The Great God Pan Is Dead

Monday, January 13, 2014

2013: A Highly Personal Top 10 List

Robert Boyd

Usually top 10 lists are about one type of thing. Top 10 movies, top 10 books, etc. In the past we've run best-of lists for visual art and performance art. This year, I decided to follow Griel Marcus's example and just list anything I wanted, regardless of genre. This blog is still an art blog, however, so art dominates the list. But it's not all art exhibits. These are exhibits, books, comics, etc., that appealed to me mightily this year.

The list is not in any particular order. There are many items on the "honorable mention" list that could easily have gone in the top 10 list if I thought about it long enough. And these items reflect both my own taste, idiosyncratic as it may be, and what I had access to. (I'm always impressed by critics who seem to have, for example, seen every movie released in a given year. But I'm an amateur part-time art critic, and I know I missed some great exhibits in the past year.) So the way to view this list is not as a top 10 list but rather as a list of things that I considered good in 2013.

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliot and Robert Gober (The Menil) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle by Chuck Smith (powerHouse Books)

It was a Forrest Bess year for me this year. The Menil put together a fine exhibit, which included within it an exhibit originally curated by Robert Gober for the Whitney Biennial. I suspect that the exhibit was what prompted Chuck Smith to turn his 1999 documetary into a book. The documentary is good, but the book is so much better--including complete texts of many Forrest Bess letters and tons of photographs. For me, the exhibit and the book inspired three posts that I'm proud of--first a review of the show, then a recounting of legendary newspaperman Sig Byrd's visit with Bess, and finally an account of my attempt to find the location of Bess's long-gone shack on East Matagorda Bay.

12 Events by the Art Guys

The Art Guys have been a partnership for 30 years. This year, they decided to step away from the baroque style of their more recent projects and do 12 "simple" events. Some involved endurance (walking the length of Little York, the longest street in Houston; doing standup comedy for 8 hours straight), some involved repeating the same absurd action over and over (riding around the 610 Loop over and over for 24 hours; walking around the crosswalks at the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft for 8 hours); and some were sui generis (wearing portable fences as they walked around city hall; moving objects counterclockwise from the southernmost, westernmost, northernmost and easternmost points of the city). They concluded by restaging their first event, The Art Guys Agree on Painting, as The Art Guys Agree On Painting, Again, This Time From Thirty Feet Up. 12 Events wasn't just a celebration of their long partnership, it was a tribute to the site of that partnership, the city of Houston.

The Property by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly)

This graphic novel (which I reviewed here) by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan took the form of a madcap romantic comedy (a delightful one) to deal with the fraught issue of the history of relations between Polish Jews and Gentiles. (See Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945by Tony Judt for a grimmer recitation of this distressing history.) The opening and closing scenes on the airplane (coming to Poland and returning to Israel demonstrate the duality between frivolity and seriousness that typifies the story. Of course, it helps that the art is beautiful and the visual storytelling lively. It's Modan's best comic from a career of excellent work, and it suggests where she can go in the future. My main worry now is that she may end up seduced away from comics to film--Modan would be a great screenwriter/director.

Sean Shim-Boyle's Salt House at Project Row Houses

To describe what Sean Shim-Boyle did with his Project Row Houses installation is to minimize its impact on the viewer. Nonetheless, here goes. Shim-Boyle took inherent elements of the row house and limited his installation to minimal use of existing elements. Specifically he put a second chimney in and added a new light source in the floor. But the magic was actually being in the space. The angled chimney was uncannily like the original chimney, and by its position made the familiar boxy room of the row house utterly strange. Devon Britt-Darby wrote in Art + Culture Texas, "The criss-crossing lines created by the chimneys, the beams, the windows and shadows give seemingly every vantage point an enchanting division of spaces that cries out for a viewfinder."

Hillerbrand+Magsamen, untitled, 2013, plastic toys, mostly from McDonalds Happy Meals, dimensions variable

Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Stuffed at Brand 10 Artspace

When I saw the above piece in Fort Worth, I instantly thought of Richard Long circles of slate. Long's work suggests to me the deep geologic time of the earth. Hillerbrand+Magsamen's Happy Meal toy version suggests another kind of time--call it "mess time"--the tiny period of time it takes for children to spread toys evenly over the floor space of one's home. It's work that makes you smile, but it also makes you think about the stuff that fills our lives. Mary Magsamen and Stephen Hillerbrand often use their two children in their work (they should get credit!), and much of the work is about being a suburban nuclear family. (I wonder how their work will change when their kids enter adolescence. So far, though, they seem like real good sports about working with mom and dad.) This exhibit was especially about the possessions that fill up a suburban home--the piles of stuff that fill a house, end up in garage sales, Good Will stores, and landfills. It was a playfully absurd exhibit.

Jeremy DePrez, left: Untitled (Milton), 2013, oil and wax on canvas, 82 x 36 inches; and right: Untitled (Harriet), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 36 inches

Jeff Elrod's and Jeremy Deprez's Fantasy Island at Texas Gallery

I'm not going to pretend I really understand Jeremy DePrez's artwork. On the contrary, I feel like whenever I try to analyze it, I fall flat on my face. That was the case when I looked at his work in his MFA exhibit, and it was the case when I saw his paintings in the Boredom show at Lawndale. I wish I could say I had an "aha!" moment seeing his work displayed with Jeff Elrod's at Texas Gallery. But I did have a revelation: whatever it is that DePrez is doing, I like it. The slightly irregular look of his canvases in this show (the stretchers weren't straight, the parallel lines were broken up) gives the work a carefully constructed feeling of slackness. They get it right by not getting it right. Oh, and the Jeff Elrods were excellent, too.

Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize by Sean B. Carroll (Crown)

Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and in just over a month defeated the French and British armies there. Albert Camus was the editor of a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jacques Monod, a biologist, was recruited into the Resistance group Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. When the various Resistance organizations were joined under an umbrella organization, the French Forces of the Interior, Monod was the chief of staff. The writer and biologist didn't meet each other until after the war, however, when they became close friends. Camus continued to write and remained an activist, turning against Communism in the face of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Monod fought a public battle against the ideologically-motivated Soviet pseudo-science of genetics known as Lysenkoism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Monod went on to win a Nobel Prize in medicine for his pioneering genetics work. Only a brief portion of the book that considers the personal friendship of the two men. Instead, Carroll weaves their life stories into the history of the French Resistance, the Hungarian rebellion, the study of genes, etc. In addition to showing the intersections between these two brilliant men, this book manages to show how the advances in biology in the period from just before World War II through the 60s are as much a part of history as anything else--that despite the split of the humanities and science into "two cultures," it is possible to consider them together fruitfully. I could not put Brave Genius down once I started--it was the most compelling book I read all year.

Brandon Araujo's exhibit at Domy Books and New Paintings by Brandon, Dylan, Guillaume and Isaiah at Spring Street Studios

Araujo's paintings have sneaked up on me over the course of the year. I know I have probably seen his work before, but the first time I noticed was at the exhibit at Domy (it was really a "Brandon" show, but Domy was still there). And I wasn't totally sure what to think about it. Then I saw more of his work in the Spring Street group show and finally visited his studio during Artcrawl. Araujo is an artist who is working out his own style, but he is also one whose work has a relationship to work by other artists around his age in Houston. So trying to understand his work is related to the task of trying to understand the work of some of his peers (among whom, the artists in the Spring Street show--Dylan Roberts, Guillaume Gelot and Isaiah López). But these artists aren't the germ of some regional school of painters--there are artists all over who are working in similar areas of abstract painting--Nathan Green, for example. They are sometimes called New Casualists or New Provisionalists. I'm a little loathe to put Araujo in that pigeonhole, particularly so early in his career. I can't put my finger on what I like about it, but the thing is, every time I see his work, I want to see more.

Ken Price, Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay, 14.5 x 15 x 14 in.

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center

If you read much about contemporary art, you will have seen over the past few decades a reduction of discussion of craftsmanship in the conversation. This goes doubly so for arts that are traditionally considered part of the craft tradition. But the considerable rise in the critical fortunes of Ken Price recently suggests that the the fortunes of craft may be changing. Price, who died in 2012 just a few months before his retrospective opened at LACMA, was one of the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery. His work has a jazzy West Coast vibe. It's playful and fun. As a ceramicist, Price would make overtures to the traditions of the crafts (his highly abstracted "cups," for example) but was also quite willing to toss tradition completely overboard when it suited him. Seeing a lifetime's work from Price was one of the best museum experiences I had all year.

Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks

This is an incomplete comics narrative. Every now and then, Horrocks will throw up a new page on his website. He just posted page 103. The first page was posted in 2009. So why call this a 2013 work? I've been following it for quite a while with great pleasure, but it was this year that it really electrified me. The very first page in 2013 plops the protagonist Sam in the middle of an orgy with 50 beautiful green Venusian women (the page reproduced above is the only "SFW" page from that sequence). Now if someone had described this too me, I'd say it sounded like a lame pile of adolescent fantasy wish-fulfillment, and I certainly wouldn't imagine that a cartoonist as sensitive and possessing of moral rectitude as Dylan Horrocks would draw such a thing. And yet, here it is. It isn't ironic--it's eroticism is meant to be erotic. But within the context of the narrative, it works--especially as you see how the rest of 2013's pages unfold. Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is about the ability of comics to be wish fulfillment. The first part is essentially realistic, a story of a blocked cartoonist. But there is an abrupt switch to the fantastic, specifically magic realism in the sense of Italo Calvino.This feels like it is shaping up to be a sequel of sorts to Hicksville, Horrock's graphic novel that posited that there was an secret art history of comics. That Horrocks continually creates major works about cartoonists and comics may seem solopsistic, and the character Sam does in many ways seem to be a stand-in for Horrocks himself. But the work is playful in the same way that If on a winter's night a traveler is playful, and that draws me in.

Honorable mention

9.5 Thesis on Art by Ben Davis (Haymarket Books)
Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me directed by Drew DeNicola and Oliva Mori
Inside Llewyn Davis directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
The Core Fellows exhibit at the Glassell School of Art featuring Andrea Behm, Anna Elise Johnson, Jang Soon Im, Madsen Minax, Miguel Amat, Ronny Quevedo, Senalka McDonald and Tatiana Istomina
North of South, East of West directed by Meredith Danluck
The uncontrollable nature of grief and forgiveness (or lack of) by Kathryn Kelley (Art League)
Within Without the Space of a Corner by Nick Kersulis (Devin Borden Gallery)
Tracing Our Pilgrimage by Kermit Oliver (Art League)
Ad Reinhardt: How to Look: Art Comics with an essay by Robert Storr (Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner)
Not How It Happened by Joel Ross and Jason Creps (Tiny Park)
A chain of non-events by Katie Wynne (Lawndale)
World Map Room by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)
Zinefest

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Thursday, January 2, 2014

UH Sculpture: Performance and a Precipice

Betsy Huete

I’m a sculpture student—a grad student at that. Bogged down, stressed out, aloof and largely unaware of anything except the date of the next critique, I spend most of my time wandering around our studio space searching for materials and inspiration, my ear buds lodged firmly into my ears, listening to awful (fantastic) top 40s music while politely smiling and waving at passersby. At the University of Houston, the graduate students share studio space with the block students (at least in the sculpture department), which are a select group of undergraduates who endure an intensive three semester program to finish with a BFA—a program that, quite frankly, I wish I had had in my undergraduate experience. But while we share the same space, due to our divergent schedules and classes our conversations are limited, and at best we catch glimpses of each other’s work in passing on critique days. So when Jana Whatley handed me the card for their senior show Floor Plan, I decided to go. I was curious, and although I really wasn’t sure what to expect, I thought it unlikely that I would want to write about it.

And I had my suspicions about the show being in our very studio space, South Park Annex. An elderly, thoroughly weathered building relegated to the far reaches of campus, South Park Annex is UH’s sculptural headquarters. Also—ask the local pizza delivery guys—it’s nearly impossible to find: it literally shares an address with a nearby parking garage. Furthermore, the previous semester’s senior show was at brewery, and drinking alcohol is fun. But upon entering the space it became clear why they chose it. Filled to the brim with large sculptural works and full-scale installations among many other pieces, it would be unlikely for this group to locate an exhibition venue that would comfortably house their work.

Among the clunkier works in the show is Drag 4 (Queer Monster or I Eat Zach Galifiabreakfast) (2013) by Dan Harp. It comprises a dilapidated, upright piano with three antiquated television sets mounted on top. Each TV quietly loops images of men in popular culture, images I should probably recognize. But the only one I did recognize was the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs; it was the scene where he tucks his penis between his legs and sashays around his bedroom in heels and makeup. Regardless of the clarity of the references, it is clear that Harp is referencing men adopting queer and/or abject personas or identities. But after spending a few minutes with the work it became obvious that something was missing. This didn’t feel like the work but instead the prop or stage set for something else. And sure enough, across the room was his performance documentation. The performance changes everything because it quickly becomes clear that the queerest aspect of the work isn’t the strange video work but Harp himself. A burly, scruffily bearded guy snugly fitting himself into a painfully heterosexual brown blazer, he sits at the piano and proceeds to play a familiar yet unrecognizable song while the looped videos run overhead. His completely out of tune singing felt desolate, hermetic, and vulnerable, taking the piece down a strikingly painful and personal road. And the materials list is equally revealing: he calls the piano an altar, suggesting worship. But his performance seems less religious than mournful. What exactly is Harp mourning? His own queer desires? Or maybe the fact that he doesn’t have any? Is it valid to want to be strange or harbor secrets? Here he raises interesting and not easily answerable questions. But one thing is certain: given that so much information is lost without the performance and that the lush imagery of the videos as well as the lavish browns of the decaying piano are lost in the documentation, the only way this work should exist is live—not as an installation and not as a video. To be fair I left before the end of the night and Harp said he would perform by the end of it, and I hope he did. Drag 4 also feels arguably out of context within a gallery format. What would happen if Harp performed in a place like Notsuoh? A forlorn drag show? The corner of a seedy bar? Regardless of how the work manifests itself, this seems like fertile territory for Harp to be exploring.

Dan Harp, Drag 4 (Queer Monster or I Eat Zach Galifiabreakfast), 2013, Performance with video moments and piano altar, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist

Another artist who engages with enticing forms of intimacy and seclusion is Noelle Dunahoe. From afar there appears to be a flimsy, modestly large geometric abstraction made of wood and cardboard. But there are square holes scattered throughout the cardboard, and it doesn’t take long to realize that these holes aren’t solely formal decisions: they also function as peep holes. Peering through the peepholes, Dunahoe has staged a miniature living room with tiny, model scale living room furniture. But she hasn’t illuminated the interior of the box. Relying on the exterior light penetrating the peepholes, the living room reads as muted silhouettes. It evokes the disturbing yet somehow comforting moments of solitude one feels while sitting alone, silently waiting for night to fall.

As I traversed across the entrance hallway to the other side, I encountered another of Dunahoe’s pieces, Horn (2013). Phallic and flaccid, soft and aggressive, light and overbearing, it’s a horn-like sculpture made of canvas that juts from the wall. But it felt confined and neutered, as if it was made to be a wall ornament against its will. So when she told me that it is intended to be a mask and she anticipates photographing herself and others with it on, I immediately felt desperate to learn more. What will the subject be wearing? What environment will they be photographed in? Will they confront other people in the shot or will they stand alone? While Harp’s work demands live performance, Horn requires itself to be frozen in photographs. I hope she takes them, and I hope they get exhibited somewhere.

As I turned away from Horn, I smelled dinner. Being someone who gets overly excited about food, I rabidly followed the trail, stopping dead in my tracks at Randi Long’s Comforteur (2013). Here she has literally mashed together two domestic comforts: mashed potatoes and a heated comforter. It’s soothing and disgusting and gluttonous and overwhelming. A fetish of familiarity, it seemed lonely parked up against the wall, and I was left craving more information. Is the work asking for a participant? What if Long just started eating it? What if she wrapped herself in the blanket, smothering her body in warmth and food? What would that tell us? It’s hard to say what it would add, but if anything it probably would be more provocative and uncomfortable. And after spending time with her sound work on Sound Cloud, it seems that Long has an interest in encasing her viewer in a perpetual, droning climax—an arresting discomfort.

Randi Long, Comforteur, 2013, Milk, butter, potatoes, straws, comforter, steam, 4’x3’x2’, Courtesy of the artist

Randi Long, Comforteur (detail), 2013, Milk, butter, potatoes, straws, comforter, steam, 4’x3’x2’, Courtesy of the artist

Close to graduation myself, I continuously hear disheartening statistics about the large number of MFA’s who quit making work just one year out of school, and I can only imagine the numbers would be far greater for undergraduates. For what it’s worth, I hope this group sticks with it. Whether it’s graduate school or giving it a go in some far off city or navigating the Houston art scene, one thing is for certain: this group of seniors are on a precipice of seriously exciting breakthroughs in their work.

Floor Plan was exhibited at South Park Annex at the University of Houston on Friday, December 13, 2013.

Report from the Golden Age of Art Comics: Kuš!

Robert Boyd

Renata Gąsiorowska, Jungle Night (Mini Kuš! #21) cover, November 2013

Latvia is a tiny Baltic state, intermittently independent but historically claimed by nearby states like Poland, Lithuania, Germany and Russia. It was an unwilling part of the Soviet Union until 1991. There are about two million Latvians. When you think of European culture (much less world culture), Latvia must be counted as on the fringe. Of the top of my head, I can't think of any prominent Latvian artists, writers or composers, living or dead.

But as someone who lives in Houston, I have no choice but to believe that culture can pop up anywhere at any time. (Otherwise I'd be forced to move.) The Latvian capital, Riga, is not large but it is old and has a cultural history. In the era of the internet, of Fedex and DSL, of jet travel and high-speed trains, no European country can be truly isolated.

So the fact that Kuš! Komiksi, an international comics publishing house, is headquartered in Riga is slightly surprising but also comforting. They publish cutting edge work by Latvian and international cartoonists. The work is published in English, which is both excellent (it means I can read it) and a little disturbing. One must conclude that they wouldn't be satisfied trying to reach the two million or so readers of Lettish. But English is a colonizing language.

Clockwise from top left: Dace Sietiņa, Bobis (Mini Kuš! #9), September 2012; Mari Ahokoivu, Otso (Mini Kuš! #10), January 2013; Maciej Sieńczyk, Historyki (Mini Kuš! #12), January 2013; Emmi Valva, All You Need Is Love (Mini Kuš! #11), January 2013

Mini Kuš! is a series of tiny comics (4" x 5 3/4" trim size), each given to a single artist. They're beautifully produced objects. They share a common design on the covers but otherwise are quite distinct. They art reproduced in beautifully reproduced in color. The artists are international--for example, Dace Sietiņa is from the Netherlands, Mari Ahokoivu is Finnish, Maciej Sieńczyk is a Polish artist and Emmi Valva is also from Finland.

Renata Gąsiorowska, Jungle Night (Mini Kuš! #21) pages 2 and 3, November 2013

Renata Gąsiorowska, an artist from Poland, tells an updated animal fable in Jungle Night. In the protagonist's world, Jungle Night is a night when the adolescent animals spend the night in the jungle in order to return to their roots. Of course it's actually an excuse for partying. But somehow, our heroine has an urge to go deep into the jungle and really experience life as it was lived so long ago.

The art is beautiful, and one thing that distinguishes it from typical comics art is that the physicality of the paper is not denied. You can see from the pages above that Gąsiorowska allows the warping of the paper from her watercolors to become part of the art itself.

Clockwise from top left: Inés Estrada, Borrowed Tails (Mini Kuš! #17), August 2013; Michael Jordan, This No Place to Stay (Mini Kuš! #18), November 2013; Jean de Wet, Crater Lake (Mini Kuš! #20), November 2013; Berliac, Inverso (Mini Kuš! #19), November 2013

(Inés Estrada is a Mexican cartoonist. Michael Jordan is from Germany and has nothing to do with the basketball player. Berliac is an Argentinian artist currently living in Norway. Jean de Wet is from South Africa.)

Michael Jordan, This No Place to Stay (Mini Kuš! #18) pp. 10 and 11, November 2013

Michael Jordan's Mini Kuš!, This No Place to Stay [sic] is described as "semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical." It has the feeling of a dream, an anxious dream about being in a hospital and feeling vaguely threatened by the environment. The writing is interesting--it's English, but English as written by someone with imperfect knowledge. Typically, the English in the Mini Kuš!series is perfectly adequate. But in This No Place to Stay, the occasional error or awkward English adds to the feeling of alienation and dread experienced by the bearded protagonist, as does the bilious mostly-monochromatic color scheme.

Clockwise from top left: Amanda Baeza, Our Library (Mini Kuš! #13), January 2013; Tiina Lehikoinen, The Pernicious Kiss (Mini Kuš! #14), August 2013; Emelie Östergren, Runaway Dog (Mini Kuš! #16), August 2013; Heta Bilaletdin, Hideous Fiesta (Mini Kuš! #19), August 2013

(Originally from Chile, Amanda Baeza lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Tiina Lehikoinen and Heta Bilaletdin are from Finland. Emelie Östergren lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.)

Most (but not all) of the artists in these 13 Mini Kuš! volumes are from the eastern side of Northern Europe, except for a few. Curiously, none are Latvians. (Some of the earlier volumes featured Latvian cartoonists, though.) What this tells me is that Kuš! Komiksi is a very unnationalistic operation. Furthermore, it suggests that the primary creative work is editorial, or to use a popular modern word, it's curatorial. They don't just publish--they host comics events and residencies. Kuš! is an art institution in addition to being a publisher. Given the diminishment of paper publishing in this electronic world, this may be a model for publishers of art comics in the future.

But it is still important to pay for these things. Heta Bilaletdin's Hideous Fiesta, for example, was supported in part by FILI, the Finnish Literature Exchange, an organization that promotes the translation and publication of Finnish literature abroad. Kuš! Komiksi get some support from the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia and other governmental organizations from Latvia, Finland and the EU. But they also earn money by selling the published works and they aren't above a little begging on their website.

Heta Bilaletdin, Hideous Fiesta (Mini Kuš! #19) pp. 4-5, August 2013

Hideous Fiesta depicts episodic scenes from a party, particularly as seen from the point of view of an older guest who has been invited and is shocked by the party-goers cynical view of the recent death of a politician. Bilaletdin depicts the party with a combination of drawing and collage, which seems just right for the subject matter.

So far Kuš! has published 15 volumes of their anthology š! and 21 volumes of Mini Kuš!. Some of the early volumes are sold out, but all the available ones can be easily purchased from Kuš! Komiksi's web store.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

How To Dispose of 5000 Works of Art: Herb and Dorothy 50 x 50

Robert Boyd

The collector's mania sneaks up on you. I'm in my super-cluttered bedroom looking around, and there are 51 visible artworks (and many more in portfolios on my bookshelves as well as artworks hanging in other rooms). They range from a painted postcard sent to me by Earl Staley and silkscreened limited edition beer-bottles with art by Ron Regé, Jr. and C.F. to paintings by Lane Hagood, Rachel Hecker and and Chris Cascio. I'm not saying this to brag--well, maybe a little--but to point out what all serious collectors come to realize--that they have a lot of stuff and will someday need to dispose of it.

We think of collectors as rich people, but despite the shocking auction prices we read about, the reality is that almost anyone can collect art. Small artwork, prints, art by non-"big name" artists can all be pretty affordable. If you can buy directly from an artist, that usually saves you some money. Sometimes you can trade for art--if you offer a service that artists need. (Hence the art collections of dentists.)

The Vogels are the gods of this approach to collecting. A quick recap of their story: Herbert Vogel was an amateur painter who worked for the post office. His wife Dorothy had a job at a public library. They loved art. They were really into pop art when they got married in 1962, but it was too expensive for them. So they started buying minimal art (not quite yet the new thing when they started). They made a deal with one another--they would live on Dorothy's salary and buy art with Herbert's income. And they did, for decades. In the end, they had a collection of over 4000 pieces of art, which they donated to the National Gallery. In 2008, a really entertaining film , Herb & Dorothy by Megumi Sasaki, was made about the couple. And that seems like it should have been the end of it. The problem is that Herb and Dorothy kept on collecting and kept on donating to the National Gallery, which finally said, enough! As big as the National Gallery is, it just couldn't absorb 5000+ pieces of art.

So they came up with a wonderful solution. They made a gift of art to 50 museums--one in each state--of 50 pieces of art. This is the 50x50 program. Thus 2500 pieces of art were distributed all over the country. And Megumi Sasaki filmed a sequel, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50.

The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas got the 50 pieces of art reserved for Texas. I saw them when the Blanton mounted an exhibit of the work, and one thing I noticed is that not every artist they collected has ended up in the canon. The Vogels had an amazing ability to pick "winners," but no one bats a thousand. (Interestingly, the Blanton also received James Michener's large collection of modernist art after his death. In the book American Art since 1900, Robert Kushner looks at Michener's collection in terms of a year by year "batting average"--significant works as a percentage of the whole. He calculates Michener's lifetime average at .319, which I'd say is pretty great. Is it crass that I'd like to know what the average is for the Vogels?)

That's one thing the new documentary examines--artists who haven't achieved any particular fame whose work was collected by the Vogels.

Charles Clough with the Vogels at the Metropolitan Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

For example, the film looks at Charles Clough. He is an abstract painter who came out of the same Buffalo scene that spawned Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo (Clough was a co-founder of Hallwalls). The Vogels collected a large number of his pieces (127 are part of the 50x50 collection), and he is one of the artists whose work ended up in all 50 museums. But his career as an artist has been rocky. He admits to having hardly sold anything in the previous 10 years. He points to a map of the USA covered with thumbtacks. Each one represents an artwork in a museum. And two-thirds of them are a result of the 50x50 program.

Charles Clough painting (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Another artist who never achieved fame was Martin Johnson. Johnson had some success in the late 70s and early 80s, but eventually moved to Richmond Virginia to run the family business, which represented plumbing supplies to buyers.

Martin Johnson and the family business (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turned out, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond was one of the recipients of the Vogel collection, and they were amazed to learn that one of the artists whose work they received lived right there in Richmond.

Martin Johnson and his work (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Artists whose moment of success happened decades ago are suddenly finding their work in museums all over America. For artists like Clough, it could mean a second chance at success.

The artist who most exemplifies the Vogel collection is Richard Tuttle. Herbert Vogel was quite close to Tuttle, and Tuttle is represented by 336 pieces in the 50x50 collection--enough for each museum in the program to get at least six Tuttles.

Richard Tuttle with the Vogels (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turns out, he's not super happy about the 50x50 program. He would have preferred to see the collection stay in one piece, even if it meant storing most of it. But he's realistic and is shown visiting with curators in Maryland to discuss the best way to display his work from the collection.

Richard Tuttle at the Academy Art Museum in Maryland (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Of course, Tuttle is a pretty difficult artist to love. Most of his work in the collection consists of pieces of lined notebook paper with one or two small watercolor marks on it. This is pretty challenging work, especially in provincial museums in Montana or Alabama. How to show this work in these disparate places is the main subject of the movie. The filmmaker traveled to several of these far-flung museums, including small museums in Honolulu and Fargo, North Dakota. Stephen Jost, the director of the Honolulu Museum of Art, addresses this head on. He knows the work is difficult for many visitors, and the Honolulu Museum has worked very hard to help viewers engage with it. One scene shows children playing a game with the art--they have a guide to all the pieces with little image excerpts, and they are in a race to see who can find them all on the walls first. But Jost acknowledges that there are some viewers who are just plain hard to reach in general and especially with the art from the Vogel collection. These viewers are teenagers and young adults.

Sullen teens at the Honolulu Museum of Art (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

What some of the museums have done is make the Vogels the focus of the exhibits--telling their story. The Blanton had the first Vogel documentary running continuously. Some museums actually recreated parts of the Vogel's apartment, down to stuffed cats and turtles (the Vogels never had children--they had pet cats, fish, and turtles).

The Plains Art Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Places like the Plains Art Museum were thrilled to get the gift. Director Colleen Sheehy states her pride in being in the company of LA MOCA and the Albright-Knox Gallery, who also received Vogel gifts. She used the Vogels themselves as the way to interest viewers in the work. She explained it this way: "The work might seem difficult, but they're so accessible." She actually commissioned a local artist, Kaylyn Gerenz, to create a stuffed animal version of one of their cats to be exhibited alongside the work in a small recreated corner of the Vogel's apartment.

One of the museums they donated the work to, the Las Vegas Art Museum, abruptly closed in February 2009, a victim of the recession which hit Las Vegas especially hard. Part of the conditions for accepting the gift were that if you closed, you had to give it to an approved museum in the same state. In this case, the work went to the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV. By focusing so much on several small, regional museums, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50 almost becomes a documentary about provincial museums. It's fascinating to see how they strive to stay relevant and stay afloat.

Herbert Vogel died during the filming of this documentary. The Vogels had already stopped collecting, and their apartment was emptying out.

Before and after (stills from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

After you've given away your life's work, I guess passing on (at the ripe old age of 90) is not so bad. But I worry about Dorothy (now 78). Will an apartment with no art and no Herb be too lonely for her?

One more interesting thing about Herb & Dorothy: 50x50. It was partly financed by a Kickstarter campaign. They did a typical thing--gifts of a certain size would get you a download of the finished movie, and a little more would get you the DVD. In short, they presold the movie. I was pretty sceptical when I heard about it, mainly because I didn't really believe there was anything else to say after the first movie. But I went ahead and donated enough to get the DVD, and I was very pleasantly surprised. By focusing on artists like Charlie Clough and Martin Johnson and museums like the Plains Museum and the Honolulu Museum, Sasaki created a completely new documentary around the Vogels. It's an informative, moving documentary.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Something to do when you have 4 hours and 48 minutes free

Robert Boyd

Listen to For Philip Guston by Morton Feldman, performed by the S.E.M. Ensemble. (Hat tip to Alex Ross.)

Philip Guston, Friend--to M.F., 1978

In the 50s, Morton Feldman was Philip Guston's closest friend. But their friendship ended in 1970 when Feldman disapproved of Guston's new cartoonish figurative "bad" paintings. Apparently Guston regretted the rift, which is why he painted Friend--to M.F. Perhaps Feldman similarly regretted the estrangement. In any case, four years after Guston's death, he composed For Philip Guston.

Monday, December 16, 2013

LOKALKOLORIT: Representation, Repetition, and Punctum

Betsy Huete

Philosopher Roland Barthes coined the term “punctum” in his final publication Camera Lucida in 1980. In enumerating the term, he was in effect making an argument against the sole interpretation of photography as a set of linguistic, political, and societal codes. While a photograph naturally contains these codes, of course, Barthes argued that there is an additional kind of meaning inherently embedded in the work. It’s a meaning that defies terminology or code breaking—it is the kind of resonance that connects with the viewer on an intensely emotional level, thereby making the work indescribably unique.

Upon entering Inman’s first main gallery, it is tempting to immediately cock one’s head to the side and think, “what the hell is going on here?” Between the nude drawing, while attributed Corinne von Lebusa but questionably drawn by a young hormone-induced boy who snuck into a life drawing class and, horny and over-imaginative, just wanted to draw neon boobies, and the muddied squirrel-rabbit something or other by Jochen Plogsties, the work immediately feels trite, out of place, and even abject. Yet they command attention. How? Furthermore, how do we connect these five artists together (von Lebusa, Plogsties, Inga Kerber, Johannes Rochhausen, and Edgar Leciejewski) who seem to be making fairly disparate work? Additionally, does the sole fact they are exhibiting in a group show necessitate their connection?

Corinne von Lebusa, Nuby, 2012, Drawing, watercolor, varnish, 27.6” x 19.7”

In titling the exhibition LOKALKOLORIT, which quite literally translates to “local color,” Inman intimates that we should. Other than their proximity to each other in sharing the same studio building and having gone to school together, and that Leipzig (where the artists reside) is our sister city, they all employ representational imagery and methods of banality and repetition that question modes of originality and authorship in art making.

These, however, are the kinds of postmodernist tropes that have been around in the art world for quite some time. And while this tongue in cheek sort of nihilism certainly pervades the work, there is also a notion of sincerity inherent in it that belies its postmodernist stereotypes—as if these artists genuinely want to cull meaning from our overly saturated, hyperbolically monitored world. And it is this kind of sincerity that not only connects the work, but also commands the viewers’ attention and displays the works’ punctum.

Naturally there are pieces in the show that communicate this more surprisingly emotively than others, and the series that most effectively achieves it are the series of floating head portraits John, Inga, Hans, Romy, and Dory (all 2013). Modestly scaled and oriented horizontally in a row, von Lebusa draws playful, lyrical faces that humorously feel like a cross between David Bowie and Glamour Shots. While Hans faces the viewer head on, the rest seem to be looking afar with entranced glances, their poses evocative of cheesy 80s portraiture, replete with fuzzy colors and backgrounds. However, this playful sensibility is sharply contrasted by sharp facial features and arresting, penetrating eyes. This contrast in conjunction with the repetition of faces demands sustained attention from the viewer, as if the faces are asking to be taken seriously in spite of themselves. This kind of unexpected seriousness is far more interesting than von Lebusa’s Portraits 1-12 (all 2012), which do not read as anything much more substantial than topical caricatures of women. And while that is probably the whole point, these portraits are simply less provocative than Hans and company.

Corinne von Lebusa, Portrait 7, 2012, Drawing, watercolor, varnish, 9.4” x 7.1”

Speaking of banality, Johannes Rochhausen paints his studio. That’s it. While repeatedly painting one’s studio may sound like an act of obsession or even narcissism, according to the exhibition catalogue, he uses his studio as subject matter less as the content of the work and more as a control to work through various aspects of painting. Therefore, the work is less a conceptual statement on Rochhausen’s place of artistic production and more self-referential exploration on the act of painting. However, it’s arguably impossible when repeatedly painting the same representational subject matter to divorce the imagery from its content. And whether he intended for that separation or not seems inconsequential because it’s actually when Rochhausen’s treatment of the paint activates his studio as the content of the work that the most exciting things start to happen. This is most prominently represented in Untitled (study of room) (2013). While still representational, this barely illuminated corner of the room more so than the rest of his work leans toward abstraction. The dark browns and grays as well as the long vertical strokes of the corner walls lend the work an air of mystery and strange intimacy, creating a space that at once feels thoroughly lived in and foreboding. And it’s this kind of ambivalent treatment of a space that is far more engaging than Air Conditioning (2013) that, while beautifully rendered, conceptually and aesthetically flatlines.

Johannes Rochhausen, Air Conditioning (Study), 2013, Oil on paper, 56.3” x 41.7”

While these are only two examples, there does seem to be this common thread of a strange, unexpected punctum prevalent in much of the works of these five artists. While they all employ representational elements and engage with postmodernist tropes of authorship, repetition, and originality, there does seem to be an optimistic attitude of garnering meaning where there, upon original inspection, doesn’t appear to be any. While of course this sincerity works better in some works more than others, hopefully this is what defines Leipzig’s local color instead of nihilistic, played out postmodernist attitudes.

LOKALKOLORIT runs until January 3, 2014 at Inman Gallery.

Monday, January 13, 2014

2013: A Highly Personal Top 10 List

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Top 10 Posts of 2013: You People Have Dirty Minds

Thursday, January 2, 2014

UH Sculpture: Performance and a Precipice

Report from the Golden Age of Art Comics: Kuš!

Saturday, December 21, 2013

How To Dispose of 5000 Works of Art: Herb and Dorothy 50 x 50

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Something to do when you have 4 hours and 48 minutes free

Monday, December 16, 2013

LOKALKOLORIT: Representation, Repetition, and Punctum

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