The Pan Review of Books: Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America

Robert Boyd


Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America by Bill Schelly (Fantagraphics Books, 2015).

I was a little worried about this book when I first heard of it because I saw Bill Schelly as a "fan" writer. The fan community in comics has long been important because they were its first historians. They are the ones who write catalogues raisonnés for comics artists. (Glen Bray wrote such a catalogue raisonné for Kurtzman in 1975, which was undoubtedly invaluable to Schelly.) They aren't notable for being good writers, though. But Schelly does a very good job here--his writing is up to the task, the book is structured well, and it seems quite complete. The only thing that could be added would perhaps be more insight into Kurtzman's mind, but psychological biographies bring their own dangers. Only truly gifted biographers can do that kind of thing well. In any case, we readers can deduce a lot about Kurtzman's state of mind from his actions and from his own recorded comments that are included in this biography.

Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was a cartoonist and humorist. He was part of a generation of young, mostly Jewish artists in New York City who came out of the Depression hungry for whatever work they could get, including what was then the bottom of the barrel for artists, the comic book industry. After attending New York's High School of Music and Art (which educated many of his future colleagues and collaborators), he was first published in comics in 1939 (as a contest winner) and sold his first professional comics work in 1942. Kurtzman was drafted and returned to comics after the war, mostly doing piece-work for Timely (the forerunner of Marvel) and other publishers, while trying to break into comic strips and slick magazine work, which paid much better and were much more prestigious than comic books. He set up a studio with his friends Will Elder and John Severin; many other cartoonists passed time in this studio, including René Goscinny, a young French cartoonist who would later create Asterix. But at the time time, they were all fairly unsuccessful young cartoonists sharpening their nascent skills and trying to make a buck. Kurtzman and Goscinny collaborated on some work-for-hire children's books in the late 40s, and perhaps we're lucky they weren't successful.

Kurtzman's main work during this period was a series of one-page filler gags for Timely called Hey Look! This where Kurtzman mastered comics language, taking it apart and putting it back together. Hey Look! is his first masterwork, but at the time hardly anyone realized it existed. It was published here in there in various Timely comics as filler--it never had its own publication (the Hey Look! strips would finally be gathered into one volume in 1991). Within the comics community, however, people noticed this work. In 1949, he met William Gaines and Al Feldstein. Gaines had inherited his father's comics publishing house, Educational Comics. He changed it to Entertaining Comics and started publishing work in then popular genres (crime, romance, westerns, etc.). Feldstein was EC's editor. They liked Kurtzman's humor work when he showed it to them, but they weren't publishing any humor comics. But they got him a job writing and drawing an anti-VD (!) educational comic that showed that he could do "serious" comics work. Impressed, they started using his work in their new horror comics.

Kurtzman drew and wrote a number of horror and science fiction for EC (unusual--Gaines and Feldstein typically did all the writing), but he didn't particularly like the genres. He suggested something more grounded in reality. He was given the job of editing and producing a new comic, Two-Fisted Tales. Initially consisting of he-man adventure stories, it became more focused on war stories as the Korean War heated up. It was an astonishing war comic right from the start. Previously, war comics had been jingoistic propaganda exercises, depicting our side as noble warriors and the other side and inhuman monsters. They tended to be quite racist (nearsighted buck-tooth Japanese caricatures were common). Two-Fisted Tales gave humanity to all participants, soldiers and civilians alike, and depicted U.S. soldiers as frightened, imperfect young men in situations outside their control.

For that alone, Two-Fisted Tales would have been notable. But Kurtzman and his artists applied an unusual level of craft and care to the comic. Kurtzman spent an inordinate amount of time researching uniforms, weapons, etc. But beyond this, he did far more than write a script--he carefully storyboarded each script. The artists had to carefully follow his layouts. These artists, some of the best in the industry (Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Alex Toth, Severin, etc.) often chafed at this. Severin and Kurtzman eventually fell out over this practice. But there was no denying the quality of the work.

 
Mad #1, cover by Harvey Kurtzman, 1952

Kurtzman was ambitious--editing, writing and designing one comic and contributing to several others wasn't enough for him. He proposed a humor comic to William Gaines. This was Mad, which started publication in 1952. Kurtzman worked with many of the same artists he had for Two-Fisted Tales (particularly Davis, Wood and Will Elder). Initially he used Mad as a way to satirize other comics. Hey Look! had deconstructed the underlying structure of comics; with Mad, he satirized the contents as well. The new title was instantly successful. He quickly moved beyond making fun of other comics to satirizing American popular culture and ultimately American culture in general. Mad was almost supernaturally good, so far above what other comics that it didn't really seem to belong in the same category. Readers loved it and became lifelong Kurtzman fans--it was the beginning of his modest celebrity. Perhaps more important than the fans were those who were inspired to follow in his footsteps. Much of the humor produced in the 60s and 70s was by people who had encountered Kurtzman's Mad as children.

While this was happening, a backlash against comics--particularly crime and horror comics--was brewing. At a certain point, EC could no longer get many of its titles distributed because they refused to submit to the newly instituted industry censorship regime, the Comics Code. Kurtzman who (like many toilers in the comics field) wished to work in the magazine world had been bugging Gaines to turn Mad into a regular magazine. Gaines realized this would be a way to do an end-run around the censors. In 1955 Mad became a magazine.

There are many times in this biography where the reader wants to reach back into time and shake Kurtzman, saying, "Don't do this thing you are about to do!" Kurtzman's relations with Gaines were deteriorating. There is blame on both sides, but it is undoubtedly true that Kurtzman was difficult to work with. His perfectionism caused last-minute changes and late issues. Mad had become EC's cash cow, not only for its own strong sales but also through incredibly successful paperback reprints. So Gaines was eager to keep Kurtzman and keep him happy. But Kurtzman was entertaining other offers, and one, to do a full-color slick humor magazine for Hugh Hefner, then riding high with his new magazine, Playboy, was irresistible. So Kurtzman made Gaines an offer that he knew Gaines couldn't accept--Kurtzman demanded a 51% stake of EC. What Kurtzman didn't seem to realize is that Gaines would have given him almost anything he asked for, including substantial equity in EC. Instead, Gaines said no and Kurtzman started work on a new magazine for Hefner called Trump.

Kurtzman had provided Gaines and Feldstein, who replaced Kurtzman as editor of Mad,  a very good model of how to produce a successful humor magazine, which they copied successfully for the next 25 years, when Feldstein retired. And Mad is still published today. Trump, on the other hand, lasted only two issues for a variety of reasons (there were reasons that Hefner told people and reasons that have been ferreted out later--Schelly presents them all as plausible but suggests that the problem was that Hefner simply didn't like the work as much as he hoped he would).

 
Humbug #2, art by Will Elder and Jack Davis, 1957

Following this were two more magazines that never quite succeeded in the market: Humbug, a modest but brilliant magazine co-owned by Kurtzman and a group of his collaborating cartoonists, and Help!, a low-budget photo-humor magazine published by Jim Warren. While none of these post-Mad publications was notably successful, each contained substantial work of real brilliance by Kurtzman. And they also showed his knack for spotting talent. For example, he hired four assistant editors during the run of Help! Three of them became justifiably famous in their respective fields--Gloria Steinem, Terry Gilliam and Robert Crumb (Crumb never even got to work there; the day he showed up for work, workmen were carting away office furniture--Warren had shut down the unprofitable magazine).

Playboy once again supplied a lifeline--Hefner offered to publish a comic strip by Kurtzman and Elder in the magazine. This was Little Annie Fanny, a lushly produced but lame satire strip starring a Candide-like character, Annie, who was built like Marilyn Monroe. Her adventures each month invariably ended up with her naked. With her gigantic breasts and brick-house figure, Schelly identifies her as a particularly adolescent kind of sex fantasy. Kurtzman was pandering to the Playboy reader which made the satire in the strip feel hypocritical at best. Furthermore, the arch-perfectionist was now subject to the whims of another perfectionist, Hefner, who tortured the Kurtzman and Elder with his intense barrage of nitpicky changes for every episode. It paid very well, though, so Kurtzman voluntarily wore this straightjacket for most of the rest of his career.

 
Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, "Goodman Goes Playboy", published in Help! #13, February 1962

In other words, when Help! was cancelled in 1965, that was the end of Kurtzman's career as a vital creative innovator. He did a few charming pieces here and there after 1965, either alone or with collaborators, but nothing important. His last great work was a series of comics done for Help! with Elder called Goodman Beaver.

For the rest of his career, he concentrated on Little Annie Fanny, consulted for Esquire, did the occasional freelance job, and taught cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Among many of his students and colleagues, he was a beloved figure. It almost seems like his career after 1980 consisted mainly of people inviting him around the world so they could pay homage to him. Because of his early studio experience with Goscinny and other French comics artists who would go on to become giants in their own right, the French knew very well who Kurtzman was and lionized him. The underground comics generation had been fans since Mad and worshiped him--and many became close friends with the master. SVA churned out a generation of great cartoonists (Drew Friedman, Mark Newgarden, Peter Bagge, Bob Fingerrman and others) who loved the man, even though they first encountered him in his declining years.

And his decline was long--Kurtzman was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1983, which got progressively worse until he died in 1993 of liver cancer. When the New York Times ran an obituary that said Kurtzman "helped found Mad magazine." Art Spiegelman, another disciple of Kurtzman who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, was outraged and called the Times, saying it was like "saying Michelangelo helped paint the Sistine Chapel just because some pope owned the ceiling." But this was the typical situation for cartoonists of Kurtzman's generation--businessmen got rich off of their creative genius while they struggled.

For people like Spiegelman, Crumb and Gilliam, Kurtzman's career was a lesson of what not to do--never cede control, never become an employee, even if those decisions required artists to take on great risks and hardships. But while Kurtzman's artistic career was tragic, his life wasn't--he had a loving family that he raised and took care of; he had a comfortable life; and had many friends who loved him. His decisions, especially the decision to produce Little Annie Fanny for 26 years were done in service of making certain his family was fed, clothed, sheltered and educated, including his son, Peter who was autistic and required special care. For those of us primarily interested in Kurtzman's art and career, Schelly does a valuable service by constantly reminding us that Kurtzman was a family man with serious responsibilities. After failing with three humor magazines, by 1965 he wasn't going to take that kind of risk again.

In my opinion, Kurtzman is the most important artist to emerge out of the mainstream or commercial comic book world. In addition to the greatness of much of his work, his influence has been profound, both within the world of comics and beyond. Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America is an engaging book about this artistic giant.

The Pan Review of Books: Nat. Brut #5

Robert Boyd

The first thing you notice about Nat. Brut No. 5 is the very attractive design. It might remind you a bit of Chris Ware or McSweeney's in this regard; it wouldn't be wrong to call it a little twee. It is square-bound and has a small trim-size, so it feels very much like a literary magazine like Paris Review or Tin House. That's appropriate as it features short stories and poems. But the attraction for me were its visual arts features.


Susan Te Kahurangi King, untitled works fromn the 60s (left) and 70s (right), reproduce in Nat. Brut No. 5

Two were about self-taught artists, Susan Te Kahurangi King and Herbert Singleton. Both of these artists are somewhat well-known to aficionados of this kind of art. King was featured in the 2014 Outsider Art Fair, where she caught the eye of Jerry Salz, who has since written enthusiastically about her; Singleton had a solo show at the New Orleans Museum of Art as part of Prospect 3, which concluded in January. Each artist's work is displayed generously over many pages, with brief essays to explain who they are and why they are important. The art was the main thing, not the writing about the art, and I found that refreshing. (It's one thing I find a little frustrating in the Brooklyn Rail, for example, which is in love with the written word).



Herbert Singleton, Dr. Kilikey The Heroine Man, reproduced in Nat. Brut No. 5

The best visual art piece in the magazine was a presentation of Step and Screw by Trenton Doyle Hancock. If you saw Hancock's most recent exhibit Skin and Bones, which traveled from  Houston to Akron and Harlem, you may have encountered this piece. But the difference between seeing a piece of art on the wall and seeing it reproduced is pretty profound. Usually, a work of art loses something when it's reproduced. But Step and Screw ironically gained something.

Step and Screw contains a comic consisting of 30 panels. Each panel is drawn on a separate page, and in the exhibit, these pages were framed and hung in a series. So you could read Step and Screw in the museum, but it's not, in my mind, a very comfortable way to read. But reading in a book works great. The story is about an encounter between Torpedo Boy, a bumbling superhero who seems to be Hancock's alter-ego, and the Klan.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Step and Screw pages 17 and 18, reproduced in Nat. Brut No. 5

The comic is structured more-or-less like most other comics: pen-and-ink drawings, word balloons, etc. The panels are all square. But the pages themselves are rectangular, and beneath each panel is a bit of text carefully cut out of the paper. The text does not mirror or obviously relate to the action in the panels above. The texts relate events from Hancock's life as well as other events, each one dated.

Now what interests me here is that the cut-out letters show the physicality of the page. This is highly unusual for a comic. Comics are usually at pains to hide this--we don't see the edges of the bristol board, the pencil lines underneath the final inks, the light blue guidelines, the white-out or any other artifact of the physical artwork or the process of making the art. Usually, published comics make sure that all you see is the image. But here in Nat. Brut, we see the image and the physical page. It reflects Hancock's liminal position--he is on the edges of both the art world and the comics world. And it is refreshing to see the physical page on which a comic is drawn, which Hancock uses inventively. It seems like something that other cartoonists could productively experiment with.

The longest literary piece was an interview by Merritt Tierce conducted by Kayla E., the editor and designer of Nat. Brut. I didn't think it was a very good interview. I learned a lot abut Merritt Tierce from it, so it's not a failure by any means, but it felt like the interviewer just sent Tierce a list of questions. A good interview has back -and-forth; it's an interplay between interviewer and interviewee. One might think of the list of questions as the song standard that a jazz musician uses to improvise from. They're the starting point--no more. Here, here is no sense of conversation between the two.

The short stories likewise didn't wow me. There are six stories in Nat. Brut No. 5, most of them very short. I was particularly intrigued when I saw that one of the stories was by Robyn O'Neil. O'Niel is best known (to me at least) as a visual artist. She draws empty, haunted landscapes. It's a subject that works well as an image--her drawings are suggestive and moody. But her story, "Fall In Love With Me, Hannah Silverman," is a lot like her paintings, and what works in her drawings doesn't quite work in the short story form. It  lacks narrative, just describing a feeling, not an occurrence. Of course, the short story is an infinitely malleable genre, and there's no reason a short story can't consist of a metaphorical description of a person's mental state. But in this case, I found it pretty unsatisfactory.


the cover of Nat. Brut No. 5

Nat. Brut No. 5 also included some poems and some found photos. The photos, assembled by Rebecca Weisberg, seemed to err on the side of the sensationalistic. In any case, I think the best platform for found photos is, ironically, the internet--there are numerous blogs centered around them.

I say "ironically" because up until now, Nat. Brut has been an internet-based magazine. Nat. Brut No. 5 is the first physical issue. Now I have no problem with reading books and magazines in electronic format. I just read Go Tell It On the Mountain on my iPad, and the words were the same there as they would have been in a paper book. But I have to say that Nat. Brut is for me much more satisfying out in the physical world than online. It may be because of its excellent design--that kind of design makes you want to hold and possess a thing.

Now the digest-sized magazine was only part of it. Included with it are two other items, a saddle-stiched newsprint magazine called Sale! and a two-sided color folded poster called Early Edition. Sale! is influenced by Chris Ware's fake ads that he used to run in Acme Novelty Library. Sale! has 32 endless pages of these things. Kayla E. designed it, and the ads themselves were produce by a variety of contributors, including such alternative comics luminaries as Ware, Robert Sikoryak, and Michael Kupperman.  The problem with Sale! is that a little of this goes a long way. No matter how funny they are, hundreds of fake ads start to wear on the reader.


The Kayla E side of Early Edition

Much better is Early Edition. I think this is meant to recall the Sunday newspaper comics section, and it consists of a combination of drawings and comics by a multitude of creators. Some come from the art comics world (Austin English, Renée French, Ruppert and Mulot, Aidan Koch,  Olivier Schrauwen, and others), the Austin alternative comics scene (Brendan Kiefer, Gillian Rhodes), the art world (Jayson Musson, Lee Baxter Davis, Susan Te Kahurangi King) and many other artists I don't recognize at all. On the two sides of Early Edition are 38 artists in all. Interestingly, Kayle E. "curated" one side and Bill Kartalopoulos, former co-director of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, the other. (An aside here--why has the word "curated" taken over the old and honorable word "edited." You don't "curate" print publications. You edit them. Calling it "curating" sounds so goddamn pretentious.)


Art by Gea Philes and Xela Flactem on the Bill Katralopoulos side of Early Edition

It's really easy to tell Katralopoulos's page--its full of images and comics by American and European art cartoonists. These are artists of often oblique comics works done for very small presses--in short, some of my favorites! Kayla E draws a little more from the art world and from Texas-based creators, but to be honest, a lot of the contributors on both pages are not artists I recognize. There's a lot of intriguing eye-candy in Early Edition.

As far as the visual art goes, Nat. Brut was nearly perfect. By showing self-taught artists with contemporary artists with comics, it covers three of my favorite kinds of art. And editorially, it is super-generous with pages to show the art to the reader--Hancock's piece got the full 30 pages it needed. In most art magazines, Step and Screw would have been excerpted at best. The beautiful design distinguishes it from other literary magazines, and the substantial pages devoted to each artist distinguish it from many art magazines. The combination of non-comics images with comics distinguishes Early Edition from most comics-oriented publications. That I don't love everything within this three-part publication is not a disqualification--my tastes are idiosyncratic, and finding a few things that please me in a magazine is enough. I'm hooked, and look forward to the next issue.

L.A., Chicago and Houston

Robert Boyd


Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties by William Hackman (2015, Other Press)


Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s by Michael Fallon (2014, Counterpoint)


Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists by Leslie Buchbinder (2015, Pentimenti Productions)


Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985, lecture by Pete Gershon with a panel discussion including Lynn Randolph, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Stout, Earl Staley and Kelly Alison

I grew up in Houston and have been interested in art since I was a child, but before I was even aware that Houston had an art scene of its own, I was interested in the scenes in Chicago and L.A. This interest began in the early 80s in college. I was taking a class called "Art Since the 40s," taught by William Camfield. One day, he showed two slides in succession, one showing a painting by Jim Nutt and one a painting by Ed Paschke. This work, shown in passing among hundreds of other slides, grabbed me hard. I ended up writing a paper about the Hairy Who for that class. This artwork was not well known--the research materials I dug up at the library were paltry. But I was able to determine from them that Chicago had a different thing going on than New York, and that thing had been around since Ivan Albright was painting there back in the 30s and 40s. Chicago's art was figurative and grotesque, and it had apparently been written out of contemporary art history, which was often presented (and still is) as a linear path. Chicago wasn't on that path.

While in school, both Edward Keinholz and Robert Irwin came and visited the campus. These were two very different artists, but they had Los Angeles in common. Later I read Lawrence Weschler's biography of Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it connected the artists (and many others). That's where I first read about the Ferus Gallery.

Perhaps the final step that cemented my interest in art scenes from the provinces was seeing the mind-blowing Helter Skelter exhibit at MOCA in Los Angeles. It made Los Angeles art feel sexy and dangerous, and suggested that the scene was vital.

I came to realize that Chicago and Los Angeles had their own distinct art histories. This is important because for the most part, I'd been taught that from the 1940 to 1980 or so, the history of art was essentially the same thing as the history of New York art. Now I saw how laughably wrong this was, because while what was happening in New York and Los Angeles overlapped in some aspects with New York and mainstream critical consensus, they were pretty distinct. And it started occurring to me that if Chicago and Los Angeles could have their own art histories, maybe other cities could. Maybe even Houston.

Los Angeles

Fortunately, the art history of Los Angeles is well documented in catalogs of museum exhibits and in other books. The Pacific Standard Time exhibits (organized in 2011 by the Getty Museum but involving the cooperation of 60 art institutions in Southern California) produce quite a few exhibition catalogs covering LA art from 1945 to 1980. Individual L.A. based artists have been well documented in exhibition catalogs and monographs (in my library, I have such books on Mike Kelley, Ed Kienholz, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Raymond Pettibon, etc.) In addition to Pacific Standard Time, there have been other exhibits devoted to Los Angeles art, with their own attendant catalogs. Time & Place: Los Angeles, 1957-1968 was exhibited in 2008-09 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Los Angeles 1955-1985: The birth of an art capital at the Centre Pompidou in 2006. Both of these shows produced excellent catalogs. The Pompidou's, called Catalog L.A.: Birth of an Art Capital 1955-1985, is an obsessively detailed timeline of the entire era.

Beyond catalogs and monographs, there have been biographies (such as the Robert Irwin book mentioned above) and histories, including the excellent Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and the oral history compiled by Kristine McKenna, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (as well as the documentary The Cool School: Story of the Ferus Art Gallery by Morgan Neville). With all this, it would seem that another book on the L.A. art scene in the 1960s would be irrelevant. But there are always new details to unearth, and points of view not yet discussed.

So even though I consider myself pretty much an expert on L.A. art in the 60s by now, I went ahead and ordered William Hackman's Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties. There isn't much here as far as the artists go that you won't find in Rebels in Paradise. But Hackman understood that institutions are important in a way that was only hinted at by Drohojowska-Philp. (That said, I consider Rebels in Paradise to be the superior book.) Obviously the rise and fall of one particular institution, the Ferus Gallery, is central to both books and any book dealing with L.A. in the 60s.


Artists outside the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1959. Clockwise from top: Billy Al Bengston, Irving Blum, Ed Moses, and John Altoon. Photo by William Claxton. - See more at: http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/archives/i126/#sthash.eIk8NWu7.dpuf

To me it's an old story, but I realize my obsessions are not universal, so here's a nutshell history of the Ferus Gallery. In 1957, Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, two young men involved in the avant garde of the L.A. art scene, decided to partner up and open a gallery together on La Cienega Blvd., a commercial street in L.A. that already had several art galleries. They showed work by the cutting edge of L.A. and San Francisco art. But the gallery wasn't at all profitable, so in 1958, Irving Blum bought out Kienholz's share, moved the gallery across the street to a nicer space, trimmed the bloated roster and worked hard to turn Ferus into a gallery that made money for its artists and its owners. Blum gave Andy Warhol his first solo show and in general started showing more New York artist, as well as a very choice selection of L.A. artists. It has to be said that Kienholz, Hopps and Blum all had good eyes for art. Among their artists were people like Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell. They really put Los Angeles art on the map at a time when art was utterly dominated by New York. In 1962, Walter Hopps left Ferus to take a job as a curator for the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1967, Blum closed Ferus Gallery. It was just too hard to get collectors to part with their money for contemporary art in L.A. He moved to New York and started the Irving Blum Gallery. Of course, Hopps, Kienholz and Blum each achieved great success subsequent to the rise and fall of Ferus as an artist, as a curator/museum director, and as a gallerist respectively.


The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, Ed Ruscha. Oil on canvas. 53 1/2 x 133 1/2 in.

But what Hackman also covers are some of the other institutions that formed the art ecology of L.A. in the 60s. The Los Angeles County Art Museum, for example, was founded in 1961 and moved into a large modernist structure on Wilshire Blvd. in 1965 (this new structure is the subject of Ed Ruscha's famous painting, The Los Angeles County Art Museum on Fire). The museum's board of directors were so self-serving that almost as soon as the museum was built, they fired museum director Richard Brown after he demanded that the museum be run more professionally (and not as a gallery for the board's art collections). This was followed by years of mediocrity.

Even more pathetic than LACMA was fate of the Pasadena Art Museum. After groundbreaking shows curated by Hopps, the museum board was convinced by Hopps that the museum should move into a custom built structure (it was housed in a leased mansion). Hopps had few allies on the museum board who, it was said by Hopps' predecessor Thomas Leavitt, cared more for "the quality of the parties" than the "quality of the exhibitions." (And that attitude persists in Houston as well, as a casual perusal of CultureMap confirms.) There was a split on the board between the older members (conservative Pasadena WASPS) and the newer members (liberal Westside Jews) about the type of art the museum should be dedicated to (the Westside contingent supporting a more modern approach, following in the success of Hopps' exhibits). Also, because the museum had long run on noblesse oblige, there was no institutional capacity to raise the money necessary to build a new building. Hopps was forced out and left L.A. for good. (He ended his career as director of the Menil.) By 1974, the Pasadena Museum was in such financial trouble that it was taken over by Norton Simon and became the Norton Simon Museum. Considering that it had been the vanguard museum for contemporary art for a few years, this was a terrible loss.

Art galleries also had their troubles. Ferus was just one of many galleries that closed in the late 60s in L.A. Their problem was similar to what Houston galleries face today--their potential customers would prefer to buy art in New York, which is only an airplane ride away. That was the situation at the end of the 70s--no commercial or public institutions could be counted on to support contemporary art in a reliable way in Los Angeles, despite the fact that that it was the third largest city in America.

This is where Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s comes in. Like artists all over the U.S., by the 70s in Los Angeles, there were serious questions about the institutions. Aside from their failure to support L.A. art, it was dawning on artists that these places were sexist and racist as well. Michael Fallon shows how parallel art worlds developed through alternative subcultures in L.A. First is feminist, and the major catalyst here was Judy Chicago. After developing a feminist art program at Fresno State, she joined up with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts to continue this work. They founded "Womanhouse" in a mansion near downtown (far from CalArts's new Valencia campus).

That this came out of CalArts is not too surprising. It was established in 1961 when the Disney brothers merged the Chouinard Art Institute (where many of the "cool school" 60s generation of LA artists studied and taught) and the L.A. Conservatory of Music. They wanted a school that would churn out the kind of skilled artists, musicians and composers that the entertainment industry needed. CalArts is still a leader for teaching animation. But it really took off in unexpected directions in 1971, when it moved to its new campus in Valencia, a distant northern suburb of Los Angeles. The school hired people like Chicago, John Baldessari and Allen Kaprow to teach. Because of this, L.A. suddenly became a hotbed of both performance art and conceptual art. The artists they taught became some of the most important artists of the 70s and 80s--though few remained in Los Angeles. Baldessari in particular encouraged them to move to New York because he recognized it would be difficult for them to maintain careers in L.A.


Suzanne Lacy, Car Renovation, 1972

Much of the book deals with the spread of performance and conceptual art in L.A., focusing on artists like Chris Burden, Mike Kelley (whose career would blossom in the 80s, but the groundwork for which was laid in the 70s), Suzanne Lacy, Paul McCarthy, Bas Jan Ader and Allen Ruppersberg. This work seems somewhat divorced from the failed institutions of the 60s, but often connected with educational institutions for support. (I've always wondered if artists who wish to decommodify art through performance or ethereality don't see their art school salaries as another form of commodification. I do.)



Llyn Foulkes, Who's on Third?, 1971-73

But Fallon points out that painting continued in Los Angeles. So he pays attention to the heterogeneous painting of Llyn Foulkes, Vija Celmins, Robert Williams, etc., while correctly refusing to identify any school of painting in L.A. When Fallon identifies a trend or tendency, it tends to be self-defining (feminist art or Chicano art), or it is something he made up himself. For example, he names a group of artists "New Romantics"--artists who were attracted in one way or another to the dark side of Los Angeles. He places Paul McCarthy, Kelley, Terry Allen, Bettye Saar and Tony Oursler in this group (and Foulkes on its edge). This seems a little dubious, but many of these artists ended up in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art of the 1990s at MOCA, which had a similarly dark theme, so maybe he's right.

Fallon also looks at art that almost had no relationship to the art world. The mural movement in L.A. in the 70s was largely Chicano and largely existed outside the heavily theorized world of conceptual and performance art. It was unabashedly populist, for one thing, and highly political. But all art worlds overlap to one degree or another--Asco, the conceptualist Chicano collective was one such overlapping point. Likewise, Fallon includes a chapter on "Lowbrow" art, the art that evolved out of custom car, surf and skateboard culture. In the 70s, this work existed defiantly outside the mainstream artworld, but time heals all breaches--Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw persuaded curator Paul Schimmel to include Robert Williams, the leader of this school of art, in the Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992.

If it sounds like a lot of the artists in this book achieved notoriety after the 70s, that's true. The impression one gets reading Creating the Future is that artists spent the decade laying a groundwork for future success. This is true not only for Mike Kelley and Robert Williams, but for James Turrell, Vija Celmins and even John Baldessari.

Creating the Future is necessarily unfocused. The simple truth is that the number of artists and the variety of artists was going to necessarily be bigger than in the 1960s. That the art scene could be defined by one institution, the Ferus Gallery, in the 1960s was a highly unusual situation. I like that Fallon doesn't try to create any false connections between scenes and artists where none really exist. Los Angeles is a city big enough to contain multitudes, artistic tendencies that are in opposition to or orthogonal to other trends. I see this in Houston today, with cliques and styles that don't really exist for each other.

Chicago

Chicago differs greatly from Los Angeles in one important way. Its artists have never become central or important to contemporary art history in the way that some of Los Angeles' artists finally did. When I think of really well-known Chicago artists, I can only think of a few (for example, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ed Paschke, Kerry James Marshal and Theaster Gates. And Golub and Spero were only rediscovered in the 80s, after long careers painting in Chicago). I think most people conversant with contemporary art might have heard of the Hairy Who without necessarily being able to name the artists involved. If they saw a Roger Brown painting or an H.C. Westermann sculpture, it might seem familiar. Here's a completely unscientific way of stating this imbalance. In my personal book collection, I have 21 books dealing with Los Angeles art and only seven dealing with Chicago art. And none of the seven are a general history like Out of Sight and Creating the Future. I would love to read such a book, if it existed.

That said, a new documentary, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists directed by Leslie Buchbinder, does try to fill in a few blanks. Right up front, it admits Chicago's marginality.  "The story of 20th century American art is already written. It is not a story about Chicago." The subject of this film are a group of artists who started exhibiting in the 1960s. Most are completely unknown today, but a few--Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Ed Paschke and Roger Brown have had major solo exhibits. They were all figurative painters. They weren't pop artists exactly, but they were influenced by popular culture, especially things on the fringe of popular culture. Instead of being influenced by shiny new products at the supermarket or mass-market ads, they were more likely to be influenced by the kinds of oddball items they found at flea markets or botanicas, early animated cartoons, pinball machines, carnival sideshows and painted commercial signs. But they were also influenced by outsider art and earlier Chicago artists like H.C. Westermann. Their work was often sexual and impolite--in this way, it seems similar to the contemporaneous art being produced by the underground cartoonists. One subgroup of the Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, even produced their own comic books to act as catalogs for their exhibits.

The structure of the film is to focus on one artist at a time, having that artist speak about his or her own work, and having other Imagists artists speak about their work, and then artists who were influenced by them. For instance, Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ware both conment on Jim Nutt's work, and Jeff Koons about Ed Paschke.

If Ferus is central to Out of Sight and CalArts to Creating the Future, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Phyllis Kind Gallery are the important institutions in Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. Don Baum was the director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and his stated goal was to give new artists a venue to show their work. Much of this was done through large group shows, but some artists wanted a smaller group show so that each of them could show multiple works. So Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson and Jim Falconer proposed this to Baum. Baum suggested they include Karl Wirsum, which turned out to be an inspired addition. They brainstormed the name, Hairy Who, and it caught the attention  of the public. (The name for the group makes them sound like a rock band, but they weren't a collective in the sense of making collective artworks--each artist did their own thing.)

They were so successful that they had two more shows together at the Hyde Park Art Center, and Baum realized that he had stumbled onto a good thing. Instead of having shows with dozens of artists, have shows with five or six artists and give them a slightly wacky name. The Nonplussed Some consisted of Ed Paschke, Ed Flood, Sarah Canright, Richard Wetzel, Robert Guinan and Don Baum, and it was followed by the False Image, consisting of Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, Philip Hanson and Eleanor Dube.


Christina Ramberg, Head, 1969-70

Just as Baldessari was a key teacher for many of the 70s era LA artists (and artists who left LA), Ray Yoshida served the same role for 60s era imagists. One of his main messages was to collect things and fill your life with your collections. He wasn't talking about expensive art collections (although perhaps not excluding them), but accumulating objects that obsess you and that collectively come to define you. Ed Paschke had photos of circus freaks; Roger Brown and Karl Wirsum had collections of oddball objects; many of the Imagists collected things from the flea markets of Maxwell Street. Part of the Hairy Who's second exhibit was a glass case full of things they collected. This was for Yoshida the starting point for a person's art. All the Imagists are visual bricoleurs, finding subject matter in the strange stuff they found on the street. For instance, there is a section Christina Ramberg's diary where she talks of finding an old romance comic on Maxwell Street, seeing all these drawings of the protagonist from the rear and being inspired to paint a series based on them.


Ed Paschke, La Chanteuse, 1981

Phyllis Kind Gallery was founded in Chicago in 1967, and she became the primary gallery for many of these artists over the next decade. Jim Nutt remarks in the film that it was probably a mistake for so many of them to put all their eggs in that one basket, but Kind was aggressive in marketing their work. Over the course of the 70s, she was successful in placing the work with collectors and encouraging museums all over the world to show and collect the work. For instance, Walter Hopps curated a show of Chicago Imagists that originated in São Paulo and which traveled throughout Latin America. But like Irving Blum, she saw the writing on the wall and moved her operation to New York, shifting focus to outsider art. She says, "You do what you have to do when you have to do it."

As quickly as they found success, they became the reactionary establishment in the eyes of the younger Chicago artists who were influenced by conceptualism and theory. You could read the hostility towards them in the pages of the New Art Examiner, which started publishing in Chicago in 1973 and for years was another important institution on the local scene. In 1974, Frank Pannier wrote, "Here [in Chicago], through the continual re-hash of the same old tired 'Dada Surrealist' concepts and also through the constant proliferation of simple-minded provincial aesthetics, most 'pictorial' art is reduced to that infectious manifestation of visual gonorrhea most clearly typified by the 'Hairy Who?' and its many offspring." ("A Painter Reviews Chicago, Part 1," Frank Pannier, The New Art Examiner, Summer 1974)

It seemed that the Imagists had gone out of style. The art market rejected them, the critics forgot them, younger artists abjured them. But what comes around goes around and they seem to have come back, with recent exhibits at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and solo Jim Nutt exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2011). Karl Wirsum and Gladys Nilsson have relatively new gallery representation in New York City, and Philip Hanson's paintings were in the most recent Whitney Biennial (they were my favorite works in the show). The film concludes with a variety of contemporary artists talking about how important the work is to them, so their influence is strong even if these artists are still not well known outside Chicago.

Houston

In these two books and this documentary, one can see similarities to L.A. and Chicago in Houston's art scene. Houston is a younger city, of course. While there were interesting artists in Houston in the 1960s, it wasn't until the 70s that the local art scene took off. So where is a book or documentary film about that era in our city's art history? It's coming. A couple of weeks ago, Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange, gave a presentation on his work in progress, Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985. He's been interviewing artists and people involved in Houston's art world for over a year now, since Bert Long's death in early 2013. Gershon had on a volunteer basis been cataloging Long's papers when Long suddenly died. Gershon said that even though he had spent a considerable amount of time with Long, there were still questions he wanted to ask. From there he realized that there are a number of Houston artists in their 60s, 70s and 80s about whom he could say the same thing. One thing lead to another, and this book was born. Rather than review something that doesn't yet exist except as a partially completed manuscript, I want to present a talk that Gershon gave about the work in progress at the Glassell school (filmed and edited by J.J. Avkah).




I believe regional art histories are extremely important. We feel sometimes that the modern world homogenizes culture, but the examples of L.A. and Chicago demonstrate how wrong that is--two cities in the U.S. produced utterly distinct art at exactly the same time. I should say three cities (including Houston). And each was distinct from New York. But this documentary and the two books also show how difficult it is to maintain and nurture a regional art scene. It can all go away and be forgotten, unless writers, archivists, film-makers and other keepers of memory do their work.

AUGUST: A new film by Emily Peacock

Hello Pan Readers! Emily Peacock is raising money to make a movie. She wants to pay the people whose labor in front and behind the camera she will be employing. She's been one of this blog's favorite artists since we first saw her work at the MFA show at UH in 2011. Since then we've reviewed her work here and here. So if you want to support an excellent artist as she attempts something quite ambitious, please visit her Indiegogo site. It's Pan-approved.

--Robert Boyd

You, Trespasser

Betsy Huete

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and the University of Houston’s School of Art, Creative Writing Program, and the School of Music all come together every year to develop a curriculum called IART. With IART (the “I” standing for “interdisciplinary”), professors from each of these schools teach courses in conjunction with other writers, artists, and musicians from around the city, with the intent of focusing on and promoting collaboration and interdisciplinary production. Every spring, UH professor and poet Nick Flynn, poet Ronnie Yates, and musician David Dove teach a course called Collaboration Among the Arts, held Tuesday nights at Gabriel Martinez’s art space Alabama Song.

I took this course while in grad school in the spring of 2013 and boy, was it a clusterfuck. Part of the problem was the students: not only was I the only graduate student in the class, I was the only art major. Therefore, for the teachers it was probably like herding cats with people who mostly, at best, took the class semi-seriously. We were broken up into five or six groups of four people and told to visit, and revisit, and examine a particular place. I remember our group, The Fluorescent Dérives, picked a place that became familiar very quickly: the Dan Flavin installation at the Menil. Our project was to develop an art project around our selected place as well as a piece of writing. Our group’s book turned out ok, but we ended up doing a performance piece, running around Alabama Song yelling in animal masks. It was stupid, and weird, and really the other projects in the end of year exhibition went downhill from there.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope 

Upon revisiting the class’ most recent end-of-semester exhibition, You, Trespasser, it was obvious that Flynn, Yates, Dove, and Martinez had seriously refined and organized the curriculum into something more generative and streamlined. They first of all incorporated prerequisites, and it was clear immediately that these students took this class, and their work, much more seriously than mine did. Secondly, instead of having each group pick their own location, the teachers selected it for them, which was Martinez’s art project Angela Davis Park. A contentious in-between space to begin with, Angela Davis Park is this small patch of land off 59 that Martinez, with a sign, simply declared as a park. Additionally, Angela Davis is not a widely heralded, uncontroversial figure; she is mostly known through intellectual circles as a deeply radical thinker and prison abolitionist. So for Martinez to claim a small, previously disregarded space and name it after someone as polarizing as Davis loads an already uncertain patch of land, charging it and territorializing it with subversion and confrontation. It not only gives the students a chance to think about meandering around a place such as that in the city in general, but also time to think about what Martinez has done with it.



Tele Dérive, Synchronized Map, 2015, Inkjet prints, colored string, Dimensions variable 

Naturally, some groups thought more about the park and their place in it than others. One group, perhaps in an attempt to be silly, decided to try to start a used car lot on the site, or staging something feigning a used car lot. The group was probably trying to transform and activate the space, maybe revivifying it with the restorative breath of transactional sales, but even for student work it feels dismissive and thoughtless. The class provides a lot for these groups to chew on, having them explore and think through a contentious space named after a contentious person, and this group seems to have evaded the point entirely in an unproductive way.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope

On the other hand, another group comprised of Vi Dieu, Aaron Golke, Angel Lartigue, Victoria Gonzalez, Jasmine Crutch, and Lena Melinger, built an installation in the park, called a “Shaltar,” which were smallish tents made out of translucent plastic. The installation was supposedly inspired by the group watching a homeless man be arrested in Angela Davis Park for loitering, as the group—who did not get arrested—watched on as bystanders, bystanders who were also loitering in the same area. The group populated the park with these devotional, frail living spaces—a soft-spoken protest that may or may not have been used, that could have been considered, that questionably combated something in some way. The accompanying video piece in the exhibition focused on the billowing tent material, making everything look like a plastic sky.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope

Somebody in the exhibition portfolio wrote this: “After my diagonal traversing of the terrain, I walked in a zig-zag pattern, like somebody was shooting at me with the laziest bullets in the world, having in mind the shattered glass that was most likely the result of some act of violence.” This sentence is the best part of the show, and capitulates the point of the class, which is to undulate between meandering and criticality, flânerie and confrontation.

You, Trespasser was on view at Alabama Song on April 24, 2015.

Real Estate Art: 2212 Salisbury

Robert Boyd

I haven't done one of these in a while, but this pricey mod (hat-tip to Swamplot for featuring it) in upper Kirby is full of art that I can't identify. Can you?

Here's a tree-like sculptural object...



That black and white thing on the desk made me think of Trenton Doyle Hancock, but really I have no idea.



You can see two works of art here--the image of wrapped paper above the red object in the foreground and the large painting in the background.



This large drawing of a bouquet of flowers on the left makes me think of Karin Broker, but the style is not what I would expect from her. So who knows?



Another view of the flower drawing plus two smaller works on the left.



I think the dark purple piece at the end of the bar is a Gael Stack.



The two deer heads are made out of an aggregation of small cylinders of some sort. When I looked at it, I thought of John Runnels' cigarette sculptures. It would be amusing to put sculptures made out of smoked cigarette butts in the kitchen--I approve! But I doubt that's what we're actually seeing.


So a lot of art in this place, but I can identify only one piece with any confidence. What do you, gentle reader, see?

Wojnarowicz in Houston

Paul Mullan


David Wojnarowicz, Untitled for ACT UP (detail), 1990

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) permanent collection is large but doesn’t get enough exposure. The planned expansion, designed by architect Steven Holl and dedicated to modern and contemporary art, may alleviate that problem. Construction begins in 2017.

Picturing Words: Text, Image, Message – one the MFAH’s small, occasional exhibitions of its collection – recently closed. Included was the print Untitled for ACT UP (1990) created by David Wojnarowicz to raise funds for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in New York City, that era’s flagship AIDS activist organization.

More typical of the artworld during that period, Wojnarowicz’s work was deeply political and addressed issues like homophobia and AIDS, from which he would die in 1992. Two shows with which he was involved, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing and Tongues of Flame, embroiled him in censorship conflicts with the Christian right. (Those forces used so-called “obscene” art – usually addressing sexuality, gender, or religion – as wedge issues to mobilize their base and to attack federal government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.) Though distanced and not a formal member, Wojnarowicz was still somewhat sympathetic to ACT UP.

On one half of Wojnarowicz’s diptych is what looks like printouts of stock data: opening price, closing price, et al. The layout is similar to that of the Wall Street Journal and old, hardcopy newspapers The color scheme is green text on a black background, evocative of green-screen, monochrome monitors common then. Alphabetized ticker symbols run from GEB to GMP and from JR to KTF. A string of characters, “-K-K-K-“, introduces those companies whose names start with that letter. This is why the particular symbol range was chosen, per Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr.

In the late 1980s, ACT UP targeted drug firms such as Burroughs Wellcome, which was charging astronomical costs for the sole, and problematic, anti-HIV treatment then available, AZT. Perhaps coincidentally the symbols GLX and JNJ – respectively, Glaxo Pharmaceuticals and Johnson and Johnson – also appear among the stocks. In perusing existing, online historical archives, though, I cannot find any references to ACT UP campaigns focused, prior to 1990, on those two corporations.

Nonetheless: Healthcare under capitalism profits at the expense of human lives, and AIDS was killing tens of thousands every year in the U.S. alone. This problem with the economic system as a whole is articulated by embedding Glaxo and Johnson and Johnson in the listings. For emphasis, those are superimposed over an outline of the United States, targeted by a bull’s-eye in red and white at the dead-center of the composition.


David Wojnarowicz, Untitled for ACT UP (detail), 1990

The diptych’s other half has (again) green text, with a different font and on a black and white background. The prose features the artist’s characteristic stream-of-consciousness:

"If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS..." says the texas healthcare official and I can't even remember what he looks like because I reached in through the t.v. screen and ripped his face in half I was told I have ARC recently and this was after watching seven friends die in the last two years slow vicious unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and drug addicts are expendable in this country "If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers" says the ex-governor of texas

This passage’s final words have, for those familiar with our city’s history, unmistakable connotations.

Inflated oil prices spurred a boom in the 1970s in the Houston economy. Oil, however, peaked in 1981 at about $32 a barrel ($82 in 2015 dollars adjusted for inflation) and began to swoon, losing a quarter of its value by 1985. Prices collapsed a further 50% the following year, settling at approximately $12 ($26 2015 dollars) a barrel. This catastrophic downturn, from 1982-1987, saw the Houston area lose one out of every seven jobs, more than 220,000 total. (See the Greater Houston Partnership’s The Economy at a Glance: Houston, for March, 2012.) Huge swathes of houses were left abandoned or foreclosed. New office towers downtown – “see-through” buildings – were completely empty. The oil bust is legendary.

Troubled times for working people can give rise to political reaction.

In June, 1984, the Houston City Council passed two amendments called the Domestic Privacy in Employment Ordinance, which prohibited, in municipal jobs, employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. This was designed to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) city employees from homophobic bias.

Christian fundamentalist churches and others quickly began collecting signatures to demand a ballot referendum, assuming that a popular vote would likely overturn those two amendments. Antigay sentiment was much worse then: per Gallup, almost half of the population believed that consensual same-sex relations should be illegal -- versus only 30% as of 2014.

(Much of my information here comes from two sources. First, local archivist and historian JD Doyle has an important website on the referendum, with scans of newspaper and journal articles not available elsewhere online. Second is Dale Carpenter’s “The 30-Year Fight for Equality in Houston,” an excerpt from his book Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas and published at Outsmart in October, 2014.)


The KKK demonstrating against LGBT people, in downtown Houston in the run-up to the January, 1985 ballot referendum. The signs read: “Frag a fag” and “Houston is not a San Francisco yet: Vote No Jan. 19.”

Petition efforts were spearheaded by the Committee for Public Awareness (CPA), in which Council member John Goodner and Harris County Republican Party Chair Russ Mather were key figures. Louie Welch, a vocal bigot and Mayor from 1964-1973, and the Houston Chamber of Commerce, of which he was the President, also supported repeal. Veterans of Anita Bryant’s antigay initiatives in Florida advised. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which had shouted “death to homosexuals” during the Council debate, rounded out this front of establishment reaction.

The CPA campaign was virulently homophobic, a manifestation of “culture war” strategies that were to successfully expand right-wing influence around the country. Later “art wars” and attacks on Wojnarowicz, mentioned above, was part of all of this.

Pre-controversy, public opinion surveys had indicated that Houstonians opposed discrimination against LGBT people, by a nine-point margin. However, another survey in October, 1984 indicated that only 37% favored the anti-discrimination measures, with 50% against. On the day of the special election, January 19, 1985, the results were even worse: only 20% voted in favor of the amendments, with 80% against. This crushing defeat for the LGBT communities here would have wide-ranging political effects well into the 1990s.

The LGBT movement has, since the 1969 Stonewall riots, focused upon changing minds one-by-one. The idea that people should come out of the closet and tell their own, personal stories to family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, church members, etcetera is powerful and, ultimately, quite successful

However, mass opinion can be swayed, not only by individuals dialoging with one another at ground level, but also by the dynamics of institutional, formal, official politics. What happens at the top, among political leadership, matters as well. Tanking support for LGBT people, from June, 1984 to October, 1984 to January of the following year – pressured by a roaring, right-wing offensive – makes this clear.

Moreover, mass opinion is not sufficient to win popular votes. Even the strongly sympathetic have to be mobilized to actually walk into the voting booth – which is a greater commitment. The Christian right’s advantage in 1985 was the organizing prowess of churches, which, after all, concentrate lots of politically like-minded people in community every Sunday morning. That was one factor in the lopsided referendum results.

This victory emboldened CPA forces, which later in 1985 ran a “Straight Slate” of candidates against City Council incumbents who had supported the Domestic Privacy in Employment Ordinance. In a comeback attempt, Welch challenged Mayor Kathy Whitmire. In October, Welch was in a television studio, at the Houston ABC affiliate, preparing for a live interview. Someone asked him what his plans were for dealing with the AIDS crisis. Thinking that the microphones had not yet been turned on, Welch responded with: “shoot the queers.” The remark was inadvertently broadcast live, and an uproar ensued, with national exposure.

This is one source of Wojnarowicz’s text in Untitled. (Obviously, the artist confused the state’s governor with a Houston mayoral candidate.) Crisscrossing the diptych two halves are critical perspectives both on big medicine, suggested by the prose and stock-market numbers, and on the decade’s poisonous political atmosphere, suggested by Welch’s quote and the inescapable “-K-K-K-“.

In 2014, City Council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). This is far more comprehensive than the 1984 amendments and bans discrimination based on sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, and pregnancy. Given the 1985 defeat – and a later one in 2001 – the right is, again, attempting to require a ballot referendum on HERO. Currently, petitions are tied up in legal moves and being counted by a judge.

The downturn in oil prices since July, 2014 is, once again, sending the Houston economy into a tailspin, with exploration and services firms now routinely announcing layoffs ranging in the thousands; and real-estate developments, such as mixed-use, office towers, and mid-rise apartment complexes, being cancelled or put “on-hold.” As should be clear, that can have unpleasant, conservatizing political ramifications. Moreover and for the third time in as many decades, any referendum will put to the test the ability of the LGBT movement to, not only change minds in society as a whole, but to institutionalize those changes in the official, formal sphere of politics. Even in today’s relatively tolerant culture, the latter will not at all automatically follow the former.

Even quite distant from its origins, Wojnarowicz’s Untitled for ACT UP continues to speak to us.