Lawn Art Alert

I am always looking for lawn art, which I define as sculpture in the lawns of private residences. It can be in the front yard or back yard, but it has to be visible by me without any trespassing. This one is 1836 Sunset Blvd.



If anyone knows anything about this sculpture, or any of the other lawn art I have found, please let me know!

Here is a map of the lawn art I have identified so far.

View Lawn Art in a larger map

Open Season

Robert Boyd

This weekend was the beginning of the "new season" for art. I'm not sure what that means--there were plenty of gallery shows this summer. I know in New York, well-to-do collectors head out to their summer homes, so the art industry, which is a consumer luxury item industry after all, slows down. For example, there is usually only one issue each of Art in America and Artforum in the summer. But why this should apply to Houston, I don't know.

Be that as it may, tons of shows opened in Houston last week. I only went to one opening (opening parties are not a good way to look at art). But I went to a few galleries after opening nights, however.

Diverse Works season opening show '"Now that I'm by myself," she says, "I'm not by myself, which is good."' is almost all video. I have no problem with video or film as an art-form. But I hate seeing video in a gallery. It is just not an environment conducive to watching video or film. Video (generally) demands your time. If you are going to get anything useful out of a video, you need to sit still and watch it unfold for whatever its length is. And that can be a challenge, especially if the video is perplexing, hermetic, outside your comfort zone--which is what art video mostly is.

There's a reason movie theaters are the way they are. You sit in a comfortable seat--that helps a lot while you watch two hours of film (or eight hours, if you are watching Our Hitler). The theater is dark, so it concentrates your attention on the projected image. And, perhaps most importantly, you can only see one movie at a time at a movie theater. You don't have two movies showing simultaneously, their blaring soundtracks competing in your ears for attention.

So Diverse Works for this show was the exact opposite of a movie theater--no comfy chairs, no darkened room, multiple videos (and soundtracks!) playing all at once.

I will mention the work of Laurel Nakadate. Her videos got my attention for all the wrong reasons: she is beautiful and gets naked in many of them. But they were definitely uncomfortable--she seemed to star with a bunch of weird older men, some who pretended to brutalize her or murder her, some on whom she held toy guns, instructing them to beg for mercy. The men were good sports--acting ability wasn't at a premium, and there was a lot of giggling as the dudes said things like, "Please don't kill me!"

 
Laurel Nakadate, "Beg for Your Life" still,  video, 2006

But for the most part, I just couldn't connect with the material I was seeing. That, if anything, is my main complaint about a lot of the new shows I saw this weekend. Peel Gallery, new art from Mexico City--it was just a jumble of brightly-colored faux-naif stuff. None of it felt particularly original (not a sin by any means), engaging, or memorable. The flower art up at the Barbara Davis Gallery were so forgettable that I had to look the show up to remember what I had seen there. (Still, flowers--they'll probably sell and for a commercial gallery, that's what counts.)

I had never been to CNTRL Gallery before--they had three artists up. One who was doing some kind of intervention on newspapers, making them hazy, washed-out, and unreadable; one who made rather unexciting 3-D fabric sculptures; and one who did what appeared to be severe, early-Frank-Stella-like abstractions made from carpet remnants.


Sasha Pierce, grey red pink, oil on canvas, 2009

But I took a closer look at Sasha Pierce's work--a lot closer.


Sasha Pierce, grey red pink detail, oil on canvas, 2009

This is not carpet--it's paint. How the hell did she do that?! Still, her paintings look like they were made with industrial no-stain carpet. She has accomplished something amazing in her technique, and used it to make some pretty boring paintings.

At least good old Dawolu Jabari Anderson came through. He had a show at Joan Wich of his giant comic book cover paintings and his drawings. His drawings are weak tea, obviously copied from other drawings or photographs, without any indication of drawing mastery. But his paintings are fun, pastiches of Jack Kirby comics covers but starring an "Aunt Jemima"-style character called Mam-E.


Dawolu Jaban Anderson, "Pig knuckles served with a punch?", latex, acrylic and ink on paper, 2009

Amazing that I saw two pieces of art featuring the Kool-Aid man this weekend. One more and it'll be a trend.

 
Dawolu Jaban Anderson, "The Jig's Up", latex, acrylic and ink on paper, 2009

In the end, I think these paintings are sort of trivial, and I think riffing on Kirby creates a kind of incoherence and is a substitute for having an original idea. But even as I write those words, they seem too harsh for these humorous, likable works. (Sorry for the lameness of my photos. They always look pretty sharp when I take them. Consider it an inducement to go see the pieces in the flesh--or at least check them out on the Joan Wich website.)

One show I liked a lot even though I had low expectations was the "Collected Works" show at Inman Gallery.  The gallery is celebrating its 20th anniversary, so it put on a show of various pieces by a bunch of different artists that had been borrowed from collectors who originally bought them from Inman. I could see how this would be a way for a gallery to pat itself on the back, but it also seemed a little contrary to mission of a contempary art gallery--to bring new work to a public of potential and existing buyers. My objection was a bit abstract, I'll admit. And it went away as soon as I saw the work. It was a jumble--too many different pieces in different styles. But there was so much there that was really good that you can safely dismiss my initial reservations.


Wayne White, "They're All Like What Does It mean and I'm All Like I Don't Know," acrylic on framed lithographs, 2003

For one thing, I got to see a Wayne White word painting up close. This two-part painting is quite small and has a totally different presence than "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep." It's nice to be able to see this side of his work while the other big installation is up just a few blocks south.


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938," embroidery on textile, 2008

I only really know Secor from her snarky, funny Glasstire columns. But I love this art! This is a piece that like Sasha Pierce's rewards looking close. Obviously Secor labored mightily to make this--embroidery is not a fast art. And yet it looks so expressive, so sketchy, so spontaneous. The colors are great, and it's great to see how she achieves her color effects by layering different colored threads.


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938" detail,  embroidery on textile, 2008


Beth Secor, "Girl, Around 1938" detail,  embroidery on textile, 2008

I also liked this extremely detailed realistic domestic painting (below), especially trying to figure out what that thing in the middle of the room is. It feels vaguely menacing.


Jim Richard, "Blinds," oil on linen, 2009

There were many other interesting pieces at the Inman--definitely worth checking out.

Finally, I went to The Joanna for their secret Saturday sale. I met Cody Ledvina who showed me around and told me a little about their evolving philosophy of pricing the art. Almost everything was under $200--apparently this approach was decided on after they drastically overpriced the art at the I Love You Baby show in July.The big exception were two huge canvases by Cheyenne Ramos (who normally shows at Joan Wich).


Cheyenne Ramos, don't know what this one is called...

Her paintings were definitely my favorites of the show there. The Joanna is a house where Mr. Ledvina lives that he rents from The Menil Foundation. They clear out the living room for the occasional exhibit. The Joanna can't put a sign out front (part of the lease agreement), but they are pretty sure that the Menil knows what they are doing.

That is all for this past weekend--but there are still plenty of shows that have just opened that I haven't seen yet. So look for more next week...

Recent Aquisition: Green by News

Last month I went to a show at the Aerosol Warfare gallery called Pieced Together. While I was there, I bought a small acrylic painting by a graffitist who goes by the name "News." I picked it up yesterday.


News, Green, acrylic on canvas, 2009

News is from San Antonio and is in his early 30s, and that's all I know about him. (He's impossible to Google!)

The owner of Aerosol Warfare told me that the artists in Pieced Together had decorated a building on Crawford, and that News had done a mural-sized version of "Green" there. So I went and took a photo.


News, Green, spraypaint on a wall, 2009

This building, which houses a business called X.L. Parts,  is absolutely amazing--it's well worth a walk-around.(It's where the green arrow is on the map below.)


View Larger Map

Props to XL Parts for being unbelievably good sports!

Poke and Topiary Text Lead

With a name like "Topiary Text Lead," you know you are going to see a show that makes you say "huh?" I'm sure this title means something to the curator, but it comes off as a nonsense phrase, three random unrelated words. This show is up at Space125 Gallery, which is a space for artists who receive individual artist fellowships from the Houston Arts Alliance. Given that the criterion for being exhibited is that you have a grant from the parent organization, the incoherent title makes more sense. These artists really have nothing in common, and lumping them together doesn't do any of them any favors. If I saw some of them in different contexts, I might like the work better.

The exception is Kia Neill (who did "Stampede" at Box 13), and she manages to avoid the incoherence of the rest of the show by having work that necessarily has be separated from the other work. She is the only sculptor in the show, and in this show works with pieces of velvet. So they are laid flat on little plinths, instead of jumbled together on the walls with the other art.

The work was in this over-bright exhibition space, but I noticed when I took a flash photo of one of the pieces how different it would look under different light. The velvet really catches light.


Kia Niell, Untitled (Multicolored Velvet), velvet, thread, polyester fibers, left--ambient light, right--flash photo

I know it looks like the flash is just washing out the colors, but what is actually happening here is that the little ridges in the piece are catching light that in the un-flashed photo are in shadow. The point I'm making is that you could get startling effects with this piece by putting spotlights on it from different angles. I assume that's intentional, but even if it's not, I like it. (Of course I really just wanted to rub my hands on this piece, but as a good citizen, I restrained myself.)

After I left Space125, I went over to FotoFest. I didn't have high hopes for Poke because of the theme--social media. First of all, most "media" art in galleries kind of bores me. A gallery is just not a good place to watch a video, for example. (Obvious exceptions would be pieces by Tony Oursler or Nam June Paik, whose work is simultaneously sculpture and video.) Second, an art show about social media just sounds like an attempt for a gallery to latch itself onto the latest cool thing. So no expectations going in.

Was I wrong--this show was great fun. The art is likely to have a shelf-life of five minutes, but for those five minutes, I loved it. You walk in and projected on the wall is a grid of hundreds of first person YouTube statements. Of course it is a cacophony of "information"--literally like watching a thousand YouTube videos of people speaking to the camera all at once. But it was so cool to look at. This piece was by Christopher Baker, but in a way, it was also by his many, many unwitting collaborators. And really, it's the unwitting collaborators that make these pieces so fun.


Penelope Umbrico, Suns from the Internet, 2008-2009

Penelope Umbrico's "Suns from the Internet" couldn't exist without unwitting collaborators. What Umbrico did here was to type the word "sun" into Flickr's search engine, download the many (thousands!) of photos of sunsets, sunrises, sunny skies, etc., crop them so just the sun is showing, print them out and make this utterly fantastic mosaic.


Penelope Umbrico, Suns from the Internet detail, 2008-2009

Aside from looking great, it made me think about how important the sun is to us humans. Not just in the obvious way that we wouldn't exist without it (indeed, the existence of life and civilization on this planet can be seen as an accidental result of the birth of this particular star), but that we all have a kind of personal relationship with it. Not too many of us worship it as a god these days, but we still pay technological tribute to it as if we did.

Jon Rafman's piece "Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life" hardly even seems like a work of art. It's more along the lines of a collection of prank calls. I don't mean to put it down, because really it's hugely entertaining. What he did was somehow create a Kool-Aid man avatar for himself, and then went into Second Life to see what kind of weird or cool stuff he could encounter--interesting avatars, weird landscapes, violence, sex, furries, etc.


Jon Rafman, Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life detail, digital video, 2009

(Let's see if PhotoBucket lets me keep that image up.)


Jon Rafman, Kool-Aid Man iSecond Life detail, digital video, 2009

So Rafman is sort of being a tourist in other people's weirdness. And that is awesome -- crash-through-a-brick-wall awesome.

There were other pieces in the show I liked--but you should get yourself downtown and check them out yourself. I have to admit that some of them looked like they might be interactive, but I couldn't figure out how to interact.  Whatever. I liked enough of this show to recommend it without reservations.

Rice University Should Have an Art Museum

Rice University is my alma mater (classes of 1992 and 2008). Any old owl who gets repeated dunned by the university knows that Rice has been in a construction orgy. Seriously, just in the past couple of years, Rice has built two new colleges (Duncan and McMurtry--this new class is the largest freshman class in Rice history), a new gym, a new student hangout place, the "Collaborative Research Center" and I don't know what else. And more stuff is on the drawing board. I don't know what the endowment is now post-crash, but in 2007 it was $4.67 billion. And yet they keep asking alums like me for money, and like a sucker I give it to them. (I feel like I am giving charity to rich people whenever I do.) They should spend some of this money on a museum.

(Actually, Rice should first spend its money on many more need-based scholarships and living allowances, as well as spending a big sum on outreach to working class and poor students in the Houston region through mentoring and tutoring, including the construction and operation of K-12 charter schools in HISD and Aldine ISD. But once Rice has done all of those things, it should build an art museum.)

Now Rice has its gallery, where they put up lots of cool installations (like the Wayne White installation that is there now). Some of you may recall that their used to be an institution called the Rice Museum. It was in one of the two metal buildings at the corner of Stockton and University. The story I heard was that when the Menils had a falling out with the University of St. Thomas, they essentially funded Rice's art and art history department, bringing a bunch of professors over, and building these two buildings, one for media (film and photography when I was an undergrad), and one a museum. It was at the Rice Museum that Ed Kienholz had his show on campus, and that's where I met him. Apparently it held some of the Menil's collection, but this was just a holding action until they could build their own museum. Now the old Rice Museum is the Martel Center for Continuing Studies.

Rice's museum should not be the whim of some rich person. It needs to be something with the university itself as the prime mover. (Which is not to say that rich alums can't be involved.) It could be built between the Baker Institute and the Shepherd School, closing off that awkward space into a neat quadrangle (where the new James Turrell piece is going). But there are other places on campus where it could reside.

What kind of museum should it be? My first impulse is that it should not be devoted to contemporary art. Not because I have anything against contemporary art (obviously), but Houston already has a lot of venues for contemporary art (CAMH, Lawndale, Diverse Works, the Station Museum, Project Row Houses, Box 13, many commercial galleries, etc.). That said, none of these institutions is collecting contemporary art. So perhaps that could be the function of the Rice Museum. (I assume that the MFAH is collecting some contemporary art as well, but obviously that is not its primary function.) Or it could pick some very specific art--regional art, art from a particular period or in a particular style or of a particular type of artist. Like a museum of Texas art. A museum of 19th century American art. A museum of naive or "outsider" art. A museum of comics art (obviously this one would appeal to me a lot). Whatever Rice chooses, it should be something that isn't well-covered by already existing Houston museums and institutions.

Any thoughts out there about a Rice Museum?

Whatever Happened to Mimi Pond?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, one of the startling facts about Wayne White is that he is married to Mimi Pond. Mimi Pond was a cartoonist whose work I sort of lumped in with the new wave cartoonists of the early 80s--it looked a lot like Lynda Barry's. When I told Wayne White I was a comix fan, he said I should introduce myself to Mimi Pond. So I did.

I mentioned to her that she was one of those cartoonists I had lost track of, but she informed me (politely) that far from being one of those people who stopped cartooning, she kept doing books for awhile, and recently did work for the L.A. Times. Maybe this is common knowledge, but it was definitely news to me.


(cartoon from June 17, 2011)

I had no idea. I knew she had written the first episode of The Simpsons (pretty cool credit to have on your resume, I must say!). But aside from that, I didn't know what she had done since the '80s, or anything about her. (One exception--she makes a fictionalized appearance in David Chelsea in Love as "Lily Pad." And no, I didn't ask her about it.)


"Lilly Pad" from David Chelsea in Love


Mimi Pond at the opening of "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep"

Not only has she not stopped doing comics, but she is 1) going to be in the Best American Comics 2009 (Charles Burns is the guest editor this year), and 2) even more exciting, is working on a graphic novel called Over Easy. And you can read a big chunk of it on her blog!

 
Over Easy page 15 by Mimi Pond

The early to mid-80s were a really important time for me as far as comics goes. The quality of the new work coming up then and the evident excitement and energy of the cartoonists really hooked me for life. So it's really exciting that someone whose 80s work I read and enjoyed is coming back strong. I can't wait to read Over Easy when it's published.

One We Lost: Wayne White

Robert Boyd



Wayne White's installation, "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep" opened Thursday, and it's incredible. The photos above are painted in huge letters on the walls and floor of the gallery. In the center--a giant cartoonish George Jones head, constructed of lumber and styrofoam.





This is the crew-cut George Jones of "White Lightnin'" fame. You can open George's mouth and smell the whiskey on his breath, and a peep-hole into his brain shows his dream:



His dreams themselves are a fan keeping George cool.



And off to the side, in honor of Houston, White has build an "ice house."



Of course I love it. How could anyone who likes H.C. Westermann, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, Claes Oldenberg, Gary Panter, etc. , not like this? But who is Wayne White? You know, how is it that a guy is making art like this, right up my alley, without me knowing about it?

White has a book, which I picked up at the Brazos Bookstore, called Wayne White: Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve. 



So I start reading it and I was knocked sideways. Wayne White is responsible for one of my all-time favorite comic stories. The story is "Bridge" and it appeared in the classic Bad News #2, edited by Kaz and Paul Karasik. The story is reprinted in White's book, but best to track down a copy of Bad News #2 to read this story of Southern suburban childhood. (It is a story that definitely deserves to be anthologized somewhere.)

White was brought up in Tennessee and went to college there. He started drawing comics and doing puppet shows there, and (this is astonishing) dated Carol Tyler while he was an undergrad. He saw RAW, and was so fired up by it that he moved to New York, tracked down Art Spiegelman, and got in with the NYC comics crowd, which I suppose is how he ended up in Bad News #2. But there was no way to make a living at comics. He ended up hooked up with Pee-Wee Herman's new show, where he designed puppets and sets (I know Gary Panter did as well, and I'd be interested in knowing how the work was divided up. White's art from this period looks a lot like Panter's--ratty and energetic.) This got him lots of work on kids' shows and doing rock videos, like this one:



He also got married, and for comics fans, this is another eye-opener. His wife is Mimi Pond (who I got to talk to a bit--more later). Since 2000, he has mainly been doing paintings on top of thrift store lithographs--nature scenes, farm scenes, seasides--all with three-dimensional words and phrases inserted into the scene. A little like Ed Ruscha crossed with Jim Shaw.


All That Fake Laughin For Nothin, acrylic on framed lithograph, 2008

I spoke to him a bit at the opening, and he was a bit amazed that I remembered "Bridge"--he called it his best comics story. His paintings are incredible, his installation is fantastic, his videos and TV work terrific. But as a devotee of the art of comics, I can't help regret a missed lifetime of fantastic comics that Wayne White decided not to do. No doubt about it, he made the right decision. Comics are so unrenumerative; lots of the best cartoonists disappear from the scene. White is kind of an extreme example--he barely stuck his toe into the medium before he moved on. That's why I didn't put two-and-two together when they announced this installation. Still, it is so weird to read the interview in his book (conducted by Todd Oldham, weirdly enough--who also published the book). He was so connected to art comics.

In any case, if you are in Houston, see the installation--it's fantastic fun. (I wonder if anyone has told George Jones about the installation?)