Some Paintings by Perry House

by Robert Boyd

Until I saw Elegant Violence, Perry House's exhibit at the Art Car Museum, I wasn't all that familiar with his work. I had seen Perry House's last two gallery shows (at Nau-Haus and d.m. allison), both of which featured paintings of candy-colored suburban houses being blown away. Elegant Violence features work from  30 years of his career, and was, for me, a revelation.  House is a veteran of Fresh Paint, a key exhibit in Houston's art history, but he has been a painter for far longer and has been a fixture on the Houston art scene since the mid-70s. Elegant Violence isn't a full-scale retrospective, but it does cover a significant span of time. I want to look at four paintings, completed between 1989 and 2007.


Perry House, The Vase (Intrusion Blue), 1989, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"

The Vase (Intrusion Blue) depicts a black modern vase with four black hoses or tendrils in it. One end of each of the hoses is in the vase and the other ends rest on the same surface the vase rests on. But that surface is not depicted--instead, the vase and the hoses are floating against a splotchy white background. Then layered on top are a series of very flat blue horizontal stripes. Every aspect of this piece is sets up an expectation that is foiled. The vase--realistically modeled--should be resting on a surface, casting a shadow, etc. The vase should be empty or have flowers in it. And the painterly underneath is overlaid by flat geometric elements. (The stripes remind me of a horizontal Daniel Buren.) The whole thing has a mysterious presence. The stripes remind me of blinds, and looking through blinds makes me think of spies or peeping toms. But why would anyone spy on this weird black vase? And what are these tendrils?


Perry House, The Curtain, The Ship of Fools, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 132"

There is a sailboat and a curtain made of the same material in The Curtain, The Ship of Fools. The material is dull and metallic with curly filigree. But it doesn't make sense that these are the same material. The curtain must be cloth. The boat however appears solid. Or maybe it is made of cloth--maybe that's why it's a ship of fools. The Curtain, The Ship of Fools, like The Vase (Intrusion Blue), features a well-modelled black-and-white image combined with a single flat color--in this case, ultramarine blue.


Perry House, Double Chintz I (Southern Dinners Series), 2003, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 36"

Twelve years later, color comes to the fore in Double Chintz I (Southern Dinners Series). "Chintz" was originally a term applied to brightly-colored printed cloth, and later was applied to mass-produced ceramic objects with similar patterns. So we have the green object (which could be ceramic, I suppose) against what I assume is cloth. I interpret this as something seen from above. The green object looks a little like a bedpan, but it's hard to say what it actually is. The primary thing is that we have two aggressive floral patterns juxtaposed. Unlike the previous two pieces, color is quite important here. In each of the two chintz patterns, we see red and yellow flowers against a background color--violet for the surface and green for the "bedpan." And our eyes perceive the red and yellow differently against green as opposed to violet. This piece deals with our perceptions of color--it's weirdly similar to James Turrell's new Skyspace at Rice University in this regard. This piece makes it hard for me to take House at face value when he said, "The fact is I’m not very aware of color. I focus on value, what’s needed to make forms recede."


Perry House, 7.25.07 (Aftermath Series), 2007, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 60"

But that statement could be true in regards to pieces like 7.25.07. There are basically two colors in this painting--a blue-green with various values and a flat yellow-green as the ground. And here, House is using differences in value to create volume and depth. This counterbalances the jumbled composition--a random landscape of twisted metal, crumbling blocks and rubble. This painting is from the Aftermath Series, and the implication is that we are witnessing a building or street after some explosive violence--a terrorist attack or aerial bombing or shelling. There are areas of Homs that look like this now.

The common thing for all these paintings is an inchoate feeling of menace. That menace is not overt, except in 7.25.07. But nonetheless, I sense it when I look at his paintings. Like certain surrealist paintings, they suggest a creeping dread or anxiety--which is not overpowering, but rather is gradually sneaking up on you. Not all of his work has this feeling, but much of it does.

RIP Artnet Magazine

Robert Boyd



I have a really fat RSS Feed, and it sends me posts from many,  many art blogs and online art magazines--Hyperallergic, Art Fag City, C-Monster, Bad at Sports, and many more. For the past couple of years, my favorite reading has come from Artnet Magazine. I liked its lack of theoretical baggage. I liked the fact that the writers wrote as if they had never seen the MLA Handbook. I like the fact that it blatantly acknowledged that art was a thing that was bought and sold. I liked Jerry Saltz's good-natured cheerleading. I liked Charlie Finch's snarky demolition of art world cant. I liked Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and Tony Fitzpatrick. Key word--"liked" in past tense. It shut down yesterday.

But I was a late-comer to Artnet Magazine. As I've been reading its obituaries, I am even more astonished by its story. The magazine, which is part of the larger Artnet art market information service, started in 1995. The internet was still steam-powered back then! And during all that time, it's had one editor, Walter Robinson, who is quite a character.

There is a great profile of Robinson  from earlier this year at GalleristNY. His life in the New York art world of the 70s, 80s and 90s is totally fascinating. Here are a couple of choice bits, but read the whole thing.

It was a fertile time for art writing and publishing, and the deAk-Robinson-Cohn trio began putting out a journal, Art-Rite, on cheap newsprint. “We wanted people to throw it away,” Ms. deAk once told an art historian. “We didn’t want to contribute to raising the value of art.”

“Magazines like Artforum were so adult,” Mr. Robinson said. “If you look back at those Art-Rites, we were so immature.”

Artists designed the covers. Ed Ruscha photographed a wax candle shaped like a devil for the front, an angel for the back. Pat Steir’s had three roses, each a different color. “They hand-printed all of them on the floor of the loft,” Ms. Steir told us. To make the print, they used a potato. “It was cheap,” she said. “No one had any money.”

While producing the magazine, artist Sol LeWitt, Mr. Robinson and Ms. deAk, along with a handful of other artists, founded Printed Matter, the now-nonprofit bookstore located in Chelsea. He bartended and made the social rounds. “He fucked every girl in the art world in the ’70s,” said Mr. McCormick. ["Art Net: The Life and Times of Walter Robinson," Andrew Russeth, January 24, 2012, GalleristNY]

That's an enviable young manhood, if I may say so! If that was all he ever really achieved, that would have been plenty. But he was also an artist and writer and editor. And he started the infamous cable access art show, GalleryBeat (see Guest of Cindy Sherman for some prime GalleryBeat).

“There was that certain ‘bad’ painting aesthetic that he did, but a lot of his work was touching, sweet paintings, that had subtlety,” said Cathy Lebowitz, who joined Art in America in the late ’80s. Mr. Robinson was something of a mentor for her, and after they had known each other for a few years, she joined him and Mr. H-O on their public-access television show, GalleryBeat.

The show started in 1993. The two men regularly visited galleries during the week and one day Mr. H-O decided that it would be worth bringing along a camera. The tone of the show is about as far from the realm of academic discourse as one can imagine. “It came from about the third grade, I think,” Mr. H-O said.

“They would be in the office conspiring,” Betsy Baker, then editor in chief of Art in America, said. Every once in a while dealers would throw them out, as was known to happen at Andrea Rosen, PaceWildenstein and the Dia Center for the Arts, which prohibited filming. After Dia ejected them on camera, Mr. Robinson becomes as incensed as he seems capable of being.

 “The thing about the Dia Center for the Arts is that what they do is bullshit,” he says briskly. “The money floods in from the rich people who write it all off on their taxes. They charge you four bucks to go into this place. They hardly ever do any exhibitions, and they won’t let us in to show you a little TV. It’s the worst things about contemporary art—elitist, snobby and stupid.” ["Art Net: The Life and Times of Walter Robinson," Andrew Russeth, January 24, 2012, GalleristNY]

I love it. I feel that way too about art galleries and museums and art spaces that restrict people (me in particular) from taking photos. Read the whole piece. It's almost an outline of his life, because his life has been so eventful that it's impossible to provide to much detail. The article careens from one thing to another, with Robinson interacting with many of the best critics and artists around before they found success. It's an exhilarating read.

Charlie Finch makes his goodbye on the Artnet site, writing, "Nothing lasts forever, but it is a shame that, at the point at which Artnet Magazine's content is more comprehensive and lucid than ever, that it will disappear. I've worked with Walter Robinson for 15 years. Everything you read about him is true, he's a gentleman, the art world loves him, he's a brilliant painter, he's the best editor of his generation, and he will land on his feet." Finch is a controversial writer, but I love his no-bullshit tone. Hell, if I could, I'd hire him to write for The Great God Pan Is Dead (Mr. Finch--email me!). He, too, will land on his feet and survive to offend again.

Jerry Saltz's writing always appeared on Artnet Magazine (as well as in other places--Artnet seemed to have some kind of blanket reprint deal with him). He wrote a typically generous farewell to the magazine.

My heart skipped a beat when I heard the news. Everything I've written since 1998 has been republished on Artnet — often with pithier titles (supplied by Robinson), always with much better and way more pictures (many taken by Robinson). For years, I wasn't paid at all by Artnet. Even though I was as almost-broke then as I almost am now, it felt fine. Once I got paid, it topped out in the low three figures. I loved every second of it.

Mostly because of the way that Walter edited and oversaw Artnet. No jargon. No unbearably long multi-footnoted, almost unreadable art-historical pieces — except all the ones by Donald Kuspitt, whom Walter loved and defended. Then there was Charlie Finch, a planetoid unto himself, the writer whom everyone read. (Charlie may be the porn star of the art world. Half of all hits go to him.) He played marauding Omega to Walter's laid-back Beta. Never an alpha dog, Walter instead was always eager around, entertained by, and amazed with everything going on around him. He could dis things, even us writers, but with a big heart.["Jerry Saltz on the End of artnet.com's Magazine," 6/25/2012, The Vulture]

Saltz points out that the art market services will survive while the magazine dies. That seems like the way of the world--the art world, at least. Money becomes ever more important (at least in the blue-chip neighborhoods of the art world) while criticism grows more irrelevant. It's a little unnerving that a lively site like Artnet Magazine could die off so suddenly. I'm sure its writers will find new homes--they're good, after all. I look forward to seeing what they do next.

Xenia Fedorchenko’s No Free Lunch: A Closer Look

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

At first glance it seems like a spastic horse, until you notice fingers on its neck and that bony dinosaur back ridge. Distant architecture with barely discernible towers and turrets bespeak medieval Europe, but a flying bird skeleton indicates something more hellish. I’m looking at Xenia Fedorchenko’s No Free Lunch, a stone litho and intaglio print in the group exhibition Heavy Hitters at Peveto through July 7.


Xenia Fedorchenko, No Free Lunch, 2012, lithography & intaglio, 15 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches

I first encountered Fedorchenko’s art in 2007 when she exhibited a copper plate etching of a severely disfigured nude in Lawndale’s Big Show. Its knee warts and sagging tits made me want to meet the artist who turned out to be Russian born, and who the year before had moved from the east coast to Beaumont to teach at Lamar University. With Untitled at Lawndale, Fedorchenko was making her Houston exhibition debut.

The Lawndale print was part of an on ongoing series of grotesque nudes meant to penetrate our excessive focus on outer appearance. Face lifts and other surface concerns, Fedorchenko believes, distance us from our corporeality. We “exist in a body without embodying it,” she told me.

The past colors her perspective. Fedorchenko lived in Moscow before the collapse of the Soviet Union, where there was scarcity, contrasted to American abundance. Arguably, people who experience waiting in line for necessities are probably less concerned with cellulite and perfect teeth.

I am recalling a nude she printed a few years back at Texas Collaborative, Dan Allison’s Houston print shop. It had a basketball shaped stomach and a painfully tiny penis atop wrinkly thin legs. Despite these afflictions, it wore a self satisfied smirk.

As previously mentioned, in No Free Lunch a bird carcass flies above the dinosaur “horse.” This motif of a flying “demon” is a compositional element shared with many of the nudes, which also include small flying figures. The flying demon it turns out is derived from devils who torture the damned in medieval depictions of Hell, particularly from the distinct current of Northern European medieval expressionism that includes the beaked, horned and scaly devils by Martin Schongauer who attack poor Saint Anthony. The flying dead bird’s thorny reptilian features relate it to Schongauer’s devils, and also to Matthias Grunewald’s devils with bird-like features. Grunewald also painted scaly dragon devils, some covered with mucous and excrement. Those who rape the wicked while they fly are very similar to Xenia’s flying caressing nudes.

In 2007 I noticed in one of her prints a fish emerging from a nude’s vagina, which directly quotes Bosch, who seems near hysteria in his dedication to helping sinners understand how horrible Hell is. In Bosch’s imagination torture can be even more hideous than a fish in your crotch. Many of his wicked have sharp objects up their butts. It was unnecessary to ask Fedorchenko if she looked closely at Bosch because her print included letterpress text of his writing, “a false paradise, sinful and demonic, the inhabitants of which would be damned.”

Fedorchenko’s treatment of skin also references medieval narrations of Hell in which devils are portrayed with rotting skin and the miserable sinners have diseased skin. Grunewald painted a corpse with syphilitic lesions that are art historically notorious. Fedorchenko’s blemished and pocked flesh, like to the putrefied rib cage on her horse, nods in that direction.

Not having spoken to Fedorchenko since 2007, I contacted her to hear the latest. Fedorchenko replied from Florence, it’s her semester break, said she could better reply when she arrived in Venice, and then wrote from Venice. She continues her teaching schedule, recently exhibited art in Saint Louis Missouri, and spends quite a bit of time giving printing demonstrations at other universities, recently at a university in California.

What’s with the horse? “The horse, a beast of labor,” she said, “symbolizes the average citizen, out of shape, overworked and tired.” According to Fedorchenko its small head and weird body indicate it’s confused, unsure of its surroundings and possibly defeated. The imposing disorganized city threatens. “Occasionally life presents the horse-being with a seemingly wonderful opportunity, the award-winning cup-cake/muffin thing, but still the being hesitates to seize it as a bird-killing monster may be lurking.”

“There’s no free lunch,” she wrote from Venice.

No Comment: Back Seats

Edward Kienholz, Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964, polyester resin, paint, fiberglass, and flock, truncated 1938 Dodge, clothing, chicken wire, beer bottles, artificial grass, and plaster cast, 66 x 240 x 144 in (via an awesome Russian Ed Kienholz website)


Bobby Smith, untitled (Tampa, FL), 1950s, from the The Rex Maniscalco Collection of Bobby Smith Photographs and Other Materials at the University of South Florida Libraries (via I've Had Dreams Like That)

Aroused: A Closer Look at Mark Williams’ Untitled 2012

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

Not long after the gurus at ARTnews defined his paint application as “mechanical,” Mark Williams offers a restless geometric abstraction with ambiguous blurred elements that veer into gestural. You have to stand before Untitled, 2012 at Wade Wilson Art to see its vitality, this work’s uneven paint, enhancing imperfections and overall translucence are not visible in a reproduction.

The shift from controlled and programmatic to somewhat disordered made me want to ask questions so I contacted Williams. He made Untitled he said by painting oil on polypropylene with a silkscreen squeegee. First he created a grid by placing vertical and horizontal strips of tape on glass. In constructing this preliminary “design” or template, applying and removing tape, he worked intuitively. The grid’s resulting imperfections compel him to call it “a broken grid.” He then painted the sheet of plastic as it lay above the grid, and here was also improvisational, applying paint as messy and liberated as he pleased.


Mark Williams, Untitled, 2012, Oil on polypropylene, 40" x 52"

When I met Williams he used tape more precisely. To create Untitled, 2011, painted layers of frosted mylar for the Synthetic Supports: Plastic is the New Paper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, he used tape to design the painted areas. We discussed the fact that tape had a different role for the Wade Wilson piece. “It is true,” he said. “I have eliminated the use of tape as a masking element. Now tape has a new function, it becomes a template.”

The 2011 show at MFAH thematically focused on the use of polymer by contemporary artists such as Williams, and in it he showed that layers of painted plastic assumed weird depth and refraction. For that show Curator Rebecca Dunham also pulled from MFAH’s permanent collection, so we got to see art by some of the biggies, such as two drawings by Jasper Johns who pioneered the technique of ink on plastic. “I’m hanging next to a Man Ray,” Lucinda Cobley who was also in the show told me, “it can’t get better than that.”


Mark Williams, Untitled, 2011, Paint on stacked layers of mylar in the exhibition Synthetic Supports: Plastic is the New Paper

Williams did not begin experimenting with plastic until 2010, so ARTnews could not have known of looser brushstrokes to come. In his article Christopher French described Williams’ use of tape to paint large monochrome geometric forms on canvas and correctly noted busy-ness from opposing geometrics and “uncertainty” at the forms’ edges, by which he meant expressive irregularities at the tape-defined borders, as in the painting Choice. The critic went on to write, “If the main forms broadcast a straightforward geometry, his marginalia add the sort of pathos associated with Robert Motherwell’s paintings,” and that is a lovely thing to say about a painter.


Mark Williams, Choice, 2006, Acrylic on canvas, 40” x 60”

Ink drawings from 2007 and 2008 indicate a certain delight in imprecise forms and serve as forewarning of gestural strokes on plastic. These works on paper are elegantly ill-defined. He recently displayed drawings in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Schlegl in Zurich.


Mark Williams, Untitled #9, 2008, Ink on paper drawing, 12” x 9”

Summing up his thoughts about Untitled, 2012 at Wade Wilson, Williams said, “it is the result of my ongoing interest in structure (the grid) and gesture (the paint).” But he appears to be aroused by the paint.

Williams and I had booze together (research) so I know a little about him. For years he has worked as an art installer at MoMA. Now try to imagine having your hands, literally, on that art, installing the de Kooning show, the Cindy Sherman, moving works in and out for light and temperature control. How can that not overwhelmingly impact his output?

So who does he look at? “As I move through the museum certain works do catch my eye,” he said. “Some favorite artists are: Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Anne Truitt, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Mark Rothko, Dan Flavin and Blinky Palermo.” Ryman is included in the Impressions show at Wade Wilson Art through July 7.

A Note on Brass Tacks at GGallery

by Robert Boyd

Brass Tacks, a group exhibit at GGallery, started by asking three San Antonio artists to invite other artists. So the first three artists essentially curate the rest of the show. The thing is, I'm not sure who the first three artists are. In any case, its a novel curatorial tactic, and the results are generally pretty appealing. Here are some of the pieces I liked.

The first piece you see when you enter the gallery is Ronny Unraveling by Clay McClure. McClure starts with antique and used wooden furniture and transforms it.


Clay McClure, Ronny Unraveling, 2011, wood chair, paper rope

This piece struck me as a sculpture of a moment frozen in time--a fantastic moment during which a chair has become possessed by some plant spirit and explosively sprouted roots. When you see Ronny Unraveling, you can see in your minds eye the moments just before--when the chair was an ordinary chair and when it started growing. The piece has an Alice in Wonderland strangeness, accentuated by the fact that the seat, back and bottom of the structure are clearly parts of a very real and very ordinary chair.


Joseph A. Duarte, Mouth, 2011, inert bullets, concrete

Joseph A. Duarte uses bullets in his two pieces. Inert bullets are bullets without gunpowder or any propellant. Mouth is a sculptural depiction of a mouth, with ragged concrete gums and snaggly bullet teeth. Mouth is both ridiculous and menacing, and the use of bullets reinforces this.


Joseph A. Duarte, Mouth, 2011, inert bullets, concrete

Mouth is not quite toothless, but it doesn't seem particularly threatening. The inert bullets are impotent.


Joseph A. Duarte, War Is a Lot of Things, 2011, inert bullets, marble

War Is a Lot of Things is more elegant than Mouth. The lovely piece of marble suspended over the bullets is prettier than the ragged concrete of Mouth. Even the bullets look better--stacked together in a glass enclosure, they show the viewer their noble brass jackets. Mouth is the old soldier as he is; War Is a Lot of Things is that soldier in his pressed uniform wearing his medals for Veterans Day.


Tommy Gregory, I thank God for teaching me humility, 2012, optic crystal

And speaking of elegant, I loved Tommy Gregory's crystal iPhones. They are appropriate monuments to this wonderful piece of technology--and they will last far longer than iPhones which, after all, will surely be obsolete in a few years. I realize that they could be read as ironic--that they could be seen to make a critical comment on our powerful attachment to our gadgets. But given that it could be read either way, I choose to read it as a straightforward homage to the iPhone.


Tommy Gregory, I keep them as a reminder they're not killing me, 2012, optic crystal

Almost as important as the objects themselves are the displays. They communicate a sense that these are important, precious objects.


Justin Parr, Time will take care of itself, just leave time alone, 2011, archival pigment print

Justin Parr contributed this spooky image, Time will take care of itself, just leave time alone. The stone well at night with a red glow from inside--it feels like something out of Twin Peaks. You don't want to look into that well, but you are compelled to.


Willie Sanchez, Mezclar, 2012, plaster, tar, polyurethane

Mezclar is the Spanish verb "to mix", and Willie Sanchez's Mezclar appears to mix Mesoamerican graphic elements with Japanese elements. The oval-shaped surface recalls a turtle shell, and the dark blotchy stain has a highly organic look. Mexclar feels more like an archeological artifact than a piece of contemporary art. An artifact from a non-existent culture, a mixture of other cultures. One could probably concoct a convincing historical explanation for this piece. The culture that created it valued beauty--that much seems certain.

Brass Tacks is up through June 29.

Safari to the Suburbs 2: Suchu Dance at West Oaks Art House

by Robert Boyd

Last November, we heard about how a long-deserted J.C. Penneys store at West Oaks Mall on Hwy 6 was to be used as some kind of art space. This month, we finally got to see that start up. Suchu Dance staged a site specific dance there as part of their annual Big Range Dance Festival.  And the space now has a name--the West Oaks Art House (WOAH).



The signage was modest--disappointingly so for such a large building. The exterior wall of the WOAH is huge and white--imagine what an ambitious artist could do with it. Or they could leave it white and project images or movies on it at night. In any case, the signage should be a little more visible.

Inside was a vast, virtually empty room. In the center were the escalators, but they had been curtained off. The structure has two floors (at least) with very high ceilings. In addition to the vast open space, there are offices and storage space and changing rooms. But all of them have largely been stripped clean. Sharsten Plenge, the director of WOAH, explained that when she arrived, the place was a mess and had many cats living inside. (It had been abandoned since 2003.)



So Suchu Dance designed a dance performance that would use the entire space. In the picture above, you see the dancers all grouped together, but that was relatively rare during the course of the long performance.



This was more typical--the dancers spread out, activating various parts of this space simultaneously, with audience members right there among them.



And store signage still hangs from the ceiling, reminding you that you are in an empty department store.



The dancers got pretty vigorous--and one of them kicked a hole in the wall. I asked Plenge abut this and she replied, "I kind of love the hole in the wall—it is like a souvenir of the energy that Suchu graced WOAH with." This may say something about how she plans to let artists use the space. Artists would no doubt appreciate the flexibility to figuratively (and literally) knock holes in the wall.

But there are still problems with the space. Its distance from the center of art in Houston, inside the Loop, remains an issue. This dance performance was sparsely attended, which is perhaps to be expected for WOAH's first event. But if WOAH is interested in the participation of the Houston art scene, more effort will need to be expended promoting its events. Something more than a Facebook page. The other problem is that Plenge doesn't live in Houston. She commutes from Los Angeles (where Pacific Retail Capital Partners, the owner of West Oaks Mall, is headquartered). Depending on what her goals are for the space, I think WOAH needs a full-time director to turn this into a continuously operating performance venue/art space. On the other hand, if she sees it as a large empty space in which to stage occasional art events, maybe a full-time director would be superfluous.

The Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Art in Spring has made a multi-year, sustained effort to reach out to the North Houston/Spring community in which it resides. I don't know if Plenge is planning on doing something similar for the far West side area or if she is planning on concentrating her efforts on attracting arts enthusiasts from in-town to make the 22 mile trek to West Oaks Mall (or a combination of the two).  And the big question is, will WOAH be doing any collaborations with Toby Keith at his new joint in the mall, I Love This Bar and Grill?

One last note. I identify the Pearl Fincher and WOAH as suburban arts institutions. That may seem to lump them together, but the reality is that they are very far away from each other--23 miles driving distance.  This speaks to difficulty in establishing a suburban art scene--the diffuse nature of the suburbs mitigates against getting a critical mass. This is one reason why artists move to certain neighborhoods in big cities--they can be close to their peers and their institutional support. I think the relative isolation from other institutions (private and non-profit) and from arts-heavy neighborhoods will always be obstacles for the Pearl Fincher and for WOAH.