. But Bernstein is doing something more than just illustrating De Vaca's story.

Most of us who grew up in Texas were required to learn Texas history (I had it in junior high). One of the facts we learn is that De Vaca was shipwrecked (for a second time) in Galveston, where he encountered some Karankawa tribespeople, who enslaved them. So Bernstein's project involved photographing locations in Galveston combined with images of people in costume and other things--inhuman things. That's where it departs from De Vaca. Bernstein seems to have combined De Vaca's story of terror and hardship with a supernatural terror. The terror reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft's terror with a dash of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. An artist who mined some of the same earth was late underground comix artist Jack Jackson, particularly in the stories The Secret of San Saba and God's Bosom.



Josh Bernstein, After Four Days, photocollage, mixed media on plexiglass, 2011

For a sixteenth century Spaniard, sailing the Gulf of Mexico and landing in Texas just 35 years after Columbus's first voyage must have been very much like entering a dark and demonic Lovecraftian dimension. And although De Vaca eventually grew to sympathize with the native peoples, his time in Galveston was associated with pure terror--being enslaved by a tribe that practiced ritual cannibalism.

So Bernstein depicts Galveston as a place of supernatural terror. He mixes natives up in it--there are Aztec aspects to Galveston's terror, for example.



Josh Bernstein, Battery Croghan, photocollage, mixed media on plexiglass, 2011

He turns Battery Croghan into a Aztec-seeming structure. The figure on the right has something (tentacles? fire?) coming out of his eyes.



Josh Bernstein, Battery Croghan detail, photocollage, mixed media on plexiglass, 2011

Readers of H.P. Lovecraft might feel that a lot of what underlies his fiction is a deep fear of the other. A racist in his personal life, the horror in Lovecraft's stories was about encountering beings whose motives and very existence was beyond human comprehension. Spaniards encountering native Americans must have had a similar reaction. It took Cabeza de Vaca nine years of wandering among the peoples of Texas and Northern Mexico to start to understand them, to see them as humans and not as incomprehensibly alien.



Josh Bernstein, The Thing in the Headlight, silver gelatin print mounted on plexiglass, 2011

Bernstein sets many of his works in what are obviously present day situations. I see this as adapting another favorite horror trope--the rediscovery of an ancient evil that was slumbering in a specific location. Obviously the haunted house is a classic version of this. So here were have some thing--a ghost? a Karankawa deity?--caught on film as if by accident. The overexposed part of the film makes it seem all the more authentic, as if captured on film purely by accident.



Josh Bernstein, Port, silver gelatin print mounted on plexiglass, 2011

Of course, sometimes a picture doesn't need an implied narrative to be spooky. Night, fog and a few lights can do the trick, as in this atmospheric ship portrait.



Josh Bernstein, Blueprint, C-Print, collage mounted on plexiglass and wood, 2011



Josh Bernstein, Non Plus Ultra, mixed media on plexiglass, 2011

A Matter of Wit at FotoFest

 by Robert Boyd

Gilbert Garcin and Miro Švolík make photos that are wry, charming, surreal and funny. It makes sense to put the two together. I looked at the show first without knowing anything about the artists. That's the best way to proceed, I think. But since both artists use themselves in the works--Garcin in every photo--it's hard not to construct a story for them. In Garcin's case, I thought he might be a young surrealist. By this, I mean someone who was a young artist in the waning days of surrealism as a movement. Now in his old age (in my scenario), Garcin was using an archaic form of photomontage to continue the surrealist project.


Gilbert Garcin, The Difference, silver gelatin print, 2004

But his real story is even more interesting. Now 81 years old, he didn't start taking photographs until he was 65. Far from being a young member of Andre Breton's surrealist circle, he was the director of a lamp manufacturing firm. Who can fail to be impressed that Garcin completely reinvented himself in retirement?

The photos recall the gentle surrealism of Magritte, but what I think about when I see them is Jacques Tati's M. Hulot. They are both small men (Garcin always depicts himself from a  distance within a surreal landscape) in rumpled overcoats. Garcin even avoids high technology (always M. Hulot's foil)--he could create flawless montages with Photoshop. Instead, we can see that he is physically cutting out images of himself an pasting them into place. It's a totally primitive notion of photomontage. (Even John Heartfield used an airbrush.)


Gilbert Garcin, Le Collectionneur, 2004

The results combine bold design with subtle, self-deprecating wit. This image was especially meaningful for me. If you are like me, and you collect art when you can afford it, you discover over time that your collection starts to overwhelm you. I recently had to confess to a gallerist that a piece I bought from her--a piece I love--was in my closet because I didn't have space to display it. What I didn't tell her was that it was sharing that space with dozens of other artworks.I'm not yet about to be crushed by my collection (like the Vogels were), but I will get there.


Miro Švolík, A Child Like Drawing I Made as a Grown-Up, silver gelatin print, 1989


Miro Švolík uses some of the same techniques as Garcin, but is much more sophisticated in his execution. One thing he likes to photograph (based on this exhibit) are "drawings" that are in part composed of people laying on the ground, photographed from above. Here he superimposed five photos to create one childish drawing--using a child as part of the drawing. These are delightful photos--ones that I imagine would appeal very much to small children (in addition to appealing to mom and dad). Someone should publish them as a childrens picture book!

Ironically, given this childlike appeal, many of the Švolík's photos are quite erotic--but they have a humorous kind of eroticism.



Miro Švolík, Big Woman Little Man, C-print, 2010

I blushed a little when I walked into the hall with these photos. Anytime I noticed someone else in the hallway, I felt like a little boy caught looking at Playboy. Is this an archaic feeling? Do people younger than me raised on easy electronic access to sexy images feel the same? The difference in size between the man and woman very much describes how I often feel when I am in the presence of a beautiful woman. Billy Bragg's song Sexuality contains the line "I feel a total jerk before your naked body of work." I think Švolík may be expressing a similar sentiment in his Big Woman Little Man photos.


Miro Švolík, Art History: Rousseau, silver gelatin print, 2001

These witty photocollages reinforce the "male gaze" by reminding us that whatever the great nudes in art history are, they are also naked ladies, usually drawn or painted or sculpted by men. Once again, there is something childish about it--like a little boy taken to a museum, giggling over what seems invisible to the adults he's with--that lady is naked!

The MFAH and Collectors

Robert Boyd



Betsabeé Romero, Guerreros en cautiverio (Captive Warriors), Carved tire with gold leaf, 2006

I went to the Museum of Fine Arts today and saw Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art, a large show of Latin American art ranging from the beginning of the century to the present. It's filled with an amazing variety of pieces and is well-worth a visit. Now I have mentioned before how tricky it is to show the work of collectors. The problem is that when a museum shows work you own, it becomes more valuable because the museum bestows a stamp of legitimacy and quality on things it displays. That said, in this case there were quite a few collectors, so it avoided the problem that "single collector" shows have, which is a lack of curatorial authority. In this case, someone (I'm not sure who) went to all these collectors and assembled a show, picking the work that seemed just right for it.

The MFAH is, of course, a collecting museum. They acquire new pieces every year. Expanding their collection of Latin American art has been a mission of the MFAH since 2001. So I wonder if these pieces they showed will end up in the permanent collection one day? How does that work? Does the MFAH identify collectors who may gift them the work or will it to them? Or does the MFAH go even further and work with collectors on choosing the work. "Lou, Gail! [*airkiss*] We want to have a top-notch Dario Robleto in the collection, and one is coming up to auction. Would you bid on it, dear? And then will it to us?"

I'm not being facetious. I have absolutely no idea how this works, but at the same time, I do know that the MFAH has close relationships to Houston's big money collectors. It's the mechanics of how those relationships work which interests me. I'm sure it's a complex dance.



res, Chica Azul, from the "Conatus" series in collaboration with Constanza Piaggio, Chromogenic print, 2006

New Acqusition--Mauricio Lazo photograph

Mauricio Lazo, El Diablito, photograph, 2009 (?)

I was at the Blaffer student show last night, and a group of junior photographers were selling prints. (The group calls itself Fourteen11 because there are 14 of them and they graduate in 2011.) Mauricio Lazo had a great piece in the show of photographed versions of loteria cards. And he was selling one of the prints at the Fourteen11 table.

Check out the Blaffer show--it's quite good.