Fresh Paint 25 Years Later

Robert Boyd



In January, 1985, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts opened a gigantic show of paintings by Houston area artists called Fresh Paint: The Houston School, curated by Barbara Rose and Susie Kalil. As far as I know, it was the first time the MFAH had devoted a large show to local artists. James Surls spoke about this last year at Lawndale, how in the 70s Houston art institutions were deathly afraid of failure. The implication was that if you put up a show of Houston art, you might get laughed at as provincial. But then Peter Marzio came along to run the MFAH, and he was a bit more expansive and risk-taking in his vision. Besides, by the early 80s, a lot of exciting art was being done in Houston. This exhibit was huge--44 painters in the Mies-designed front part of the museum. The paintings varied in size but tended towards being big. I was still a student at Rice and was excited about the show--although I had mixed feeling about the work.

Why this show? Why 1985? These questions are easy to answer, really. During the sixties and especially the 70s, Houston had grown substantially. That growth was fueled by the oil industry. While the rest of the country was knocked off its feet repeatedly by high oil prices, Houston prospered. A smugness, a certain unattractive swagger developed. (Totally unjustified--Houston had no control over oil prices, even thought it benefited from their rapid rise.) In 2009 dollars, the price of oil in 1970 was $9.94/bbl. In 1985, it was $54.95/bbl. (The price of oil collapsed the next year and didn't start recovering until 1999--this past-decade-long revival of the price of oil is one of the reasons Texas has suffered less than other parts of the country during the past two recessions.) 1985 was therefore a peak year. Great cities celebrate their wealth with art. Hence Fresh Paint. Hence FotoFest, which also began in 1985. And Fresh Paint wasn't just for Houston to pat itself on the back--it traveled to P.S. 1 in May of 1985. We were ready to show New York a thing or two.

But 25 years later, how does it stand up? I mostly have my memories and my copy of the catalog to go by. The first thing that rankles, and even then seemed an overreach, was the identification of a "Houston School" of painting. The rationale here was that in the Renaissance, there were distinct regional schools tied to specific Italian cities. Furthermore, one could reasonably point to places like Chicago and L.A. as having distinct regional voices and approaches--schools, if you must use the term. So why not Houston? All that was needed was to find some kind of stylistic or thematic link that tied Houston artists together.

This was folly. Here's what Thomas McEvilley wrote in Artforum at the time. He says it a lot better than I can.

The show is one in which the critic must review the curating before the work; the curating is so extravagant that the work can hardly be seen until one has blown away the cloud of claims that surround it. And when it is seen, it is found to be still without the frame or horizon which it is curating's responsibility to provide. Above all, Rose and Kalil have failed to present their Houston artists in a relation to the world. To say that these artists are gifted is not to say much. Entering the "Fresh Paint" show in the Miesian space of the museum's Cullinan Hall is both shocking and stimulating. The visual clamor is deafening. Walking through it is like riding waves of sometimes discordant music. To walk through the "Fresh Paint" show with the question of a school in mind is chaos. Everywhere are conflicting values which annihilate one another.

There just wasn't enough tying these artists together to make the case that there was a "Houston school." I can almost imagine what they were thinking, though. They saw a bunch of paintings by local artists that were, broadly speaking, neoexpressionist (which was the hip thing to be as painting and the art market revived in the 1980s--think Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, David Salle, etc.), but with injections of semi-tropical color (which could reflect the greenness of Houston), neon-ish touches (reflecting both Houston's gaudiness and Mexican border towns) and a certain Mexican influence (from the great Mexican painters, from the border, from the influence of Mexican immigrants, etc.) And this stuff is present in a lot of the paintings, more or less. But seen from the vantage point of today, it seems a little kitschy. I'm looking at you Earl Staley, Malinda Beeman, Patrick Cronin and Craig Lesser.

Rose and Kalil also make a case that Houston artists are non-abstract. "The use of figuration is similarly motivated today [...] by the desire to communicate with the public rather than to remain locked in the isolated prison of art for art's sake. The general antagonism of Houston-based artists to elitist styles, intelligible only to the initiated, is as much a moral position as it is an attraction to local folk traditions as opposed to the academic elitism of the more hermetic modernist styles." (Barbara Rose, "Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting in Houston", Fresh Paint: The Houston School, 1985)  But some of the best paintings in the show--those by Dorothy Hood, Joseph Glasco and Basilios Poulos, for example--are completely abstract and most definitely come out of the modernist tradition.

And because Rose and Kalil identified this "school" as a school of painting, this meant artists working in other media were left out. If you were to make a list of the top Houston artists from the last 30 years, James Surls, Mel Chin and Jim Love would be near the top. But because of the thesis advanced by Rose and Kalil, they are necessarily left out of this show. Furthermore, from the vantage of today, you have to ask, "Painting? Why painting?" It wouldn't be fair to criticize the curators for focusing on painting--it was in the air. The art world was full of discussion and argument about the revival of painting--particularly neoexpressionism--that accompanied the explosion of the art market. Some--the October critics especially--saw this as retrograde and reactionary, driven by money. Others, famously Thomas Lawson, formulated defenses of painting. Rose and Kalil allied themselves with the conservatives and with money. Still, that meant that this show had to ignore a lot of the previous 25 years in art. To see Fresh Paint was to see what art would be like if there had been no Happenings, no neo-dada, no Minimalism, no post-minimalism, no conceptual art, no process art, no performance art, no Arte Povera, no Earth Art, no Art & Technology, no Fluxus, etc.

So there was a lot to criticize about the show, but why bother? This was an exhibit that had its run 25 years ago. At the time, it engendered a lot of the same kind of discussion. The No Zoning catalog said this: "Sparking heated debate about inclusions versus exclusions, and the true definition of the "Houston School," the exhibition was nonetheless a watershed moment in the maturation of the Houston scene." (Caroline Huber and The Art Guys, "Merging Traffic: A Chronology", No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, 2009.) It's pointless to complain about it now.

The questions that should be asked, 25 years later, are these. What affect did the show have on Houston's art scene? Did the show represent the direction of Houston art going forward? (Or another way of asking it would be, was there a Houston School?) And what happened to the artists in the show?

The last question is the easiest to answer, thanks to a handy little research tool called Google. It let me down with 10 of the artists--I just couldn't find much on them. But I found quite a lot on most of the rest.

As you might expect, some of them have died, and some of them have moved away from Houston. At least eight of the artists are dead. A few of the older artists died of old-age related things, but at least a couple died in tragic circumstances. James Bettison got sick with bacterial meningitis in 1991 and finally died in 1997. (This obituary doesn't mention it, but later articles suggest Bettison had AIDS, and bacterial meningitus is known to attack people with weakened immune systems from HIV and AIDS.) Robin Utterback was murdered in 2007 by his partner, who then committed suicide.

At least 11 of the artists no longer live in Houston or the Houston area (although a few that moved only made it as far as Austin). One of the artists who moved and who is doing some really interesting work is Sara Stites. She is now living in Miami, and this is an example of her current work.

 

Derek Boshier is now in Los Angeles, but it always seemed a bit bogus to lump him into a "Houston School." He happened to be teaching here in he 80s, and doing some brightly colored, painterly works that could be lumped in with neoexpressionism. But he had already had a pretty distinguished career in the U.K. when he came here. The work he does now seems to take elements of his earlier Pop art and elements of his Houston-era expressionism and combines them. (Interestingly, Boshier was a well-loved teacher for two cartoonists I really respect, Scott Gilbert, who studied with him here in Houston, and Eddie Campbell, one of the most important cartoonists alive, who studied with Boshier in England.)

Among those who stayed in Houston are many of the respected elders of the Houston art scene--Sharon Kopriva, Gael Stack, Bas Poulos, etc. I've seen good shows from some of the artists--Kelly Alisons's bird paintings at G Gallery, for example, and Perry House's show at NauHaus last year. Earl Staley lives in Tomball now and has an amusing blog, Professor Art.



Kelley Alison, Oh Well, paint on book pages, 2010

In short, a lot of the artists from Fresh Paint are still around, still productive, still voices in the Houston scene. But not every story has been so great. In 2004, the Houston Press had a great article called "No Virgins, No Velvet" which was about the difficulties Latino artists had making it in Houston. As their main example, they wrote about the rise and fall of the career of Ibsen Espada. As far as I can tell, his last solo show was in 2002 at Sicardi.

A much more tragic story is that of Kermit Oliver, a painter in a classical style who specializes in religious themes. His son, Khrystian, murdered a man during a robbery in Nacogdoches, was tried, convicted, and executed in 2009. Khrystian had been Kermit's model in many paintings, including an image of Christ resurrected that hangs over the altar in the Morrow Chapel at Trinity Episcopal Church on Holman. (Oliver has had great success as a painter, however, including a solo exhibit at the MFAH in 2005.)

Did Fresh Paint point the way forward for Houston art? To an extent, yes. After all, most of the participants kept on painting, and many stayed here in Houston to practice their art. However, if one were to discuss the art produced in Houston between 1985 and now and to make a list of the most significant artists, it wouldn't be the Fresh Paint people. It wouldn't really be painters for the most part, or else it would be artists for whom painting was just a part of their overall practice. The Art Guys had their first solo show in 1983, for example. I think the most important work in Houston has been more conceptual, more performance based, and more community oriented. I think of Rick Lowe and Project Row Houses or Jim Pirtle and Notsuoh. I think sculpture in the broadest sense of the word (including social sculpture in the Joseph Beuys sense) has been pretty key. One need only think of artists like Paul Kittelson, Havel and Ruck, and Lee Littlefield. And fundamentally, the Houston art scene seems a lot more diverse and eclectic than what one would have expected from Fresh Paint. I feel pretty confident in saying that it would make no curatorial sense to try to do a big but tightly focused exhibit like Fresh Paint today. And indeed, what we now see are curators who assemble shows out of smaller, more focused groups of Houston artists.

Diem Chau at Peel Gallery

There is a category of art that I call "stunt art." It's art where the artist has done something so unlikely that you can't help but be impressed, whether or not the art is really good. Samuel Johnson said, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." We'll leave behind Johnson's 18th century notions of women; stunt art is to art like a walking dog is to great dancer. You are impressed with stunt art, but if you think too hard about it, you start doubting its value as art. A good example of stunt art would be the pencil lead sculptures that seemed to be sent all over the internet recently. 


So given this forthright condemnation of stunt art, I am chagrined to admit how much I like Diem Chau's carved crayons.



Diem Chau, untitled, carved Crayola crayon



Diem Chau, untitled, carved Crayola crayons

There is something appealing about Crayola's colors, and these tiny totems (any relation to her home in Seattle?) seem so fragile, so cute. 


Diem Chau, untitled, carved Crayola crayon


Diem Chau, untitled, carved Crayola crayons

I think it was easy for me to forgive her for being a stunt artist because some of the other art she had in the show. 


Diem Chau, Offering, porcelain cup, silk organza


These other works consist of porcelain plates and cups, over which an embroidered silk scrim is stretched. The embroidery is usually a line drawing of part of a person (the whole figure is never visible), looking casual and ordinary.



Diem Chau, Girl, porcelain plate, silk organza

Chau's drawings are clear and concise, leaving out as many details as possible while still being completely recognizable. Their spareness and the casualness of the presentation belies the high level of craft involved.


Diem Chau, Linger, porcelain plate, silk organza

What does this aesthetic--high craft mixed with a casual matter-of-factness--remind me of. I think one can look at certain modern comics artists, like Gabrielle Bell or many of the artists published in Mome. I think one can find work that operates similarly on Etsy. It's an approach I like a lot. This work has the kind of homey beauty that you think of grandmothers creating--needlepoint samplers, quilts, etc. It is art with a comforting domesticity.


Diem Chau, Float, porcelain plate, silk organza

As this was Peel Gallery, there was also something semi-useful for sale. Instead of their usual jewelry, which I don't have enough interest in to be able to judge, they had stereo speakers. Weird, huh? Something for all you audiophiles/design lovers.


Joey Roth, ceramic speakers and amp, 2009


These speakers not only look cool, but they crank pretty good, too. Joey Roth got other designers to make their own versions of his speakers, which were pretty interesting too.



Matthew Waldman, wood, fluorescent lamp, paint, porcelain speaker, 2010



Sruli Recht, cardboard speakers, 2010


I'd love to have those cardboard babies. But I figure that to own these, you have to have a huge space, and it has to be interior designed within an inch of its life. There are a few mod houses here and there where that would work--not mine though. I live is a cluttered space where books and art fight it out for existence. Still, those are some handsome speakers...

The Seventh House at Project Row Houses

The new "round" is up at Project Row Houses, and I have mixed feelings about it. Before I waffle at great length here, let me start with this: go see the show. Not every PRH show rewards a visit, but this one does. See it on a sunny day. You won't regret it. And if you don't read any further than this paragraph, that's OK.

Edgar Arceneaux and Nery Gabriel Lemus were the co-curators. The six artists apparently all know each other--the description of the show by the curators says, "The Seventh House was intended to be a vessel that expressed the nature and attributes of the dialogue that informed several years of numerous discrete collaborations between six artists." All but one of the artists studied at CalArts. Like many PRH shows, this one is at least somewhat political. That is to say, any given row house in this exhibit is likely to have an explicit political message. (Each artist had his or her own row house to use as an installation space.)  My problem is that I agree with Edward Winkleman, who wrote "most political art not only sucks, it can barely aspire to sucking" 


Andrea Bowers, Hope in Hindsight, installation, 2010


For instance, this piece by Andrea Bowers. She has painted the outside of the row house with something Obama said in 2006. Inside she has a poster image of a smiling African-American teenager wearing a tee-shirt that portrays Obama as a superhero. The poster also has an extremely hopeful text from Obama's inauguration. Then there are two videos playing, one showing crowds at the inauguration, and one showing the extremely disappointed African-American woman from a recent Obama town hall meeting. The basic message is, Obama, you let us down!


I'm sorry, this is a really shallow message. Anyone who expected Obama to be a superhero was deluding herself. Obama, working in the political environment of an unusually bad economy, managed to get through the biggest reform in health care and biggest financial industry reforms in decades. Honestly, if the economy wasn't so bad, liberals would be showering Obama with praise. What he's done is remarkable. But apparently some people--including Andrea Bower?--expected him to be Superman. 


But! Look at that house. It looks great. That's the thing. I am a hedonist; I like things that are visually beautiful or cool or whatever. Things that, when I look at them, I want to say, "Wow!" And this row house qualifies. This tension between super-obvious, kind-of-shallow-and-unnuanced political message on one hand and a big visual wow on the other typifies this PRH show.



Olga Koumoundouros, Accumulation of Mondays, installation, 2010


For example, look at this freaking red room by Olga Koumoundouros. I love it! The intensity of the red, the blue cables, the mysterious hanging objects. Walking into it from Holman Street just gives you this injection of visual energy. This photo barely does justice to it. But what does it mean? Let's refer to the text...

Human sustenance looms large in our emotional life as we strive for resources that are inequitably distributed [...] By indicating the drive for upward mobility that economic disparity in American society forces, "Accumulation of Mondays" operates as an exaltation of the socio-political idea that human sustenance is a right for all.

See, the hanging objects are grocery items wrapped with supermarket circulars. And the fact that some Americans struggle to get enough while some have plenty is bad. This message would be totally unintelligible without the written text, and as a political message it is utterly banal. And a message like this, with no solution attached, feels like the laziest kind of posturing. (That said, PRH is an exemplary organization in the sense that in addition to exhibiting political art devoted to social justice issues, it actually does something about it. Check out their website to see what PRH does for the community--it's amazing.)


So here I am dismissing Koumoundouros's message while loving her work. I can't easily reconcile these mixed feelings. But there it is. (Go see this work--it is striking and beautiful. And its beauty must be problematic for the artist. A work about the injustice of poverty shouldn't provide aesthetic pleasure, should it?)


Not everything in this show is overtly political. Rodney McMillian (the one artist of the six who didn't go to CalArts) has taken black vinyl and sewn it into an interior space for a row house. You start from the outside.



Robert McMillian, portal: a state of kemmering in the Council-era of corrosion, installation, 2010


Then you walk into this vinyl-covered space through the house. 



Robert McMillian, portal: a state of kemmering in the Council-era of corrosion, installation, 2010

What does this title,  portal: a state of kemmering in the Council-era of corrosion, mean? He writes "The project was created in thinking about the portal in terms of transformation: physical, psychological, and metaphysical." I think the title is referring to The Left Hand of Darkness, the feminist science fiction novel by one of my favorite authors, Ursula LeGuin. In this book, a representative from Earth is on a planet of humans who have been separated from the main stream of humanity for thousands of years. They have (either through evolution or through genetic engineering--I can't remember) become hermaphrodites, who for most of any given month are basically sexless, only becoming either male or female during two days of the month--a time called kemmer. Kemmering is is the state of having a gender, and pairs often swear to one another to be devoted during kemmering. 


The way McMillian's house is set up forces you to go through it, from the front door to the back. So I am interpreting this portal as the space where one resolves into a specific gender for kemmer. It's the biological decision space. Or is it? McMillian doesn't offer up a lot of clues, which is the way I like it.


(For a truly vicious review of McMillian's work, see this review by Leah Ollman of a show in L.A. at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. McMillian used sewn vinyl elements in that show as well. Suzanne Vielmetter is the gallery home for most of the artists in this show.)


So you can see why I have mixed feelings. And perhaps you see why I say go and see the show.

Anne J. Regan's Unusual Sleeping Arrangement

Anne J. Regan, Partner, Receiver, Cartographer, paper Regan slept with for 100 nights, 2010

I mentioned the Louise Bourgeois tribute show at Darke Gallery in my previous post. I liked the show quite a lot, but by the time I had time to write about it, it was down. (It's always a game of catch-up here at the Great God Pan...). There is a new show in the downstairs gallery (Marcelyn McNeil), but many of the pieces from the tribute show are still on view upstairs, including this piece by Anne J. Regan.

Artists have a bunch of different relationships with their materials. They might feel indifferent to them or in love with them. Regan takes loving her materials to a whole new level here be sleeping with a piece of paper for 100 days. The paper is in pretty good shape, considering. A piece like this, where the process is so important, really makes a viewer ask some questions. First of all--was Regan sleeping alone all this time? If not, what did her partner think? "Honey, we have to share the bed with this piece of paper, OK?"

Recent Acquistion: Encomium 1-3 by Rabéa Ballin

Rabéa Ballin, Encomium 1-3, black prisma color, charcoal, white conte, Galkyd on handmade paper, 2010

I first saw Rabéa Ballin's work in a show at Joan Wich gallery. The pieces were all highly detailed depictions of African-American woman's hairstyles, usually involving complex braids. They were drawn on very big pages with black prisma pencil. The hair was shown with no reference to the human body, except for the curve of the skull from which the hair sprang. Drawn this way, they almost seemed abstract! I really liked them, but I thought the use of the black prisma pencil. This kind of pencil doesn't make a super-dark line, so the resulting drawings didn't have extremely high contrast between light and dark.

After Joan Wich died, the gallery was closed down and its artists were scattered to the winds. Ballin ended up at Linda Darke Gallery, where she was included in the recent group show dedicated to Louise Bourgeois. I saw Encomium 1-3 and was knocked out. Adding charcoal to her drawings gives them a darker, heavier presence. This is amplified by the brown handmade paper. There is a compromise involved in using charcoal. You can't get quite the precise detail you can with most pencils. But in this triptych, it works great. When I saw it, I instantly thought of a rainbow--a rainbow of braided hair. So I bit the bullet and bought it. I look forward to seeing much more work from Ballin, and I'm really proud to have this piece.

Mat Brinkman's Beer

There is a long association of art and wine. Although here in the U.S., we often have this puritanical notion that art should educate us or enlighten us, one of art's main functions is pleasure. Ditto with alcohol. Alcohol and art are tools for hedonism. And when we start talking about wine, we add in another commonality, connoisseurship. So it was natural that the two should come together at some point, which is what happened in 1945 with Château Mouton Rothschild. In that year, they commissioned a young artist, Philippe Jullian, to create an illustration for their wine label.



Philippe Jullian, Château Mouton Rothschild 1945 wine label

After that point, Château Mouton Rothschild commissioned a new artist label each year by some of the greatest names in art. Here are a few.


Jean Cocteau, Château Mouton Rothschild 1947 wine label


André Masson, Château Mouton Rothschild 1957 wine label


Pierre Alechinsky, Château Mouton Rothschild 1966 wine label


Pablo Picasso, Château Mouton Rothschild 1973 wine label

This label was a tribute to Picasso, who died in 1973. I'm not sure if he actually created this image for Rothschild.


Niki de Saint Phalle, Château Mouton Rothschild 1997 wine label


Ilya Kabakov, Château Mouton Rothschild 2002 wine label

Château Mouton Rothschild started a tradition of limited edition artist labels. (Their labels are limited by the quantity of the vintage in a given year.)

So has anyone done this with art comics artists? Well, you can deduce that they have from the title of this post. A company called Alchemic Ale began releasing limited edition beer with artist-design silk-screened labels. The first was a beer with a label designed by Ron Regé, Jr., which came with a tiny little comic book attached. And in the past week or so, Alchemic Ale released a limited edition beer with a Halloween themed silkscreened label by Mat Brinkman.


Mat Brinkman, Bokrijks Ale bottle by Alchemic Ale, 2010

Mat Brinkman was one of the Fort Thunder artists. He's published two great books, Teratoid Heights and Multiforce, and as part of the group Forcefield, he was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

How is the beer? The Ron Regé, Jr. beer was Belgian abbey ale, and it was delicious. As for the Mat Brinkman beer? Well, my two bottle are cooling in the fridge right now--I will be drinking them later this afternoon. I'll give a review then.

One final note: Alchemic Ale is located here in Houston. Who would have guessed that the first alternative comics institution (after the late, lamented Apeshot Press) would be a beer importer?

Update: The Mat Brinkman-labels Bokrijks Ale is delicious--it has a young, fresh malty flavor.