Geoff Winningham at Koelsch Gallery

by Robert Boyd


Geoff Winningham, Houston Coliseum 1971, vintage gelatin silver print (1975) from a 35 mm negative, image size 12" x 18", uneditioned, from Friday Night at the Coliseum (1971)


Geoff Winningham has been taking photos of Mexico and Texas for decades. He started teaching at Rice in 1969 and is still a photography professor there. I took classes from him when I was an undergrad in the 80s. He radiated a love for photography then, and comes through in this show, which collects work from various points in his career, including this early photo, Houston Coliseum 1971. The Sam Houston Coliseum was a municipal sports arena downtown. This is where folks went to see wrestling, than as now a downmarket form of entertainment (the Coliseum was torn down in 1998 and replaced with the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, a much more upmarket entertainment venue). I saw many rock concerts at the Coliseum as a teenager and young adult, but I never saw wrestling there. But Winningham captured it--in this photo with the contrapposto stance, the shadowed face. the tiny wrestler up to the left--it feels almost surreal rather than documentary.


Geoff Winningham, Leadville, Colorado #2 1994, carbon pigment print (2012) on brushed aluminum from a 4x5 film negative, 24" x 30", #1 in an edition of 3 with 1 artist's proof

Leadville Colorado #2 may be my favorite photo in the show. He photographed this in an abandoned barn in Leadville, Colorado. The barn was locked, but there was enough space under the door that he could crawl in with his 4x5 view camera. Nothing in the barn appeared to be any newer than 1943 (he took this photo in 1994). The walls were covered with tattered bit of paper. The barn was dark--Winningham says that to get this picture (and the three others from the same barn that are in the show), he had to expose the negatives for 30 minutes.

The result is powerful. It will remind one of the paintings of W.M. Harnett and especially John Frederick Peto. They both painted flat surfaces with stuff attached to them--19th century bulletin boards in a sense. They both dealt with memory and identity, as defined by images and words. And this is the name of Winningham's show: Words and Pictures: 1971 - 2012.We don't know who pinned all these items to the wall in Leadville, but close examination of the photo lets us get to know that person. And the decayed condition reminds us that this person, who over time covered the walls with images and words that he considered important, is long dead. Memory is always in a battle with death. Peto frequently included a small photo of Lincoln in his paintings of bulletin boards. In the story "Metamophosis" by David Eagleman, it is explained that after you die, you go to an afterlife. But you can (and will) die again, in the "moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time." Somehow, this decaying collage of pinned up detritus seems, in Winningham's photo, a struggle against oblivion. We may not know his name, but we feel we know him in some way--all because Winningham crawled under a door and spent several hours photographing in a barn.


Geoff Winningham, Jerdy's Barber Shop, Port Arthur, Texas 2004, Fuji Archive print (2007) from a 4x5 film negative, image size 15.25" x 19.75", uneditioned

Again in Jerdy's Barber Shop we have the idea of things pinned to a wall that reflect (or create) identity--in this case, the identity of a place. This is the barber shop as a place for men (see Stuart Davis's Men Without Women). The Playboy centerfolds on the wall speak to that. What strikes me about both this photo and the previous one is that the person who owns the space (presumably Jerdy in this case) is a collector of images. This is something I relate to, and presumably something Winningham relates to as well. In fact, collectors of images include compulsive wall-coverers like Jerdy, photographers like Winningham, art critics like me, art collectors, and people with Pinterest accounts. We may not have a lot in common otherwise, but this image-gathering compulsion is an important part of us. Unfortunately, we can't go see Jerdy's collection. Winningham writes, "Jerdy Fontenot's unforgettable barber shop was destroyed by Hurricane Rite, the year after I took this photo."


Geoff Winningham, Transition 2008, archival inkjet (2008) print on German etching paper

Transition 2008 has the same density as Jerdy's Barber Shop, but feels more modern--or postmodern. When I was a student, I thought of Winningham as a documentary photographer who made compelling images of what he could see through his viewfinder out in the world. I didn't see him as postmodern. His work was close to the subject, pretty much unmediated. It was unposed. It was often about finding the perfect image, like Cartier-Bresson. But this selection has me thinking that Winningham was a postmodernist all along. This "photo" is a good example. Transitions consist of about 600 photographic images, arranged chronologically, of Obama's inauguration. he took the photos off a big screen TV and then collaged them. So unlike any classical notion of photography (one moment in time, seen by the photographer, captured on film) we have an event that took many hours, photographs of other images, as seen by other cameramen.

But this is true of most of the work in this show to some extent. So much of it consists of photos of someone else's images or words, or someone else's vernacular curation of images. It has really made me reevaluate Winningham as a photographer. His work, which I always admired, seems so much richer after seeing this exhibit.


Geoff Winningham, Chiapas, Mexico 1983, archival inkjet print on Moab Enrada rag paper from an 8" x 10" film negative, image size 11.75" x 15", #1 print of an edition of 5

Chiapas, Mexico 1983 stands out for its simple composition. Unlike many of the pieces above, there isn't an all-over composition nor is the image dense with information. With the intersecting diagonals and horizontal elements, it comes across as a minimalist design. But the concerns of the other pieces in the show are still present. We get the written word--"Superior" and the sense of photographing someone else's art. This image is, in fact, hand-painted on the wall.

There are so many great FotoFest exhibits up now or opening in the next couple of weeks. Many of them are excellent. It would be difficult for any one person to see them all (even me). But if you're reading this, go see Words and Pictures: Photographs 1971 - 2012 at Koelsch Gallery. It's a moving, eye-opening show.

Death-Haunted Houston: Dianne David, Toni Beauchamp, Mark Aguhar

by Robert Boyd

I apologize to all readers about how much death there has been on this blog lately. With Moebius, Dale Yarger, Ken Price, Charlie Stagg and Mike Kelley, it's been a parade of obituaries around here. With Dale, I've been lucky to be in contact with so many other people who loved him. I never knew Charlie Stagg, but since he died, I've heard so many good stories about the man that I really wish I had.

Unfortunately, Death didn't head down to Padre for Spring Break. Dianne David, Toni Beauchamp and Mark Aguhar all died recently. You might not be familiar with all three of these names, but each one is a person who had an affect on Houston's art, and each represents a different generation.



The Dianne David Gallery with a Roy Fridge show from 1966

Dianne David (1938 or 39 to 2012) was the founder of an early modern gallery in Houston, David Gallery. The David Gallery existed from 1963 until 1982 and gave the first Houston shows to a wide range of artists, including Dorman David (her brother), Bob Camblin, Lucas Johnson, Earl Staley, Roy Fridge, Jim Love, David McManaway, Charles Pebworth, Donald Roller Wilson, William T. Wiley, Larry Rivers, Seymour Leichmann, and Guy Johnson. And that's about all I know about it (and her). But this is enough. These are some of the most important artists to emerge in Houston during the 60s and 70s. Gallerists who show local artists are important--they are gatekeepers and taste-makers. Starting a gallery that shows contemporary cutting-edge art by Houston artists is never a sure thing, and in 1963 it must have seemed an extremely risky enterprise indeed. Thank goodness Dianne David did it.


Good, an anthology of writings about Houston edited by Toni Beauchamp

Toni Beauchamp (1945 to 2012) had a definable effect on Houston and its art, but it's hard to put one label on her. Glasstire called her a "patron," but she was much more than that. Even though she and Dianne David were born less than 10 years apart, David started her gallery young (she was 24 or 25) while Beauchamp waited a long time to make her mark. That's why I count them as belonging to different generations. David was a pioneer. Beauchamp's work built on the work of pioneers. For example, her MA thesis was about James Johnson Sweeney, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in the 60s, who brought the museum into the modern age. This kind of local art history continued in many of the publications she worked on for the Blaffer, where she was an assistant director. She was instrumental in bringing modern public art to Houston, and served on the boards of many key local arts institutions. And she edited one of the best books about Houston, Good. When she died, she was working on a similar book about Marfa, which is on schedule to be published.


Mark Aguhar, Transy Girlfriend Looks (Colin S.), watercolor, ink, gouache & lipstick on paper, 2011

 Mark Aguhar (1987 to 2012) was a young artist whose work I had seen only once, at Lawndale in a solo exhibit called M2M in early 2011. I didn't write about that show because its theme of gay male sexuality was something I couldn't relate to. I felt like anything I wrote would lack insight, to say the least. Aguhar was from Houston and studied art at UT. When she died, she was getting her MFA at the University of Illinois. Aguhar, like many artists of her generation, had a large presence online. Aside from her professional web page where you can see her many drawings and sculptures, she had a blog, Blogging for Brown Gurls. Its subtitle was "I'm starting a new blog and it's all about self-acceptance." It's terrible when someone so young dies--and when it's an artist, we are left wondering what kind of work lay in his future that will now never be made.

Days like this make you feel like death is stalking Houston. Drink a toast tonight to David, Beauchamp and Aguhar, OK?

A Note on the Late Work of Jules Olitski

by Robert Boyd

When I think of the work of Jules Olitski (whose work is currently on view at the MFAH in an exhibition called Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski up through May 6), I think of works like Monkey Woman (1962)--blobs of color soaked into unprimed canvas. This is the Olitski of art history as we generally think of it. (That standard history might go like this: Modernism begins in the late 19th century. It moves unevenly through the 20th century to greater and greater levels of abstraction and essentialism, reaching a conceptual dead end in the early 60s, at which time post-modernism's anti-essentialist, anti-Kantian, theatrical approaches take over.) Olitski is an exemplar of the late modernist idea that a painting's essential qualities are arrangement of colors and flatness.


Jules Olitski, Monkey Woman, 1964, acrylic on canvas

The thing is, Olitski just ignored that grand art historical narrative. He quickly gave up "flatness" (some of his later paintings are so heavily impastoed that I  worried that the weight of the paint would tear the enormous canvases).

The museum has a whole wall of his late paintings (Olitski died in 2007 at age 84). Before I saw this show, a painter friend of mine who had seen it characterized these paintings as "fraught." I wondered what he meant until I saw them. The word I would have used was "anxious," but we're close enough.


Jules Olitski, With Love and Disregard: Splendor, 2002, acrylic on canvas

As you can see in With Love and Disregard: Splendor, he poured paint onto the canvas. This was the technique used in all the the late paintings displayed at the MFAH. We see big round blobs of color, but we also see shaky strings of paint on the edges of each blob. The jittery quality of these lines is one reason they pictures feel anxious to me. Another reason is the craquelure--the "cracks" that are visible in some of the round blobs (not so much in this painting, but in some of the other late paintings in the show). This effect can be deliberately induced. For example,you can induce cracks by putting a fast-drying paint on top of a slow drying paint (different color paints dry at different rates). I assume Olitski did this deliberately, but who knows for sure. In any case, the jagged cracks contribute to the anxious surface.

This is an artist who spent a lifetime creating works that largely washed over the viewer with gentle waves of color. Why at the end of his life are his paintings so different? Was it a fear of death, or new anxiety about the world (these were painted post 9/11). Or were these jagged, shaky marks the way he painted for physical reasons (perhaps he had Parkinson's, or perhaps age alone made it harder for him to hold a brush steady). Or possibly, these were just formal moves by Olitski, without connection to the artist's mind or body or the state of the world. It could be any of these things, I suppose. Whatever the reason, it is interesting to see how an artist you think you know changes over the course of his life.

One Last Lone Star Performance Explosion post

I think Jonatan Lopez filmed this.



Yes, that is John Gregory Boehme attempting to carry me around the room. I'm both too heavy and too tall for him... Nice guy, I have to admit.--Robert Boyd

What I did at the Lone Star Explosion Biennale: Day 3 (NSFW)

Dean Liscum

Lone Star Performance Explosion day three's dominating theme seemed to be food and catharsis. By the third day, I figured out the timing (the artists never start on time) and arrived in time to catch all the acts even though the first thing listed on the bill was Daniel-Kayne's Three Day Fast. By my calculations he was a day and a half into it, which made me a day and a half late.

If there was an explanation, I missed it. So what I saw is what you get: denuding Fiji bottles of there labels, decanting the bottled water into a larger container, performing a ritual (meditation? possibly prayers? the striking of a gong?) re-decanting the water back into the Fiji bottles from whence it came, and placing them on the alter.

Daniel-Kayne in the window of Dean's

Altar-making

More precious than oil, you just wait.

I'm not sure if this was a protest against designer water (Fiji being one of the most egregiously ungreen) or simply a reminder of how vital water is to us as humans. Whether you worship it or not, water and its future is worth expending a little mental energy on.

I stepped into Notsuoh for Chicken 'N Dinner in which Nancy Douthey played a talking chicken as it described and acted out how to prepare itself for dinner.

A floured Nancy Douthey

Dinner done, the audience moved next door to Dean's and was greeted by a toilet on stage. Stevie and Brian McCord then mounted the stage, sat down, and started eating from the toilet. Their dinner table talk consisted of discussions about food: access to and experiences of it. As they shoveled the contents of the toilet into their mouths with their hands, occasionally endearingly feeding each other, they discussed the plethora of grocery stores in and around River Oaks. They discussed the food desserts in Houston in places like the Third Ward. Stevie discussed the first times she ate meat: first pork (not so good), then chicken (coming up it still tastes remarkably like chicken), and finally beef, which took--she still loves it. Brian, basically, made a whole lot of snide remarks about whatever Stevie said. (I'm not sure if it's supposed to be part of the performance, but I could tell they're married.)

Brian and Stevie McCord
No really, it's soy.

When they were done (and I'm not sure if they cleaned their bowl), they wiped off with a napkin and exited stage right.

The end result was just as appetizing as the meal.

By the end, I and apparently the rest of the audience, was ready for a drink. As I was approaching the bar, a group of people who were all dressed in black stormed the bar. They were lead by a woman standing in a shopping cart. Since before I arrived, this group had been outside the bar spouting some sort of temperance and abstinence jibberish. "This leads to veneral disease" one shouted while pointing to Notsuoh. (I'd heard the bathrooms at Notsuoh were sketchy, but I didn't think they were that bad.)

I will buy any book with the silhouette
of a hatchet on its cover.

The woman in the shopping cart got out of her chariot and on the bar. Once stable, she pulled out an axe, brandishing it and castigating the crowd. Then my brain clicked on. That wasn't an axe, it was a hatchet. And that wasn't an abstinence crusader, it was Emily Sloan excellently disguised and performing her piece Carrie Nation Hatchitation.

Alcohol leads to debauchery!
No shit. That's why I'm in this bar.

After she was de-barred, Sloan shouted slogans and lead her band of teetotaler (and myself) to the second floor of Notsuoh, which was the venue for the remainder of the performances.

On the second floor, waiting atop a 15 ft. ladder was the performance artist, Julia Wallace in dark sunglasses and a black dress. Music began and she performed a sort of ballet dance on the ladder. It wasn't Cirque du Soleil, but it certainly wasn't a drunken maintenance man either. It was tightly choreographed, similar to a number of pieces she's done with sexyATTACK.

Done with the dance, she descended the ladder into a pile of dirt and glitter. After perfunctorily removing her sunglasses and dress, she scooped up the dirt and smeared it on her body. Sufficiently slathered, she danced around the ladder and vocalized.

The nudity and the slathering were sensual, but she had me up on the ladder. That portion of the performance captivated my mind.

While a crew of people removed the ladder and the dirt to prepare for the next act, I grabbed a plate of wonderful Pakistani food prepared by Nusrat Malik and then spent 5 minutes trying to navigate the drink-ticket bar set up. My quest for a ticket and a justification of why was a performance piece in itself.

What's a festival without fantastic food?
Nusrat and her assistant Dale

Gim Gwang Cheol took the stage and began unfurling a tape of some type (adhesive? magnetic?). After he'd reached a certain length, he stopped.

Gim Gwang Cheol unraveling a spool of  tape.

Then he methodically and matter-of- factly wrapped it tightly around his head until he had used all the tape that he had unfurled.

Gim with head wrapped, raising his arms to form a cross.
I'm not sure if it was a religious reference or one to the movie Platoon.

As with his other works, I have no idea what it meant, but the slow, subtle, steady pace of it mesmerized me.

Dressed like every middle school physical education (P.E.) teacher I've ever had, John Gregory Boehme strode on to the stage with his arms full of a tennis racket, a golf club, a hockey stick, and a baseball bat. He situated the equipment on a block of lard, which was already there. After all the implements were properly positioned, he tore a hunk of lard from the block and fashioned it into a ball. He repeated this exercise until he had several balls of lard (sounds like a gift one of my rural uncles tried to give me in the 70s) that ranged from baseball to golf ball size.

Coach Boehme

Boehme then proceeded to hit them with the various sports equipment. Some as they lay on the ground. Others, he coaxed audience members to toss his way and he attempted to blast them into the crowd.

Having played all the balls, Boehme stripped out of his sweat suit and put on slacks, a tie, and a jacket. He then placed some sort of breathing apparatus over his nose and mouth, coated his head with 6 inches of lard, pressed a tennis racket, golf club, and a hockey stick into it and then proceed to read a list of the habits of highly successful people or some such group.

Basically, the performance metaphorically captured my entire experience of middle school.

The adolescent flashback, however, didn't stop there. Orion Maxted took the stage with a small card board box. He placed the box in the middle of the stage, extracted a banana from it, held the banana above his head and proclaimed, "banana."  Simply enough. It reminded me of Wittgenstein's language games.

Orion Maxted and his banana

Until he pulled out an orange and proclaimed it a ""banana" and then labelled the box itself a "banana" and began retrieving audience members, bullying them onto the stage, and christening them "banana."

Early "bananas"

Ultimately, he cajoled or coerced just about everyone and everything in the space into participating in this humorous but insidious game, in which he insisted on a version of "the banana truth" and we went a long with it.

peer-pressured or artist pressured "bananas"

To underscore the whole exercise, he wrapped the entire crowd in a ring of tape. All we were missing was a bow and he could have presented us as present to the most debased politicians as an example of how easy it is to get people to go along with your version of the truth as long as you insistently repeat it. Thank goodness he's not running for president.

The stage cleared of "bananas." A man in white paint and a loin cloth set up a small table with various jars and cans of food, most notably mayonnaise. Then Jim Pirtle took the stage and began reading a story of catharsis.

Pirtle with loin-clothed assistant

I'm not going to summarize the story because to do so would make it sound both archetypal and trite. I, who know Jim only as the owner of Notsuoh and who usually has a harder time keeping his balance than I do, found it moving. I will say it did involve a discussion with a virtual "brother" from Russia, a lot of mayonnaise being smeared on Jim, tears (catharsis usually does), more mayonnaise, some personal history, and the quote "this place used to be about chaos and now it's all clean!"...and the second floor of Notsuoh was impressively clean.

...and Russian twin/doppelganger makes three

Then Jim put on a wig and sang a song as a Russian bear. (He'd actually make a pretty good lounge singer if lounge singers wore bad wigs and stumbled around the stag while singing.) What can I say. It worked. Sometimes, you just gotta be there.

Pirtle channeling his musical, inner Russian bear

The next performance was A Geometry of Painting by Nestor Topchy, Marianna Lemesoff, Greg Henry, and Dawn Bell. Armed with paint trays full of what looked like International Klein Blue paint, Marianna and Dawn took their places on either side of the stage size-canvas that covered the floor. Nestor and Greg stood before each, respectively and the ladies coated their backs with the paint.

Marianna bluing the back of Nestor

The two men then met at various spots on the mat\canvas. Using Judo and Aikido movements, they proceeded to paint the canvas by throwing each other.

human painting implements
(I hope they got free drinks at the bar.)

It was a very deliberate act of composition. It consisted of moments of contemplation and consultation followed by a quick, forceful throw and the reverberating slap. Then a caesura involving the re-application of paint and a repetition of contemplation and kinetic composition.

Nestor and Greg putting their backs into their art.

The performance went on for sometime. The crowd got into it ("Oh no you didn't," "you walked right into that one," and the like). Nestor politely requested silence. The piece reminded me of Yves Klein's blue paintings with nude females. However, in my opinion, where as the "beauty" of Klein's piece is ultimately the canvas, the beauty of Topchy's piece was in the making.

The evening ended with 1KA performing some electronic-metal generated music. The sounds were at times screeching, at times thundering.

It was a pitch-perfect coda for my experience of the LSP Biennale.

Goin' Mobile with the Lens Capsule

by Robert Boyd

FotoFest is upon us. It opens officially on March 16, but many satellite shows have already opened. And one gallery has openings every week from from March 3rd through March 31st. It's called The Lens Capsule, and it's a gallery in a truck. (I wonder if this pop-up marathon takes its inspiration from the food trucks that we see nowadays at almost every gallery or museum show opening.) It is a project of two 2011 UH MFA graduates, Emily Peacock and Britt Ragsdale.


The Lens Capsule at Lawndale, March 9

Each week, The Lens Capsule will feature a mini-exhibit of a different emerging photographer. You can see where they will set up on their calendar. Their next show is tomorrow (Thursday) at The Houston Center for Photography with photographer Teresa Munisteri.


The Lens Capsule at Isabelle Court, March 3

The set-up is minimal and clever. Inside the truck, walls have been constructed out of some kind of board (I couldn't tell whether it was plywood or masonite or some other kind of board). This board is white and extends from a couple of feet above the floor to about five and a half or six feet up. It is attached to the wall of the truck somehow. This is your typical U-Haul type truck, which has an uneven wall with regular intrusions. That means that there is a gap between the board and the truck's inner wall. This is where the light are place.


The Lens Capsule interior at Lawndale, March 9

The lights are on bendable metal necks. They are battery powered lights, and the battery-pack is slotted between the board wall and the truck wall. It's a tight fit, which is what holds the light in place. So in the end, you have an elegant (if a bit cramped) exhibition space using the absolute minimum amount of hardware and fixtures.


The Lens Capsule interior at Isabella Court, March 3

This is such a good idea that I hope other artists/curators copy it. What better way to have a micro-pop-up gallery. If someone were willing to shell out between twelve and fifteen thousand, they could own their own pop-up gallery (and perhaps start up a small art transportation business on the side).

For now, you have five more chances to see The Lens Capsule and the artists Peacock and Ragsdale have chosen for their mobile curatorial project.