Sent by Earl Staley for Vatican City.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Friday, November 1, 2013
From Here to Afternoon: Labor and Formalities
Betsy Huete
Revealing and the concealment of information: it’s a formidable issue that artists and curators alike frequently contend with in presenting to the public. Places like the CAMH or the MFAH, for instance, provide detailed museum placards laying out the exhibition’s historical context or even outright meaning of the work. Most galleries provide some sort of handout, again rooting the work and/or the artist(s) within a particular context. Places like the Menil, on the other hand, provide very little information to the viewer other than the title, year, and artist, greatly entrusting the viewer to enact meaning onto the work—for better or worse. Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov's latest curatorial effort From Here to Afternoon, up now at Glassell, somehow jockeys these two positions.
Exhibition entrance
Albeit written in somewhat ambiguous and fairly impenetrable language, Haggren and Lylov do provide a written document explicating the context and meaning of the exhibition. Also, there are writings scattered throughout the space that functionally anchor and appropriately provide context, and even meditate on a contemporary art exhibit’s positioning within modes of labor and efficiency. But given their equivalence in scale to and spacing between the actual artworks, the writings seem to bear their own weight as autonomous art forms, and work surprisingly well as such. The transmutation of written explanation to art object is a surprising and innovative move that simultaneously informs and subverts meaning—a smart ambiguity that relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks. Another notable treatment (or lack thereof) of the space is the omission of artist and title placards. The result is a cohesive and deeply nuanced yet nebulous grouping: a curation drafted as an unintentional collaboration between artists. While totally practical and probably necessary, it makes the image list attached to the handout seem almost disappointing.
Installation view, front gallery
Placing trust in the viewer to properly engage with the work is a respectable although risky move here—this is an exhibition that requires time. Lots of it. With its text-heavy, historicized, and intellectual agenda, glazing over the work and shrugging it off as an exploration of the banalities and dignity of labor as well as the manipulation of its laborers seems like a tempting prospect. This isn’t fresh territory, after all. Between the Touch Sanitation (1970-80) project of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), or even Houston’s currently running Shrimp Boat Project, effort used as both a material and concept in art has been in play at the very least since the post-minimalists. Fortunately, for the viewer and Haggren/Lylov alike, it doesn’t take too long to realize that in this situation, labor is instead used as a stepping-stone to engender abstraction and formal concerns.
Installation view, middle gallery
That’s not to say that these issues aren’t prevalent in the work, or aren’t meant to be included, or shouldn’t be a part of the work. It’s that they immanently present themselves through a corroboration of visual and textual abstractions resulting from actual systems of efficiency, like the photographic motion studies of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, speech conducting, and shipping containers, just to name a few. One clear example of this is the Laban-Lawrence studies of rhythm and labor, examined here through the lens of Romana Schmalisch. She uses these studies, conducted and published mostly in the 1940s, to explore the texture and rhetoric of efficiency, the most effective of which is Notation of Efficiency (2013). Situated in its own cozy dark room, the piece consists of a single slide projector, operating as an outmoded PowerPoint presentation. It’s a sequence of facts, visual aids, and Laban-Lawrence diagrams that hardly make any sense to the layperson. While seeming to do nothing more than explain a system, Schmalisch’s dead-pan delivery reveals subtle humor, making intense studies of movement like wrapping a Mars Bar feel fascinating, concise, and utterly ridiculous. She also controls the cadence of the projector, its intermittent clicking flying through some slides while spending way too much time on others. It’s a clever way of forcing the viewer to focus on phrases or images he would normally disregard, rendering certain aspects of these studies as not only important, but foreboding, manipulative, and slightly terrifying.
Romana Schmalisch, Notation of Efficiency, 2013, Slide projection and model (bamboo sphere)
Another instance of slide projector usage occurs with Liz Magic Laser’s The Digital Face (2012). In the main part of the exhibition space, two projected images face each other on opposite walls. They are two dancers, Alan Good and Cori Kresge, silently reenacting the choreography of George H. W. Bush’s 1990 and Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, respectively. The slides present images of frozen movements punctuating various points of the speeches. Overall, the piece is a fairly hilarious and extremely intelligent isolation of the movement and texture of political rhetoric, and poignantly fits in the show. But the piece originally existed as a performance at MoMA PS1 and usually shows up in galleries as a dual-channel video, and so much of the humor, nuance, and impeccable movements of the dancers is thus lost in this iteration. While the use of outmoded technology transplanted the viewer to a correlating time period in Schmalisch’s work, it doesn’t make sense with Laser’s. It’s a curatorial attempt at cohesion that cuts The Digital Face off at the knees—a grave misstep.
Liz Magic Laser, The Digital Face, 2012, Two slide projector installation
As previously stated, there are several pieces that quite purposefully lack immediacy, that demand extended attention, and Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov’s Hongkong Turbulence (2013) is one of them. Although the running time is unstated, the looped video likely takes over half an hour to cycle through. The video initially reads as boring and self-indulgent observations of the transportation, shipping, and packing of commodities—a piece that is blanketly ungenerous to the viewer. But after about ten minutes or so (hang in there!), the work suddenly shifts from tedium to intense satisfaction. As it cyclically demonstrates machines and people binding, packing, smashing, crushing, compartmentalizing, selling, beeping, and deconstructing massive amounts of things, the work abstractly and formally, and almost ethnographically, reveals the innards of contemporary systems of efficiency.
Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov, Hongkong Turbulence, 2013, 16mm film transferred to HD video
From Here to Afternoon makes interesting and borderline risky curatorial decisions that, while sometimes hurting the work, also enable it and create formal and conceptual relationships that would not likely exist if each piece were seen by itself. It also uses art to vocalize and think through overshadowed historical moments, and it’s usually presented the other way around in a standard contemporary context.
From Here to Afternoon runs until November 24, 2013, at the Glassell School.
Revealing and the concealment of information: it’s a formidable issue that artists and curators alike frequently contend with in presenting to the public. Places like the CAMH or the MFAH, for instance, provide detailed museum placards laying out the exhibition’s historical context or even outright meaning of the work. Most galleries provide some sort of handout, again rooting the work and/or the artist(s) within a particular context. Places like the Menil, on the other hand, provide very little information to the viewer other than the title, year, and artist, greatly entrusting the viewer to enact meaning onto the work—for better or worse. Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov's latest curatorial effort From Here to Afternoon, up now at Glassell, somehow jockeys these two positions.
Exhibition entrance
Albeit written in somewhat ambiguous and fairly impenetrable language, Haggren and Lylov do provide a written document explicating the context and meaning of the exhibition. Also, there are writings scattered throughout the space that functionally anchor and appropriately provide context, and even meditate on a contemporary art exhibit’s positioning within modes of labor and efficiency. But given their equivalence in scale to and spacing between the actual artworks, the writings seem to bear their own weight as autonomous art forms, and work surprisingly well as such. The transmutation of written explanation to art object is a surprising and innovative move that simultaneously informs and subverts meaning—a smart ambiguity that relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks. Another notable treatment (or lack thereof) of the space is the omission of artist and title placards. The result is a cohesive and deeply nuanced yet nebulous grouping: a curation drafted as an unintentional collaboration between artists. While totally practical and probably necessary, it makes the image list attached to the handout seem almost disappointing.
Installation view, front gallery
Placing trust in the viewer to properly engage with the work is a respectable although risky move here—this is an exhibition that requires time. Lots of it. With its text-heavy, historicized, and intellectual agenda, glazing over the work and shrugging it off as an exploration of the banalities and dignity of labor as well as the manipulation of its laborers seems like a tempting prospect. This isn’t fresh territory, after all. Between the Touch Sanitation (1970-80) project of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), or even Houston’s currently running Shrimp Boat Project, effort used as both a material and concept in art has been in play at the very least since the post-minimalists. Fortunately, for the viewer and Haggren/Lylov alike, it doesn’t take too long to realize that in this situation, labor is instead used as a stepping-stone to engender abstraction and formal concerns.
Installation view, middle gallery
That’s not to say that these issues aren’t prevalent in the work, or aren’t meant to be included, or shouldn’t be a part of the work. It’s that they immanently present themselves through a corroboration of visual and textual abstractions resulting from actual systems of efficiency, like the photographic motion studies of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, speech conducting, and shipping containers, just to name a few. One clear example of this is the Laban-Lawrence studies of rhythm and labor, examined here through the lens of Romana Schmalisch. She uses these studies, conducted and published mostly in the 1940s, to explore the texture and rhetoric of efficiency, the most effective of which is Notation of Efficiency (2013). Situated in its own cozy dark room, the piece consists of a single slide projector, operating as an outmoded PowerPoint presentation. It’s a sequence of facts, visual aids, and Laban-Lawrence diagrams that hardly make any sense to the layperson. While seeming to do nothing more than explain a system, Schmalisch’s dead-pan delivery reveals subtle humor, making intense studies of movement like wrapping a Mars Bar feel fascinating, concise, and utterly ridiculous. She also controls the cadence of the projector, its intermittent clicking flying through some slides while spending way too much time on others. It’s a clever way of forcing the viewer to focus on phrases or images he would normally disregard, rendering certain aspects of these studies as not only important, but foreboding, manipulative, and slightly terrifying.
Romana Schmalisch, Notation of Efficiency, 2013, Slide projection and model (bamboo sphere)
Another instance of slide projector usage occurs with Liz Magic Laser’s The Digital Face (2012). In the main part of the exhibition space, two projected images face each other on opposite walls. They are two dancers, Alan Good and Cori Kresge, silently reenacting the choreography of George H. W. Bush’s 1990 and Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address, respectively. The slides present images of frozen movements punctuating various points of the speeches. Overall, the piece is a fairly hilarious and extremely intelligent isolation of the movement and texture of political rhetoric, and poignantly fits in the show. But the piece originally existed as a performance at MoMA PS1 and usually shows up in galleries as a dual-channel video, and so much of the humor, nuance, and impeccable movements of the dancers is thus lost in this iteration. While the use of outmoded technology transplanted the viewer to a correlating time period in Schmalisch’s work, it doesn’t make sense with Laser’s. It’s a curatorial attempt at cohesion that cuts The Digital Face off at the knees—a grave misstep.
Liz Magic Laser, The Digital Face, 2012, Two slide projector installation
As previously stated, there are several pieces that quite purposefully lack immediacy, that demand extended attention, and Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov’s Hongkong Turbulence (2013) is one of them. Although the running time is unstated, the looped video likely takes over half an hour to cycle through. The video initially reads as boring and self-indulgent observations of the transportation, shipping, and packing of commodities—a piece that is blanketly ungenerous to the viewer. But after about ten minutes or so (hang in there!), the work suddenly shifts from tedium to intense satisfaction. As it cyclically demonstrates machines and people binding, packing, smashing, crushing, compartmentalizing, selling, beeping, and deconstructing massive amounts of things, the work abstractly and formally, and almost ethnographically, reveals the innards of contemporary systems of efficiency.
Elke Marhofer and Mikhail Lylov, Hongkong Turbulence, 2013, 16mm film transferred to HD video
From Here to Afternoon makes interesting and borderline risky curatorial decisions that, while sometimes hurting the work, also enable it and create formal and conceptual relationships that would not likely exist if each piece were seen by itself. It also uses art to vocalize and think through overshadowed historical moments, and it’s usually presented the other way around in a standard contemporary context.
From Here to Afternoon runs until November 24, 2013, at the Glassell School.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Happy Birthday CAMH
Robert Boyd
The Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston turns 65 today.
They celebrated in the traditional manner: abstract painting and cosplay.
The Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston turns 65 today.
They celebrated in the traditional manner: abstract painting and cosplay.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Pan Recommends for the week of October 31 to November 6
Robert Boyd
Busy week! I think it will be difficult for any one person to see all these shows, and there are probably a few I missed.
THURSDAY THROUGH SATURDAY
Thistles & Currants, c. 1885. Artist unknown.
International Quilt FestivalHouston at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Thursday and Friday 10 am to 7 pm; Saturday 10 am to 4 pm. And you thought there were only two art fairs in Houston! The trade show portion was held earlier this week, but now we civilian fans of snuggable art can take a gander.
THURSDAY
I don't know what this is, but you can find out yourself at Front Gallery
Betwixt and Between featuring work by Mark Flood, Tina Marin, Ann-Sofi Siden and others at the Front Gallery, 6–8 pm. This is a show drawn from the Engelstein/Parazette personal collection--I love seeing what artists collect.
Outside the Lines and 65th Anniversary Celebration at the CAMH, 6–11 pm. OK, this is a bit complicated. This is a six-part (!) exhibit of contemporary abstraction. Each of the CAMHs three curators will each present two exhibits, three Thursday and three more in January. So we have UIA (Unlikely Iterations of the Abstract) curated by Bill Arning, featuring work by Tauba Auerbach, Chris Bogia, Carol Bove, Tom Burr, Julia Dault, Gabriel Dawe, Cheryl Donegan, Christian Eckart, Mark Flood, Danielle Frankenthal, Jeffrey Gibson, Nathan Green, Gilbert Hsiao, Paul Lee, Daniel Levine, Gavin Perry, Jack Pierson, Stephen Prina, and Brian Zink; then Outside the Lines curated by Dean Daderko featuring work by Travis Boyer, Sarah Cain, Leidy Churchman, Katy Heinlein, Fabienne Lasserre, Siobhan Liddell, Benny Merris, Dona Nelson, and Susie Rosmarin; and finally Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver featuring work by AfriCOBRA (Kevin Cole, James Phillips, Frank Smith), Candida Alvarez, Romare Bearden, Nick Cave, Abigail DeVille, Sam Gilliam, Richard Mayhew, Jayson Musson, Floyd Newsum, Angel Otero, John Outterbridge, Howardena Pindell, Shinique Smith, Kianja Strobert, Alma Thomas, and Jack White.Interestingly, each of the curators includes at least one Houston artist in their group--that appears the way that Houston artists get int the CAMH these days, as parts of group shows. I predict that this will be a visual cacophony, but viewers will undoubtedly find individual pieces of art that they fall in love with.
SPOOKY as HELL featuring work by Heather Bause, Jamie Davis, Lauren Moya Ford, John Forse, Zaeed Kala, Bradley Kerl, Melinda Laszczynski, Jennifer McClish, Sebastian Montes, Eric Ockrassa, Caroline Roberts, Caroline Sharpless, Michael Toskovich, & Amy Elizabeth Wright at the University of Houston, 4th floor Projects Gallery, 6–9 pm. Trick or treat! U.H. graduate painting students put on a Halloween show.
FRIDAY
Inga Kerber
LOKALKOLORIT featuring Jochen Plogsties, Johannes Rochhausen, Corinne Von Lebusa, Inga Kerber and Edgar Leciejewski at Inman Gallery, 6 to 8 pm. A group show of artists from Leipzig.
Raychael Stine, Vision 9. 2013. Oil & acrylic on canvas. 17" x 13"
Raychael Stine: a little ways away from everywhere at Art Palace, 6–8 pm. If you have ever wanted to know what a painting of a dog by Frank Auerbach might look like, this show may be helpful. Lots of thick, emphatic paint.
an older work by Danielle Frankenthal, Impulse: Moanin’ by Mingus, acrylic paint on two transparent acrylic resin panels 23.75 x 11.75 in
Danielle Frankenthal: Turbulence at Wade Wilson Art, 6–8 pm.The abstract painter who often works on transparent acrylic panels returns for a new show.
James Smolleck; Study for a Saturnine Night, 2013; ink, acrylic and collage on paper; 30 x 25.5 in.
James Smolleck: Sweat Bath with Saturn at David Shelton Gallery, 6–8 pm. James Smolleck was included in the Shelton Gallery's opening show, and this is his first solo show at the gallery.
Heather and Ivan Morison, Go On, Cry (study), 2013
Slyk Chaynjis: Heather and Ivan Morison at Diverseworks, 7–9 pm. Slyk Chaynjis is the protagonist of a narrative constructed by U.K. artists Heather and Ivan Morison for this multi-media installation, which will include aspects both in Diverse Works and beyond.
SATURDAY
a newer Matt Magee found on the internet: Decoder, 2013, lithograph
Matt Magee: circa 1994 at Hiram Butler Gallery, 11 am – 1 pm. I'm not sure if these are artworks by Matt Magee from 1994 or if they are meant to evoke 1994 or what.
Tuymans
A. Conversation. With. Luc Tuymans at the El Dorado Ballroom, 5:30–6:30 pm. This could be fun. The Menil put a pretty opaque billboard up for the Luc Tuymans show, which had just the word "nice" and a detail of a Tuymans painting showing a pair of eyes. One went up over near Project Row Houses. In response, someone created an identical billboard with the word "nicest" and a close-up on the eyes of Tupac Shakur. So now Luc Tuymans is bringing his effete European self over to the Third Ward for a talk. Nice.
Jane Miller
Jane Miller: Books Without Pages, Pages Without Books at G Gallery. Jane Miller was one of the first artists to do an installation in the Rice Gallery.
Mark Bercier
Mark Bercier: The Healin' Symbols at Redbud Gallery, 6–9 pm. Mark Bercier has developed a "visual language" consisting of 27 letters and 27 symbols, and I guess he makes art with them. The art on his website teeters on the edge between charming and cloying.
Jake Wells
Empty Basket: Jake Wells at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. Box 13 is having one of their multiple openings this Saturday. Jake Wells' art for this show is made of painted wheat and grass, evidently. It looks pretty but fragile.
Edward Ramsay-Moran
PlusPlus: Edward Ramsay-Morin at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. The previous work I had seen by Edward Ramsay-Morin featured somewhat disturbing empty faces. This computer generated art looks quite a bit different.
Paul Middendorf: The Everyday at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. For Box 13's webpage, Middendorf provided a supervague statement and the badass image above.
I think this one is by Andy Mattern
Trace by Andy Mattern, Leigh Merrill, and Pavel Romaniko at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. Three photographers, two from University of North Texas and one from New Mexico.
TUESDAY
Lance Brown, Studies for Lou, acrylic on paper, detail, 2013
The Door : A Tribute to Lou Reed featuring Daniel Bertalot, Robert Boyd, Lance Brown, Georgie Flood, Erin Keelin (San Antonio) Jennifer McNichols, David McClain, Martha McClain, Joelle McTeague, Dave Murray and Greg Scott with music by Brown Velvet, Jim Pirtle, John Zambrano, Eric Todd, FLCON FCKER, Jane Schmitt and The Pinky Lieder at Notsuoh, 7 pm til closing. Dude isn't even cold! Anyway, here's my favorite piece of Lou Reed tribute art so far:
(I'm going to Hell, aren't I?)
WEDNESDAY
Houston Cinema Arts Festival at Cinema on the Verge Gallery and Cinema 16 Screening Room and the Museum of Fine Arts, various times. The Cinema Arts Festival opens next Wednesday (and continues for a week). There are three screenings Wednesday: two of North of South, West of East and one of Cutie and the Boxer. It looks like a lot of great movies will be playing--I recommend you get your tickets early.
Busy week! I think it will be difficult for any one person to see all these shows, and there are probably a few I missed.
THURSDAY THROUGH SATURDAY
Thistles & Currants, c. 1885. Artist unknown.
International Quilt FestivalHouston at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Thursday and Friday 10 am to 7 pm; Saturday 10 am to 4 pm. And you thought there were only two art fairs in Houston! The trade show portion was held earlier this week, but now we civilian fans of snuggable art can take a gander.
THURSDAY
I don't know what this is, but you can find out yourself at Front Gallery
Betwixt and Between featuring work by Mark Flood, Tina Marin, Ann-Sofi Siden and others at the Front Gallery, 6–8 pm. This is a show drawn from the Engelstein/Parazette personal collection--I love seeing what artists collect.
Outside the Lines and 65th Anniversary Celebration at the CAMH, 6–11 pm. OK, this is a bit complicated. This is a six-part (!) exhibit of contemporary abstraction. Each of the CAMHs three curators will each present two exhibits, three Thursday and three more in January. So we have UIA (Unlikely Iterations of the Abstract) curated by Bill Arning, featuring work by Tauba Auerbach, Chris Bogia, Carol Bove, Tom Burr, Julia Dault, Gabriel Dawe, Cheryl Donegan, Christian Eckart, Mark Flood, Danielle Frankenthal, Jeffrey Gibson, Nathan Green, Gilbert Hsiao, Paul Lee, Daniel Levine, Gavin Perry, Jack Pierson, Stephen Prina, and Brian Zink; then Outside the Lines curated by Dean Daderko featuring work by Travis Boyer, Sarah Cain, Leidy Churchman, Katy Heinlein, Fabienne Lasserre, Siobhan Liddell, Benny Merris, Dona Nelson, and Susie Rosmarin; and finally Black in the Abstract, Part 1: Epistrophy curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver featuring work by AfriCOBRA (Kevin Cole, James Phillips, Frank Smith), Candida Alvarez, Romare Bearden, Nick Cave, Abigail DeVille, Sam Gilliam, Richard Mayhew, Jayson Musson, Floyd Newsum, Angel Otero, John Outterbridge, Howardena Pindell, Shinique Smith, Kianja Strobert, Alma Thomas, and Jack White.Interestingly, each of the curators includes at least one Houston artist in their group--that appears the way that Houston artists get int the CAMH these days, as parts of group shows. I predict that this will be a visual cacophony, but viewers will undoubtedly find individual pieces of art that they fall in love with.
SPOOKY as HELL featuring work by Heather Bause, Jamie Davis, Lauren Moya Ford, John Forse, Zaeed Kala, Bradley Kerl, Melinda Laszczynski, Jennifer McClish, Sebastian Montes, Eric Ockrassa, Caroline Roberts, Caroline Sharpless, Michael Toskovich, & Amy Elizabeth Wright at the University of Houston, 4th floor Projects Gallery, 6–9 pm. Trick or treat! U.H. graduate painting students put on a Halloween show.
FRIDAY
Inga Kerber
LOKALKOLORIT featuring Jochen Plogsties, Johannes Rochhausen, Corinne Von Lebusa, Inga Kerber and Edgar Leciejewski at Inman Gallery, 6 to 8 pm. A group show of artists from Leipzig.
Raychael Stine, Vision 9. 2013. Oil & acrylic on canvas. 17" x 13"
Raychael Stine: a little ways away from everywhere at Art Palace, 6–8 pm. If you have ever wanted to know what a painting of a dog by Frank Auerbach might look like, this show may be helpful. Lots of thick, emphatic paint.
an older work by Danielle Frankenthal, Impulse: Moanin’ by Mingus, acrylic paint on two transparent acrylic resin panels 23.75 x 11.75 in
Danielle Frankenthal: Turbulence at Wade Wilson Art, 6–8 pm.The abstract painter who often works on transparent acrylic panels returns for a new show.
James Smolleck; Study for a Saturnine Night, 2013; ink, acrylic and collage on paper; 30 x 25.5 in.
James Smolleck: Sweat Bath with Saturn at David Shelton Gallery, 6–8 pm. James Smolleck was included in the Shelton Gallery's opening show, and this is his first solo show at the gallery.
Heather and Ivan Morison, Go On, Cry (study), 2013
Slyk Chaynjis: Heather and Ivan Morison at Diverseworks, 7–9 pm. Slyk Chaynjis is the protagonist of a narrative constructed by U.K. artists Heather and Ivan Morison for this multi-media installation, which will include aspects both in Diverse Works and beyond.
SATURDAY
a newer Matt Magee found on the internet: Decoder, 2013, lithograph
Matt Magee: circa 1994 at Hiram Butler Gallery, 11 am – 1 pm. I'm not sure if these are artworks by Matt Magee from 1994 or if they are meant to evoke 1994 or what.
Tuymans
A. Conversation. With. Luc Tuymans at the El Dorado Ballroom, 5:30–6:30 pm. This could be fun. The Menil put a pretty opaque billboard up for the Luc Tuymans show, which had just the word "nice" and a detail of a Tuymans painting showing a pair of eyes. One went up over near Project Row Houses. In response, someone created an identical billboard with the word "nicest" and a close-up on the eyes of Tupac Shakur. So now Luc Tuymans is bringing his effete European self over to the Third Ward for a talk. Nice.
Jane Miller
Jane Miller: Books Without Pages, Pages Without Books at G Gallery. Jane Miller was one of the first artists to do an installation in the Rice Gallery.
Mark Bercier
Mark Bercier: The Healin' Symbols at Redbud Gallery, 6–9 pm. Mark Bercier has developed a "visual language" consisting of 27 letters and 27 symbols, and I guess he makes art with them. The art on his website teeters on the edge between charming and cloying.
Jake Wells
Empty Basket: Jake Wells at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. Box 13 is having one of their multiple openings this Saturday. Jake Wells' art for this show is made of painted wheat and grass, evidently. It looks pretty but fragile.
Edward Ramsay-Moran
PlusPlus: Edward Ramsay-Morin at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. The previous work I had seen by Edward Ramsay-Morin featured somewhat disturbing empty faces. This computer generated art looks quite a bit different.
Paul Middendorf: The Everyday at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. For Box 13's webpage, Middendorf provided a supervague statement and the badass image above.
I think this one is by Andy Mattern
Trace by Andy Mattern, Leigh Merrill, and Pavel Romaniko at BOX 13 ArtSpace, 7–9:30 pm. Three photographers, two from University of North Texas and one from New Mexico.
TUESDAY
Lance Brown, Studies for Lou, acrylic on paper, detail, 2013
The Door : A Tribute to Lou Reed featuring Daniel Bertalot, Robert Boyd, Lance Brown, Georgie Flood, Erin Keelin (San Antonio) Jennifer McNichols, David McClain, Martha McClain, Joelle McTeague, Dave Murray and Greg Scott with music by Brown Velvet, Jim Pirtle, John Zambrano, Eric Todd, FLCON FCKER, Jane Schmitt and The Pinky Lieder at Notsuoh, 7 pm til closing. Dude isn't even cold! Anyway, here's my favorite piece of Lou Reed tribute art so far:
(I'm going to Hell, aren't I?)
WEDNESDAY
Houston Cinema Arts Festival at Cinema on the Verge Gallery and Cinema 16 Screening Room and the Museum of Fine Arts, various times. The Cinema Arts Festival opens next Wednesday (and continues for a week). There are three screenings Wednesday: two of North of South, West of East and one of Cutie and the Boxer. It looks like a lot of great movies will be playing--I recommend you get your tickets early.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
It's Nice to Share: LaBier, Gendel and Lokiec at the Brandon
Robert Boyd
Houston Galeria watercolors by Jacqueline Gendel, Peter LaBier and Tim Lokiec
Jacqueline Gendel, Peter LaBier and Tim Lokiec have studios in the same building. Individually, they have had some art world success. Jacqueline Gendel has a pretty long history of exhibiting in Houston. She has shown at Bryan Miller Gallery in 2011 and Mixture Contemporary in 2002 and 2004. (I was intrigued when I read about her shows at Mixture because I had never heard of that gallery. It apparently came and went while I was living away from Houston. So I googled it, and it was a gallery owned by Dan Fergus, who owns the Brandon and Brasil, and run by Lisa Cooley, who now runs one of the hippest galleries in New York.) Tim Lokiec seems to have peaked early in the artworld's fame game--his first solo show in 2003 was reviewed by Roberta Smith and at one point he was represented by Zach Feuer Gallery. He was included in a group show at McClain Gallery in 2005. But this kind of "success" has little to do with the art itself. Peter LaBier is the only "Houston virgin" of the group.
Houston Galeria at The Brandon Contemporary is a collaborative show by these artists. "Collaborative" is a loaded word. In this case, the collaboration is described as "three artists sitting on the floor of a studio passing around paper, listening to music or books on audible, making individual easel paintings based on their collective works on paper." This is collaboration as game playing. These kinds of games are often used to pull artists out of their habitual practices, but often they're just played for the fun of it.
The wall of watercolors and drawings above represent the first step of the collaboration. These are the drawings on which the paintings in show are based. For example, the watercolor drawing Houston Galeria 18 is the source for two paintings.
Jacqueline Gendel and Peter LaBier, Houston Galleria 18, 2013, mixed media 17.5 x 12.5 inches
Peter LaBier, Houston Galleria 75, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
The general composition is retained and the color scheme is approximately the same. But LaBier's Houston Galleria 75 has more detail and includes some complimentary colors and additional compositional elements.
The drawings/watercolors are themselves often based on existing images, some art historical, some from advertisements or pop culture.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 1, 2013, mixed media, 14 x 11 inches
Tim Lokiec, Houston Galleria 52, 2013, mixed media, 12.5 x 9.5 inches
Some look like they are pastiches of other contemporary artists. Houston Galeria 30 looks like a Joshua Abelow drawing, for example.
Jacqueline Gendel and Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 30, 2013, mixed media, 15.5 x 14.5 inches
Houston Galeria 30 is drastically transformed however when it is turned into a painting.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 80, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
The addition of the dog's tongue adds a touch of perversity to this already ridiculous image, but as silly as it seems, I see something unexpected here. LaBier is playing with Matisse. Compare it to Tabac Royal, for example.
Henri Matisse, Tabac Royal, 1943, Oil on canvas
The intense colors and patterned, flattened ground reminds me so much of Matisse--Matisse minus the elegance! But it the more I think about it, the more this kind of approach to painting is a common practice these days. I see a lot of painting that addresses classical modernism in one way or another while wearing its dumbness on its sleeve. When Roberta Smith reviewed Tom Lokiec, she casually dropped in a reference to "bad painting," the kind of painting that had been the subject of an exhibit at the New Museum in 1978. This show was full of painters doing subjects and techniques that just seemed dumb. So after neo-expressionism and neo-geo and street art and all the other painting movements and trends, somehow "bad painting" has survived 35 years. The thing is, it works for me. I am simultaneously repelled by and drawn to Houston Galeria 80. A work of art that both pulls and pushes me is one that I find interesting. (It should be noted also that while Houston Galeria 30 looks like a Joshua Abelow, Houston Galeria 80 has been so transformed that it looks nothing like an Abelow.)
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 84, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
LaBier has other Matisse-esque pieces. The colors and the leaf shapes in Houston Galeria 84 seem unmistakably derived from Matisse, for example.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 77, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
The same is true for Houston Galeria 77. When you look at the pieces on LaBier's website, they don't look very Matisse-like compared to the ones in this show. But there is one earlier piece there that is directly based on a Matisse, and others that are based on other well-known Modernist images. It seems like Matisse is on his mind.
Jacqueline Gendel, Houston Galeria 83, 2013, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches
Jacqueline Gendel gets her Matisse on in a few paintings, not so much referencing Matisse's palette as his subject matters and flatness.
Jacqueline Gendel and Tim Lokiec, Houston Galeria 86, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
In Houston Galeria 86, Gendel collaborates with Tim Lokiec to create a scene of an artist painting an easel painting. The painter and the setting are in a kind of Matisse like space (maybe with a hint of Arshile Gorky), but the painting is grey and white. Maybe the painting is meant to be an inverted version of the world of the painter--grey where the painter's world is vibrant.
Jacqueline Gendel, Peter Labier and Tim Lokiec, Houston Galeria 85, 2013, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches
When I heard about this show and heard about the collaborative techniques, I was expecting something quite different than what I ultimately found. I guess I was expecting something brainier and less visual. Instead I was surprised with these explosions of paint. The collaboration was playful, and the painters seemed eager to pay homage to modernist forbears, particularly Matisse. His influence is almost overwhelming. Only a certain level of adolescent doodle "dumbness" keeps some of the pieces from being out-and-out pastiches. Instead what we have is a show that is making contradictory statements while pretending not to make any statement at all. It is casually compelling.
Houston Galeria watercolors by Jacqueline Gendel, Peter LaBier and Tim Lokiec
Jacqueline Gendel, Peter LaBier and Tim Lokiec have studios in the same building. Individually, they have had some art world success. Jacqueline Gendel has a pretty long history of exhibiting in Houston. She has shown at Bryan Miller Gallery in 2011 and Mixture Contemporary in 2002 and 2004. (I was intrigued when I read about her shows at Mixture because I had never heard of that gallery. It apparently came and went while I was living away from Houston. So I googled it, and it was a gallery owned by Dan Fergus, who owns the Brandon and Brasil, and run by Lisa Cooley, who now runs one of the hippest galleries in New York.) Tim Lokiec seems to have peaked early in the artworld's fame game--his first solo show in 2003 was reviewed by Roberta Smith and at one point he was represented by Zach Feuer Gallery. He was included in a group show at McClain Gallery in 2005. But this kind of "success" has little to do with the art itself. Peter LaBier is the only "Houston virgin" of the group.
Houston Galeria at The Brandon Contemporary is a collaborative show by these artists. "Collaborative" is a loaded word. In this case, the collaboration is described as "three artists sitting on the floor of a studio passing around paper, listening to music or books on audible, making individual easel paintings based on their collective works on paper." This is collaboration as game playing. These kinds of games are often used to pull artists out of their habitual practices, but often they're just played for the fun of it.
The wall of watercolors and drawings above represent the first step of the collaboration. These are the drawings on which the paintings in show are based. For example, the watercolor drawing Houston Galeria 18 is the source for two paintings.
Jacqueline Gendel and Peter LaBier, Houston Galleria 18, 2013, mixed media 17.5 x 12.5 inches
Peter LaBier, Houston Galleria 75, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
The general composition is retained and the color scheme is approximately the same. But LaBier's Houston Galleria 75 has more detail and includes some complimentary colors and additional compositional elements.
The drawings/watercolors are themselves often based on existing images, some art historical, some from advertisements or pop culture.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 1, 2013, mixed media, 14 x 11 inches
Tim Lokiec, Houston Galleria 52, 2013, mixed media, 12.5 x 9.5 inches
Some look like they are pastiches of other contemporary artists. Houston Galeria 30 looks like a Joshua Abelow drawing, for example.
Jacqueline Gendel and Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 30, 2013, mixed media, 15.5 x 14.5 inches
Houston Galeria 30 is drastically transformed however when it is turned into a painting.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 80, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
The addition of the dog's tongue adds a touch of perversity to this already ridiculous image, but as silly as it seems, I see something unexpected here. LaBier is playing with Matisse. Compare it to Tabac Royal, for example.
Henri Matisse, Tabac Royal, 1943, Oil on canvas
The intense colors and patterned, flattened ground reminds me so much of Matisse--Matisse minus the elegance! But it the more I think about it, the more this kind of approach to painting is a common practice these days. I see a lot of painting that addresses classical modernism in one way or another while wearing its dumbness on its sleeve. When Roberta Smith reviewed Tom Lokiec, she casually dropped in a reference to "bad painting," the kind of painting that had been the subject of an exhibit at the New Museum in 1978. This show was full of painters doing subjects and techniques that just seemed dumb. So after neo-expressionism and neo-geo and street art and all the other painting movements and trends, somehow "bad painting" has survived 35 years. The thing is, it works for me. I am simultaneously repelled by and drawn to Houston Galeria 80. A work of art that both pulls and pushes me is one that I find interesting. (It should be noted also that while Houston Galeria 30 looks like a Joshua Abelow, Houston Galeria 80 has been so transformed that it looks nothing like an Abelow.)
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 84, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
LaBier has other Matisse-esque pieces. The colors and the leaf shapes in Houston Galeria 84 seem unmistakably derived from Matisse, for example.
Peter LaBier, Houston Galeria 77, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
The same is true for Houston Galeria 77. When you look at the pieces on LaBier's website, they don't look very Matisse-like compared to the ones in this show. But there is one earlier piece there that is directly based on a Matisse, and others that are based on other well-known Modernist images. It seems like Matisse is on his mind.
Jacqueline Gendel, Houston Galeria 83, 2013, oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches
Jacqueline Gendel gets her Matisse on in a few paintings, not so much referencing Matisse's palette as his subject matters and flatness.
Jacqueline Gendel and Tim Lokiec, Houston Galeria 86, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches
In Houston Galeria 86, Gendel collaborates with Tim Lokiec to create a scene of an artist painting an easel painting. The painter and the setting are in a kind of Matisse like space (maybe with a hint of Arshile Gorky), but the painting is grey and white. Maybe the painting is meant to be an inverted version of the world of the painter--grey where the painter's world is vibrant.
Jacqueline Gendel, Peter Labier and Tim Lokiec, Houston Galeria 85, 2013, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches
When I heard about this show and heard about the collaborative techniques, I was expecting something quite different than what I ultimately found. I guess I was expecting something brainier and less visual. Instead I was surprised with these explosions of paint. The collaboration was playful, and the painters seemed eager to pay homage to modernist forbears, particularly Matisse. His influence is almost overwhelming. Only a certain level of adolescent doodle "dumbness" keeps some of the pieces from being out-and-out pastiches. Instead what we have is a show that is making contradictory statements while pretending not to make any statement at all. It is casually compelling.
Friday, October 25, 2013
The Pan Review of Books: Recent Readings
Robert Boyd
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
by Barnaby Martin (Faber & Faber, 2013). This is a scattered book. Barnaby Martin is not just writing about the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but also about his life leading up to the arrest, the life of his father, the political situation in China from the the Qing dynasty to the present. The amazing thing is that he sort of succeeds. If you are, like me, woefully ignorant of China and the situation that Chinese artists and intellectuals labor under, Hanging Man is actually a good primer.
On April 11, 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested. Held incommunicado, he was abruptly released on June 22. At first he didn't want to talk about his captivity because if there was one thing he knew, it could happen again at any time. (Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner, so fame is not a perfect shield.) But he finally opened up to his friend Martin. The story had to be told not for his sake, but for the sake of the 55 other known artists, writers and activists who were rounded up at the same time and are still missing.
Ai describes his questioning and the fantastic gulf between him and his interlocutors. It is the same gulf that exists between many artists, particularly conceptual artists, and the public. The public can't see what they are doing is art and assume that there is some kind of scam happening. The police thought that perhaps it was a form of money laundering. But in the United States, the worst a conceptual artist suffers is a kind of invisibility or scorn. Explaining his work to a barely educated chain-smoking cop was a life-or-death matter for Ai.
Ai's international fame probably mitigated his improsonment. But why were all these artists and writers rounded up in the first place? It was the Arab Spring--the uprisings that over-through dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. These scared China. They were afraid that a "jasmine revolution" could happen in China. Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia and four months later, Ai Weiwei is arrested as a result. Cause and effect.
China experts will find lots of potted history and things to disagree with here. Martin acknowledges this as best he can. He knows this brief book is not--cannot be--the whole story of any of its subjects: Chinese history, Chinese contemporary art, Chinese activism, Ai Weiwei, etc. I wish he had included an appendix of further reading suggestions. But as an introduction to these various subjects, Hanging Man is excellent.
Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art
by David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001). David Galnson, an economist at the University of Chicago, presumes to write about art history. It's as if someone took all the propaganda about interdisciplinarity seriously. Even art critics find the narrowness of art writing intolerable. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in her essay "Art Criticism Bound to Fail" (2006): "Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Maxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name some heuristic precedents)." I've always favored looking at art through the lenses of the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology. But it is one thing to do this in a highly theoretical way (as do most Marxist art critics, like Benjamin Buchloh) and quite another to use the basic substrate of those fields--data. It's one of the reasons that Pierre Bourdieu's writings about art and its audiences carry so much weight--he collected the data and looked at what the data told him. That's what Don Thompson did in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
, where he found that statistically speaking that art magazines and critics had very little direct effect on the value of works of art (which was a load off my mind).
Galenson takes one of the most popular data sets available for the art world--auction results, and combines it with the birth dates of modern (impressionism to about pop and minimalism) artists, the dates they started their careers, and the dates they did works that had come up at auction. What he wanted to see was if an artists' most valuable works came at a particular time in his life. This turns out to be true, but he discovered something more interesting--that some artist's most valuable works come very early in their career while some come relatively late. If he had made of histogram of this (which is a kind of graph of the distribution), it would have looked like a bactrian camel. This is a great, somewhat surprising result. Once you have data showing you something like this, your job is to try to construct a plausible theory for why it is so. Galenson's theory is that there are some modern artists who reach their goal after long years of trying things and experimenting and honing their ideas and their skills. Cezanne would the the obvious example of this sort of artist. There are other artists who come up with an idea and execute it fully formed, like Athena emerging full grown and armored from Zeus's head. Picasso with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is an example, as are the stripe paintings of Frank Stella. These usually come early in the artist's career. Galenson calls the first group experimentalists and the second group conceptualists, and suggest that their way of looking at art is fundamentally different.
One problem with this theory is that it assumes that the importance or quality of a body of work from an artist's career is, on average, congruent with the paintings that got highest prices at auction. But he finds a couple of other data-driven ways to demonstrate this. For example, he assumes that broadly speaking, there is a consensus among art historians about which are the most important works of a given artist (obviously there will be disagreements among individual art historians). To figure out what that consensus might be, he looked at the pictures used to illustrate 33 English-language art history surveys published sine 1968. He compared those images with the auction leaders for each artist and found a high overlap, which indicated that the highest priced works also tended to be the ones considered important by art historians.
Of course, he also backs this up with non-numeric data sources--art history texts, art criticism, and original texts by artists themselves (Pissarro's letters look like they must be quite entertaining, based on the bits quoted here).
There are big problems with this approach. It removes the artist from his historical setting. For example, all the abstract expressionists are seen as experimentalists, but considering that they spent the beginnings of their careers 1) in the Depression and 2) somewhat cut off from what was happening in Europe, they had little choice but to get to where they were going through a process of gradual change. They couldn't easily look at what some slightly older artist was doing and take a leap form there. Picasso, on the other hand, could see all the experimental modernism he wanted--he could see the last Cezannes shortly after the master painted them. In a sense, he was in the position to use Cezanne's lifetime of gradual experimentalism to launch his one great conceptual advance, cubism. In short, artists respond to the circumstances they're in.
That said, it's an interesting way to think about the past 150 years of art, and the data is the data. Even if Galenson's interpretation is wrong, the data still exists for some other art historian to examine and draw conclusions from it. But that will only happen if they, like sociologists and psychologists and economists, take a couple of stats classes and learn the math.
cover by Killoffer
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, translated by Marshall Berman (Penguin Classics). "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism." So begin one of the most important political documents of modern history. It's ending is equally famous: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!" But why buy a copy of The Communist Manifesto? Many copies can be found for free online.
At 43 pages, The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet, not a book. To fill out this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, they had to include an introduction by the translator (the recently deceased Marshall Berman) and introductions to the subsequent German, Italian, English, Polish and Russian editions by Engels. So why did I spend $13 on it? Because I love the cover by Killoffer, one of the great French Comics artists who came to prominence through the legendary collective comics publishing outfit, L'Association. Not that much of his comics have been published in English--a few stories in Mome and the amazing solipsistic book Six-hundred and Seventy-six Apparitions of Killoffer
. (You can see an excerpt of the latter here.) His cover for the Communist Manifesto is incredible--he uses every square centimeter--the french flaps, the front and back covers, the spine--to present a single continuous image. What did Marx say about commodity fetishism? Excuse me please while I go and admire my new possession.
Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
by Barnaby Martin (Faber & Faber, 2013). This is a scattered book. Barnaby Martin is not just writing about the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but also about his life leading up to the arrest, the life of his father, the political situation in China from the the Qing dynasty to the present. The amazing thing is that he sort of succeeds. If you are, like me, woefully ignorant of China and the situation that Chinese artists and intellectuals labor under, Hanging Man is actually a good primer.On April 11, 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested. Held incommunicado, he was abruptly released on June 22. At first he didn't want to talk about his captivity because if there was one thing he knew, it could happen again at any time. (Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner, so fame is not a perfect shield.) But he finally opened up to his friend Martin. The story had to be told not for his sake, but for the sake of the 55 other known artists, writers and activists who were rounded up at the same time and are still missing.
Ai describes his questioning and the fantastic gulf between him and his interlocutors. It is the same gulf that exists between many artists, particularly conceptual artists, and the public. The public can't see what they are doing is art and assume that there is some kind of scam happening. The police thought that perhaps it was a form of money laundering. But in the United States, the worst a conceptual artist suffers is a kind of invisibility or scorn. Explaining his work to a barely educated chain-smoking cop was a life-or-death matter for Ai.
Ai's international fame probably mitigated his improsonment. But why were all these artists and writers rounded up in the first place? It was the Arab Spring--the uprisings that over-through dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. These scared China. They were afraid that a "jasmine revolution" could happen in China. Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia and four months later, Ai Weiwei is arrested as a result. Cause and effect.
China experts will find lots of potted history and things to disagree with here. Martin acknowledges this as best he can. He knows this brief book is not--cannot be--the whole story of any of its subjects: Chinese history, Chinese contemporary art, Chinese activism, Ai Weiwei, etc. I wish he had included an appendix of further reading suggestions. But as an introduction to these various subjects, Hanging Man is excellent.
Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art
by David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001). David Galnson, an economist at the University of Chicago, presumes to write about art history. It's as if someone took all the propaganda about interdisciplinarity seriously. Even art critics find the narrowness of art writing intolerable. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in her essay "Art Criticism Bound to Fail" (2006): "Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Maxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name some heuristic precedents)." I've always favored looking at art through the lenses of the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology. But it is one thing to do this in a highly theoretical way (as do most Marxist art critics, like Benjamin Buchloh) and quite another to use the basic substrate of those fields--data. It's one of the reasons that Pierre Bourdieu's writings about art and its audiences carry so much weight--he collected the data and looked at what the data told him. That's what Don Thompson did in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, where he found that statistically speaking that art magazines and critics had very little direct effect on the value of works of art (which was a load off my mind).Galenson takes one of the most popular data sets available for the art world--auction results, and combines it with the birth dates of modern (impressionism to about pop and minimalism) artists, the dates they started their careers, and the dates they did works that had come up at auction. What he wanted to see was if an artists' most valuable works came at a particular time in his life. This turns out to be true, but he discovered something more interesting--that some artist's most valuable works come very early in their career while some come relatively late. If he had made of histogram of this (which is a kind of graph of the distribution), it would have looked like a bactrian camel. This is a great, somewhat surprising result. Once you have data showing you something like this, your job is to try to construct a plausible theory for why it is so. Galenson's theory is that there are some modern artists who reach their goal after long years of trying things and experimenting and honing their ideas and their skills. Cezanne would the the obvious example of this sort of artist. There are other artists who come up with an idea and execute it fully formed, like Athena emerging full grown and armored from Zeus's head. Picasso with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is an example, as are the stripe paintings of Frank Stella. These usually come early in the artist's career. Galenson calls the first group experimentalists and the second group conceptualists, and suggest that their way of looking at art is fundamentally different.
One problem with this theory is that it assumes that the importance or quality of a body of work from an artist's career is, on average, congruent with the paintings that got highest prices at auction. But he finds a couple of other data-driven ways to demonstrate this. For example, he assumes that broadly speaking, there is a consensus among art historians about which are the most important works of a given artist (obviously there will be disagreements among individual art historians). To figure out what that consensus might be, he looked at the pictures used to illustrate 33 English-language art history surveys published sine 1968. He compared those images with the auction leaders for each artist and found a high overlap, which indicated that the highest priced works also tended to be the ones considered important by art historians.
Of course, he also backs this up with non-numeric data sources--art history texts, art criticism, and original texts by artists themselves (Pissarro's letters look like they must be quite entertaining, based on the bits quoted here).
There are big problems with this approach. It removes the artist from his historical setting. For example, all the abstract expressionists are seen as experimentalists, but considering that they spent the beginnings of their careers 1) in the Depression and 2) somewhat cut off from what was happening in Europe, they had little choice but to get to where they were going through a process of gradual change. They couldn't easily look at what some slightly older artist was doing and take a leap form there. Picasso, on the other hand, could see all the experimental modernism he wanted--he could see the last Cezannes shortly after the master painted them. In a sense, he was in the position to use Cezanne's lifetime of gradual experimentalism to launch his one great conceptual advance, cubism. In short, artists respond to the circumstances they're in.
That said, it's an interesting way to think about the past 150 years of art, and the data is the data. Even if Galenson's interpretation is wrong, the data still exists for some other art historian to examine and draw conclusions from it. But that will only happen if they, like sociologists and psychologists and economists, take a couple of stats classes and learn the math.
cover by KillofferThe Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, translated by Marshall Berman (Penguin Classics). "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism." So begin one of the most important political documents of modern history. It's ending is equally famous: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!" But why buy a copy of The Communist Manifesto? Many copies can be found for free online.
At 43 pages, The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet, not a book. To fill out this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, they had to include an introduction by the translator (the recently deceased Marshall Berman) and introductions to the subsequent German, Italian, English, Polish and Russian editions by Engels. So why did I spend $13 on it? Because I love the cover by Killoffer, one of the great French Comics artists who came to prominence through the legendary collective comics publishing outfit, L'Association. Not that much of his comics have been published in English--a few stories in Mome and the amazing solipsistic book Six-hundred and Seventy-six Apparitions of Killoffer
. (You can see an excerpt of the latter here.) His cover for the Communist Manifesto is incredible--he uses every square centimeter--the french flaps, the front and back covers, the spine--to present a single continuous image. What did Marx say about commodity fetishism? Excuse me please while I go and admire my new possession.
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