Houston Art Odyssey

I have some time off for the 4^th, and I decided to use that time museum and gallery going. The Kathryn Kelley post was one fruit of this. But really, most of what I saw didn’t affect me as strongly. Very little wowed me. These were shows not really worth a blog post each. It doesn’t mean they were bad, necessarily.

The thing is, with a lot of them, I do have something that I want to communicate. Just nothing big. So I am going to use something they taught us in business school for communicating with possible future subliterate bosses and co-workers—bullet points.

Mitch Debrowner at the John Cleary Gallery.

• This image from the announcement is by far the coolest photo in the show. Never a great sign.

Kelli Scott Kelley at the Hooks-Epstein Galleries.

• I like the fact that her name is Kelli twice. It would be even better if her name was Kelli Kelly Kelley.
• Her art reminded me of the cover art from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood by Neko Case. Um, that was a really good album.

Michael De La Cerda at the McMurtrey Gallery.

• This guy’s art, made of epoxy resin, looks like candy. I want to eat it.

Edward Lane McCartney at Goldesberry Gallery

• McCartney wasn’t showing, but they had some of his pieces in back. They are made of hundreds of little plastic army men glued together and are really cool.
• A commenter tells me that each army man was individually tied together, not glued. I'm sure if I had gotten down and looked very closely at this piece, I would have noticed this. Sorry for the error, E.L. McCartney!
  

North Looks South at the Museum of Fine Arts.

• It is really excellent that the MFAH is making a special effort to collect Latin American modern art. It’s a good specialty to have.
• That said, if I see another piece of freaking op art (especially kinetic op art), I will kill.
• Seriously, they should have displayed this art with “Miniskirt” and other songs by Esquivel playing in the background, cause that’s what this art was—decorations for space age bachelor pads.
• Carlos Cruz-Diez is the biggest offender.

• But in his favor, he did design the groovy crosswalks that are now in front of the museum.
• The city of Houston should license these designs from him and put them in place at every intersection in the city. Seriously.
  
• The pieces by Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark are boring “neo-concrete” abstractions (ideal for hanging in Oscar Niemeyer buildings inhabited by robots—or military technocrats). The MFAH should get later work by these artists, which were sensuous and funky, and which prefigured the work of the arte povera artists as well as contemporary Brazilian artists like Ernesto Neto and Vik Muñiz.

Contemporary Conversations: John Chamberlain, American Tableau at the Menil Museum.

• It must be really, really hard to move that sculpture.
• Do they ever have to re-weld it after a move?

Jan van der Ploeg at Gallery Sonja Roesch.

• Very efficient art. You can get everything there is to get out of it in about 20 seconds.

The Great Texas Sculpture Roundup at the ArtCar Museum.

• The Art Guys prove once again that a great idea trumps artistic skill every time. Their piece for the show consisted of anodized pails, plywood, and old shoes—and was the best thing in the show.

Aerosol Warfare Gallery.

• Does this place really exist? I couldn’t find it. I think Google Maps steered me on a wild goose chase. Grr. I will try again.
  

Art + Art

Nice, huh. A beautiful Pogo daily from 1951 by Walt Kelly. Despite all that fine brushwork, Kelly worked pretty small--that original is only 17.5" x 6" with the strip itself 16.5" x 4.75".

But check this out:



If you look closely, you can see Kelly's underdrawing. He uses blue pencil which would disappear in the photographic process for making the strip print-ready. His blue pencil drawing is very tight, except (curiously) on the lettering and (less curiously) on Porky Pine. But what is amazing is not his pencils but his inks. Not a single correction on the page. What an amazingly skilled brush-handler he was! It's freaky that a guy who was such a brilliant writer and satirist should also be such a skilled artist--but that combination describes many (but not all) of the greatest cartoonists, of whom Kelly is one of the very top ever.



This photograph is "Untitled from Rabbits in the Land of Squirrels" by Elaine Bradford. If you are from Houston, you might have seen her recent show at the Art League called the Museum of Unnatural History. This show was half Museum of Jurassic Technology and half knitting. I understand a fake museum--museums are so central to art in our day that basic postmodern theory practically demands that artists create pastiches and parodies of museums. You see it in David Wilson's and Hans Haacke's work, among others. It's a form of conceptual art, but it involves a lot of precise craft.

Likewise knitting. Knitting is kind of a new thing in art. I don't know what it means. Maybe Bradford can enlighten us a little with some words from her own website.

Through crocheting sweaters for inanimate objects, she references connotations associated with the handmade, and personal ideas of comfort and warmth. These ideas about the process of crocheting are juxtaposed with the absurdity of its application. She has covered a variety of items in handmade sweaters, including trees, vacuum cleaners, and groceries. Her most recent work involves crocheting sweaters for taxidermied animals.

So OK. I thought it may refer to early feminist artwork that often used traditionally female artforms (like sewing) and wrenched it into the man's man's man's world of contemporary fine art.

This was one of the pieces for sale for either $50 or $100 at theApama Mackey Gallery. This was a one-day show called the "The AMG Visual Stimulus Package" that was co-sponsored by Houston video site, Keep Houston Rich.

Anyway, I bought these two pieces of art, adding them to my "collection," such as it is.

Visiting Every Art Gallery in Houston

Not me. Beth Secor. She is an artist, a curator, a writer and a blogger over at Glasstire, and she sets out to visit and report on every art gallery in town.

There are at least 100 galleries, if not more in Houston, and I would fathom a guess that few among you, my dear readers, have even visited 25 of those, if that many. And why is that? Why don’t we go to more galleries? Is it because they are too far away and gas is too expensive? I know why you don’t go. It’s because those other galleries don’t show Core Fellows, and you are really worried about appearing uncool. That’s the real reason. Admit it.

Well, I already know I’m not cool and because of this I have the freedom to visit every friggin’ gallery in the whole damn town. I am going to start out in the Heights and then spiral out to other parts of the city. I don’t want anyone to have any false expectations - these aren’t going to be full on reviews and I am not going to give you the entire history of the space, I might even get the name and address wrong, and if a place is too far away, I’ll just make up shit about it. And no, I don’t have air conditioning in my car and yes, I have bursitis in my right elbow and am typing everything out with my left hand.

Her first visit is to a gallery in the Heights that really gets the business. My recommendation to the galleries--let Beth Secor take pictures. Because even if she offers up a negative review (as she does here, oh, boy, does she!), at least the photos will let the gallery speak for itself, and frankly, you are trying to sell art and not letting someone photograph it for a review is pretty piss-poor marketing. Plus, if you don't let her take pictures, you might get the "honor" of having her recreate the artwork for you.

The very worst pieces in the show [...] were both made by a person whose name I will not reveal, in order to spare them the public humiliation. These works were constructed of orange peels, which in one case had been tacked to the wall behind the gallery desk [...].

Since I can’t show you the original because of the no photo rule, and in order to help you understand my extreme annoyance, I recreated and photographed one of these “whatevers” at home. Granted the gallery attendant did not look like Humpty Dumpty, and the “artist” did a better job of peeling her oranges in long coiling strands, but you get the general idea. Except I kind of like my photograph, so maybe you won’t get what I’m saying after all.

Gallery owners--this is what you might get if you don't allow a reviewer (particularly Beth Secor) to take photos:

Artwork cruelly recreated for the purpose of mockery by Beth Secor.

Tadanori Yokoo

Ok, enough with the politics. Time for a pure visual coolness break.


The Wonders of Life on Earth



Yakuza Movies (1968)



Sleep, Crime and Falling (1965)


See lots more by this Japanese poster artist at Journey Around My Skull, a great blog about avant garde books and graphic art.

J'aime Picasso!

And I especially love A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. This book, as with the previous two volumes, is too overwhelming to try to reduce into a pithy blog post. Read it (but start with the first volume) and love it. Just to leave you with a taste, here are a few pits I liked.

On Classicism:

Picasso saw eye-to-eye with Stravinsky, who believed "the only critical exercise of value must take place in art, i.e., in pastiche or parody." [How postmodern!] Picasso chose parody.

On Picasso's relations with other artists:

Picasso seldom put lesser artists down. Time and again, he would discreetly give them money, buy their work or get dealers interested, and even marry them off. [Juan] Gris, however, was not a lesser artist. He had absorbed the lessons of cubism at Picasso's elbow and had gone on to take cubism a stage further by dint of calculations, the like of which Picasso and Braque always distrusted. Ironically, Gris's discoveries were so impressive that Picasso did not hesitate to take advantage of them.

On being rich:

Despite the devaluation of his work, Picasso suffered little from the crash. [...] Picasso was about to buy one of the most expensive cars at the Salon de l'Automobile, a large, luxurious Hispano-Suiza coupe de ville. Picasso, who had experienced greater poverty than most of his painter friends, ejoyed driving around, to Olga's dismay, in this ostentatious chaufffeured car wearing an old suit the worse for paint stains, cigarette burns, and plaster dust. As he said more than once, "I would like to live like a pauper with lots of money."

Houses in Motion

When I was an art student, I was fascinated with graffiti and animation, and thought it would be cool to somehow combine the two. I even planned to do an animated version of a Sprawl song, "Big Ass Jewel" (with such lyrics as "Big ass jewel/it's a fascist death tool/shooting multicolored lightning into George Rupp's pool") on an 8' time 4' piece of plywood. Only a camera malfunction kept this from really coming off.

There is no way it could have been one millionth as good as the animation below. This animated graffiti is titled Muto, and is by an artist called "Blu", and was painted on public walls in Buenos Aires. It's mindblowing.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Eat a Botero

Hat-tip to C-Monster. One of his (her?) commenters wrote, "you eat the botero, you become the botero!"