Pan Recommends for the week of October 3 to October 9

Robert Boyd

Quite a bit going on this week, including the Fringe Festival, a big show at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and a new gallery opening up in Houston, The Mission.

THURSDAY THROUGH SUNDAY


 Frame Dance Productions will be at the Fringe Festival

The 2013 Fringe Festival at Frenetic Theatre, The Barn, Super Happy Fun Land and Bohemeo's starting a various times at various venues (see the calendar for details). The Fringe Festival (which actually started yesterday) returns in a more compact form (no longer spread out over multiple weekends) with many dance, music, theater, etc. performances.

THURSDAY


Charles Hutson, A Dry Autum, watercolor, 9 x 13 inches, c. 1920

Natural Wonder: Charles Hutson Memorial exhibition at d. m. allison, 6–8 pm. Charles Hutson (1840-1936) was a Civil War veteran who took up painting in his 60s. This pop-up show (through Saturday) includes an auction of Hutson works, which can be seen here.


Raul Gonzalez

Consider All Things: Hiyme Brummett and Raul Gonzalez at Main Street Projects, 6–9 pm. Raul Gonzalez took his art back to school to get an MFA at UTSA. But now he's back to show something to the barfies at Double Trouble, along with fellow exhibitor Hiyme Brummett.

FRIDAY


Margaret Meehan

we were them: Margaret Meehan at David Shelton Gallery, 6–8 pm. I'm down for any Margaret Meehan show, but how can she top her photos of the bloody but elegant female albino sasquatch boxer?


Melissa Thorne's installation in progress at Devin Borden Gallery

Melissa Thorne: A Wall Around a Window at Devin Borden Gallery, 6–8 pm. Melissa Thorne's installation looks interesting, but the description is kind of a bummer: "Melissa Thorne explores memory, familiarity, history and transformation..."


A lot of stairs to climb in the old lighthouse

Lighthouse in the Sea of Time: Zineb Sedira at Blaffer Art Museum, 6–9 pm. Pictures of Algerian lighthouses and interviews with Algerian lighthouse keepers. (Lighthouse keeper is my dream job.)

 
Ann Stautberg

Ann Stautberg: New Work at Avis Frank, 6 to 8 pm. Ann Stautberg hand-colors black and white photographs. Looks interesting.

SATURDAY


Neil Patrick Harris by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The OUT List at Hiram Butler Gallery, 11 am – 1 pm. The slick photographer of Latinos, supermodels, artists, African-Americans, fashionistas, musicians, politicians and above all, celebrities, now has a series of portraits of LGBTQ people (especially LGBTQ celebrities).


Beatrice Coron, Chaos City

Sprawl at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft featuring Dylan J. Beck, Kathryn Clark, Beatrice Coron, Dustin Farnsworth, Julia Gabriel, Nancy Nicholson, Sara Pfau, Keith Renner, Paul Sacaridiz, Carrie Schneider, E. Ryan Simmons, Demitra Thomloudis, Norwood Viviano, Ashley Wahba, Dane Youngren and Andrea Zeuner, 5:30 to 8 pm. An ambitious concept, but wouldn't it have been more appropriate to have this in Stafford or Kingwood? The show will also feature a bunch of speakers over the next few weeks,but I would suggest also getting the great old Houston band Sprawl back together for a performance as well.


Inka-Maaria Jurvanen

Inka-Maaria Jurvanen: Laughter Without Laugher at Redbud Gallery, 6–9 pm. I don't get the title of this show by Finnish artist Inka-Maaria Jurvanen. Her art reminds me a bit of Roger Brown's.

 
Mark Hogensen

Draw up a chair, please featuring new work by Mark Hogensen at Ggallery, 6 to 9 pm. Just as the name of the show implies, these are drawings of chairs and tables. Come by and set a spell.

 
Susan Giles, Horizontal CN Tower

The Mission Inaugural Group Show featuring Susan Giles, Jeroen Nelemans, EJ Hill, Erica Bohm, Adam Gondek and Missy Weimer at The Mission, 6:30–8:30 pm. Since gallerist Joan Wich died, her space at 4411 Montrose has been the site for a variety of pop-ups and short term leases. Now it will be getting a long-term occupant, the Houston branch of Chicago's Mission gallery. Scuttlebutt had The Mission specializing in Latin American art, but this inaugural show mostly features North American artists.



Paisaje Roto / Passage Rot: Jorge Galván Flores at Fresh Arts, 5–10 pm, in association with the Winter Street and Spring Street Studios open house. Jorge Galván Flores's exhibit has something to do with topiary, which means it will be awesome, but even if it's not, there will be a ton of open studios to check out at Winter and Spring Street.

 
David Polizter, Sea Cliffs, Boothbay Harbor, 2012

Emily Peacock: You, Me & Diane and David Politzer: When You’re Out There at Galveston Arts Center, 6–8 pm. If you missed the initial run of Emily Peacock's You, Me and Diane at Lawndale in 2012, here's your chance to see these surprisingly heartwarming recreations of Diane Arbus photos. David Politzer's work has also been shown at Lawndale--his ironic images of national park dioramas and gift shops will take on an extra poignancy now that the Republicans in Congress have caused all the national parks to close.


MONDAY


Hillerbrand and Magsamen and co.

Hillerbrand and Magsamen: A Fluxus Practice in Suburbia at Alabama Song, 7:30–9:30 pm. AKA "Getting your children involved in amusingly absurd artistic antics before they become teenagers and start rolling their eyes with disgust whenever you say, 'Hey, kids--wanna make some art with mom and dad today?'"

WEDNESDAY


Gerardo Mosquera: all art critics should wear hard hats

Gerardo Mosquera: "Infinite Islands: Art, Internationalization, and Cultural Dynamics", lecture at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 4:30–5:30 pm. The Cuban curator and critic speaks. If you happen to be free in the afternoon on Wednesday (unlike me), this should be quite interesting.

Kermit Oliver and his Precursors

Robert Boyd

There are two shows up at the Art League right now, both showcasing painters. Neither is known as an abstractionist. But they are on different sides of abstraction. Kermit Oliver comes across as a pre-modern painter while Rachel Hecker is a thoroughly post-modern artist. It's an intriguing pair of shows. I was walking through Kermit Oliver: Tracing Our Pilgrimage when I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks.


Kermit Oliver, Buckeye Atop a Mexican Wheel, 1997, acrylic on panel, 55 x 38 inches

I was reminded of a great American painting After the Hunt by William Harnett.


William Harnett, After the Hunt, 1885

Oliver's painting is quite spare compared to Harnett's busier painting, but the two are clearly related. The rabbits are in nearly identical positions. Harnett was part of a school of American still-life painters who often painted nearly flat subjects--particularly things pinned to or hanging from a wall. The work had a somewhat trompe-l'oeil quality. But to modern eyes, these paintings read like precursors to modernism (sort of the way that the poems of Emily Dickinson are like modernist poems avant le lettre). The subject matter is pushed very close to the picture plane, removing the feeling of a framed picture as a window into space.

But what does it mean for Kermit Oliver to be playing with Harnett-like flatness in Buckeye Atop a Mexican Wheel. Oliver is not a modernist, but he lives in a world where modernism happened. This painting deliberately links the two worlds of modernism and premodernism, just as Harnett and John Peto did unwittingly back in the 19th century. Indeed, the arrangement of the two rectangles above the rabbit reminds me of Kazimir Malevich.


Kazimir Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915, Oil on canvas

The point is that Kermit Oliver's art is not easy to pigeonhole. It looks like painterly realism from the 19th century, but as Buckeye Atop a Mexican Wheel shows us, nothing is quite that simple. For someone used to thinking in categories, that makes his work difficult to write about. And that difficulty is a siren call--writing about Oliver's work is irresistible but likely to crash on the shoals. But when I saw Malevich and Harnett reflected in Buckeye Atop a Mexican Wheel, I was reminded of one of my favorite essays, "Kafka and His Precursors" by Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1951. It's one I have referred to explicitly in my critical writing, and it is always in the back of my mind.

Borges lists a group of literary and philosophical works that remind him in various ways of elements he finds in the work of Kafka. These include the work of Kierkegaard, a poem by Robert Browning, a story by Léon Bloy, etc. He concludes the essay with these observations:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (from a translation by James E. Irby)

I might not have ever thought about William Harnett and Kazimir Malevich together if not for Buckeye Atop a Mexican Wheel. Oliver is an artist whose work is always shaded by the work of the past. And the past is a tool with which one can approach Oliver's work.


Kermit Oliver, A Small Menagerie Poised Before Approaching Summer Shower, 2013, acrylic on masonite with handcrafted frame, 50 3/4 x 40 1/2 inches framed

A Small Menagerie Poised Before Approaching Summer Shower is a charming group portrait of various animals, mostly domesticated (cow, sheep, ass, pig, cat, rooster) with some wild animals (fox, rabbit, skunk, various birds). They are posed in a landscape of central Texas--a vast prairie with a thunderstorm visible miles away. Oliver calls is a "summer shower," but the size of it makes it seem slightly ominous. But like so often in August in September, the storm is somewhere over there while the sun is shining here.  So the figures in the foreground are bathed in intense light--the colors of the grass, the flowers and the rooster are intense, and the white birds are very white. Oliver may be influenced by Northern European art, but he paints a scene that feels 30° north, not 50°.


Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, circa 1834, oil on canvas, 30 × 35.5 inches

Edward Hicks painted Peaceable Kingdom in 1834 to reflect his Quaker beliefs. It doesn't reflect a specific biblical verse, but certainly Isaiah 1:16 comes to mind: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them." In Oliver's version, however, the large predators are missing. The owl, the cat and the fox are the only three hunters I see, and they aren't especially fearsome. Oliver isn't depicting a scene where lions and leopards and wolves lay down with goats and calves and lambs. But perhaps the dangerous element is the storm itself. Between these (mostly) domesticated animals and the power of nature there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce. In this reading, the use of the phrase "Summer Shower" in the title makes sense.


Kermit Oliver, Dido and Aeneas, 21997, acrylic on gessoed birch panel with handcrafted frame, 50 x 32 inches

Dido was the queen and founder of Carthage according to legend. In the Aeneid, she falls in love with Aeneas, a Trojan refugee who will later become the ancestor of the Romans. Dido herself is a refugee from Tyre in Lebanon. Aeneas also loves her, but is told by Mercury that Jupiter wants him to leave Carthage and go to Rome. Dido kills herself when he leaves.

At one time, every well-educated gentleman in Europe was very familiar with this story from the Aeneid. It was the subject of many European artworks, most notably the Purcell opera, Dido and Aeneas. And there have been many paintings depicting Dido and Aeneas.


Nicolas Verkolye, Dido and Aeneas, early 1700s, oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 45 1/4 inches

This one by Nicolas Verkolye (owned by the Getty) is typical. All the characters look very European--in this case, Northern European. Dido is a pale blonde. European artists before the 19th century typically painted classical and Biblical subjects as if the characters were from their own country. (Hence the very blonde Christ is Grunewald's Isenheim Alterpiece.) So for Oliver, who is African American, to depict Dido as a black woman is not a break from the European tradition but a continuation of it.

But what is a break is that Oliver's Dido and Aeneas doesn't depict Aeneas. There are three shrouded figures on the left and Dido alone on the right. She is staring into a vague distant space; she looks unbearably sad. Aeneas is present in the picture in her despair. One could even read this as taking place just after her suicide--the white greasepaint on her face gives her a ghostly appearance and the shrouded figures could be read as grieving mourners.


Kermit Oliver, Orpheus, 1997, acrylic on gessoed birch panel with handcrafted frame, 50 x 52 inches framed

Since classical times, artists have been depicting Orpheus, one of the key Greek mythological figures. Orpheus sang and played the lyre so well that his music was capable of calming wild animals. This image is frequently the subject of depictions of Orpheus. Such pictures often have a variety of animals--carnivores and herbivores--surrounding Orpheus as he plays. In this way, they prefigure The Peaceable Kingdom and reflect Isaiah 1:16.


Orpheus surroundend by animals. Ancient Roman floor mosaic, from Palermo, now in the. Museo archeologico regionale di Palermo

Greek and Roman depictions show him plying a lyre. But later European paintings usually show him playing a bowed string instrument.


Sebastian Vrancx, Orpheus and the Beasts, c. 1595, Oil on panel, 55 x 69 cm 

In other words, just as in depictions of Dido and Aeneas, artists made the image of the myth into something local and contemporary. In the case of Orpheus, he plays a lyre in the Roman mosaic and a violin in the Flemish Sebastian Vrancx painting. So why not an accordion in Oliver's version? Likewise, Oliver puts Orpheus in contemporary clothes and makes him a black man. He doesn't view the myth as something from the distant past but something that is continually present.

But where he does depart from earlier depictions of Orpheus is that the beast in this painting is not calm. On the contrary, Orpheus has a split second to pick up that accordion and start playing, or else he's dead meat. Orpheus is a strange painting. In addition to the attacking tiger, the flowers and the book are difficult to relate to the myth. Oliver may be drawing on a myth that has inspired art and religious practices since at least the 6th century BCE, but he takes possession of it with an idiosyncratic interpretation and personal symbols.


Kermit Oliver, A Swine Before a Silvered Bowl of River Pearls, 2012, acrylic on panel with handcrafted frame, 30 x 24 inches

Mathew 7:6 reads, "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." The Bible is a source of much of Oliver's art. He has painted many scenes from the Bible, including a controversial rendering of his son Krystian as Jesus. When I think of Christianity today, I think of a religion that is often distrustful of beauty and of art. For example, I am struck by how many churches in Houston are in unadorned metal sheds--it's as if building a beautiful church would be vain or sinful. But Oliver reminds us that there are Christian artists working today whose work embraces beauty and reflects their own highly personal relationship with their religion. 


This is a subject that deserves a deeper examination. So too does Oliver's technique. And something should be said about the magnificent frames that go with each painting. Perhaps when someone publishes a monograph on Oliver, these aspects of his work will get the examination they deserve. For now, go to the Art League and sample Oliver's unique oeuvre.

Michael Crowder: Fifty Shades of Flocking

Betsy Huete

With the publication of such books as Art & Artifact: The Museum as Medium and Massimiliano Gioni’s theme The Encyclopedic Palace for the 55th Venice Biennale, it is evident that artists’ engagement with taxonomy, categorization, and museology has hit an all-time apex in the contemporary art landscape. This framework for making hasn’t, of course, cropped up out of nowhere; rather, it has been fomenting for quite some time. Artists like Mark Dion, British artist Robert Williams, and Fred Wilson, among many, many others have been working like this for decades. While Dion’s modus operandi is to develop curiosity cabinets that re-categorize objects held in the collection of a given institution, and Williams similarly carefully researches and taxonomizes various materials and subject matter, Wilson reflects the museum back onto the viewer, critiquing and exposing the institutional reinforcement of racial biases. In a good half of his exhibition Retro-Spectacle (all 2013), currently up at Wade Wilson Art, Michael Crowder joins the conversation.


Mariposa mori, 2013, Cast glass butterflies, mahogany cabinets, tromp l’oeil library, rug, dimensions variable. 

The back half of the gallery houses Crowder’s installation Mariposa mori. The viewer enters through open red velvet curtains to encounter a space reminiscent of a museum, or an avid collector’s study. Methodically placed throughout are seven cabinets or display cases of the same name as the installation with varying parenthetical subtitles like Historia Naturalia or Specimen Pedestal. Along the back wall is a tromp l’oeil of a library, replete with Mariposa mori (Collector’s Portrait) mounted resolutely above the faux mantle. Each dark mahogany display case holds anywhere from one to over one hundred butterflies cast in a process known as pâte de verre, which is a method deriving from 19th century France in which an artisan melts and fuses glass particles together. Evocative of both curiosity cabinets and natural history museums, Dr. Scott Sherer says this of the work: “While simple colorless glass particles conjoin to capture the idiosyncrasy of a singular butterfly and suggest the remarkable journeys that enable the survival of a kaleidoscope, Mariposa mori also maintains a deeper conceptual foundation.” Except there is no concept.


Mariposa mori (Collector’s Portrait), 2013, 32x31x5 inches.

The butterflies, while impeccably crafted and carefully placed, offer no evidence of research, or taxonomy, or any categorization whatsoever. The most intellectually rigorous endeavor Crowder embarks upon the viewer is Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia), a three-step representation of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. And while the beautifully constructed butterflies—in all their muted color and granulated fragility—should arguably be enough, with the incorporation of curiosity cabinets and a museum setting, he has effectively assigned meaning where it doesn’t belong.


Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia), 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.


Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.


Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.


Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.

Where Mariposa mori misses conceptually, Crowder’s Refined Crude series hits the mark. In the room directly in front of Mariposa mori he has mounted seven works from the series, all with the same name but variations in number (as in Refined Crude 68.86 or Refined Crude 58.65), evocative of the banal “Untitled’s” of the foregone era of modernist painting. And although every material used in Refined Crude is representational, Crowder’s angular construction certainly harkens to geometric abstraction. Each piece is a slight variation of the same scene: a cast drill bit attached to a mahogany frame, either hanging or slightly penetrating the mahogany on the opposite side. Slate or a photograph of rock in a landscape occasionally factors in, as in 60.57 or 46.80. Here, Crowder melds complex layers of meaning with the materials he uses and how he chooses to display them. But between the voluptuous red walls, the velvety curtains, the heavy-handed flocking, and the vaginally fetishistic Body of Work: Part 2, the viewer constantly has to contend with props instead of examining the work for what it is. And ironically, the agitation created in these conflations of meaning is actually more erotic than the theatrics enveloping the work.



Refined Crude 46.80, 2013, Cast lead crystal, slate, 13x17x2 inches.

Retro-spectacle undoubtedly lives up to its name. Unfortunately, the spectacular nature of the exhibition betrays Michael Crowder’s masterful craftsmanship instead of buttressing it.

Retro-spectacle runs until October 22, 2013 at Wade Wilson Art.

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Jack Kirby, “I Laughed at the Great God, Pan!” page 1, 1959 (hat tip to kobek)

Cargo Space: How Does It Rate? A Scientific Study

Robert Boyd



Cargo Space made its debut last night. It looks like there is still some work to do, which better be done fast. It is soon taking a long trip to Tulsa, bringing artists to the prairie. They are scheduled to be in Tulsa at the Hardesty Arts Center on October 4. Chris Sperandio, the prime mover behind Cargo Space will be the Neal Cassidy of this trip. The Cargo Space will be shuffling Houston artists up to Tulsa in several trips. The traveling artists are Daniel Anguilu (one of the artists who painted the exterior, along with Eyeful Art, Dual and Beau Pope), Mike Beradino, Natasha Bowdoin, Robert Pruitt, Rahul Mitra and Seth Mittag.






Cool little figures on the back of the bus.



Welcome aboard!



You can write messages to your fellow passengers on the chalk boards, which will come in handy when various passengers decide they aren't talking to one another anymore.


It looks good but not complete. For one thing, no privacy curtains around the beds.

As I was looking at Cargo Space, especially the paint job, I instantly thought of Ken Kesey's bus and the cross country "acid test" trip it took. And that got me thinking about other famous RV-type vehicles. How does Cargo Space stack up? Well, we won't know for sure until Cargo Space hits the road, but here're our RV-comparisons.

Cargo Space vs. Ken Kesey's Furthur Bus

In1964, writer Ken Kesey purchased a bus for the purpose of taking a cross country psychedelic trip (in both senses of the word) with the Merry Pranksters. At the wheel was Neal Cassidy, Jack Keroac's speedfreak buddy who was the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. It was an epic trip at the dawn of what we think of as the 60s. They even passed through Houston so that Kesey could meet up with his friend Larry McMurtrey. The whole thing was financed with the profits from Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And the trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. So how does the Cargo Space stack up?





Cargo Space vs. the Breaking Bad meth lab RV

This Sunday, the final episode of Breaking Bad airs. It's the story of Walter White, a chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to manufacture methamphetimine in order to leave something behind for his family when he goes. He teams up with an small-time criminal Jesse Pinkman, and the pair initially cook their drugs in the RV below. Why in an RV? Because the process of cooking meth makes a very powerful and distinct odor, so being able to travel to some place remote, park, cook, then move on is very useful. Even if someone did notice the smell, Walt and Jesse would be gone before anyone put two and two together.

Is this realistic? If you've ever read Methland, the harrowing book about the effect of meth on one small town, you know it is. One of the things meth cooks do in that book is make miniature meth labs in liter-sized coke bottles, then strap the bottles to bicycles which they ride around town as the chemicals react. That way the smell is dissipated. This lead the town to literally outlaw bicycles.





The interior of the Breaking Bad RV was a little bit cramped, but highly functional.




Cargo Space vs. the Girls Gone Wild bus

There was a time in America when these buses criss-crossed America getting intoxicated college girls to take off their clothes on camera. Now that Joe Francis, the leader of the Girls Gone Wild empire, is in jail, I assume Girls Gone Wild is defunct--at least as a bus-based pornographic business.





I couldn't find any photos online of the inside of the bus. Just as well, I suppose. This is a family blog.



Cargo Space vs the Lost in America RV

The first part of this video clip is from the brilliant Albert Brooks movie, Lost in America. The second part is an ad with really loud music. You've been warned. The RV in the movie symbolizes their desire to escape their lives of quiet bourgeois desperation and their inability to leave bourgeois comforts behind.





Cargo Space vs. EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle

In Stripes, this innocent looking RV turns out to be pretty bad-ass. Bill Murray and Ivan Reitman use it to rescue their hapless fellow soldiers from Czechoslovakia.







Can Cargo Space live up to its illustrious predecessors? Only time will tell.