No Seriously, What’s the Matter With Rice?

Betsy Huete

 
The building formerly known as Art Barn ready to be disassembled

Rice University’s recent decision to raze the Art Barn has caused quite the stir. (Well, possible razing—the Brown Foundation at present is discussing the possibility of moving the building to the Fourth Ward—because deconstructing, moving, finding land, and rebuilding is apparently a much more financially viable option than simply maintaining it onsite.) Although it has done little for the arts beyond sitting next to the Media Center for decades, proponents claim that it has symbolic and rich art historical and architectural value for not only Rice but Houston at large. While these claims may absolutely be true and the Art Barn’s demolishing very sad, as arts writer Devon Britt-Darby, Matchbox co-curator Jessica Fuquay, and Glasstire commenter Lisa Hardaway among others have made abundantly clear, this is just one incident, one symptom of the systemic failure of Rice University to take its arts program seriously.

And it’s easy for us to point finger, isn’t it? Yes, where the powers that be choose to direct—or not direct—their funding is certainly one culprit, and we’ll get to that in a bit. But the truth is Rice’s blatant lack of respect disguised as nonchalance towards the visual arts has far reaching tendrils that are deeply entrenched within the arts department as well as the greater student culture.

 
Edward and Nancy Kienholz, The Art Show, 1984 at the Art Barn (from Finders/Keepers catalog, 1997)

I’d like to start by saying that I didn’t even know what the Art Barn was until I got to grad school, nor was I aware of its dense, luxurious history and connection to the Menils. I thought it was just the corrugated metal building for Continuing Studies that happened to look an awful lot like the Media Center. Now sure, we can chalk that up to my own ignorance and lack of curiosity, but it begs the question: why is the school across town discussing, educating, and celebrating Rice’s art historical significance when Rice isn’t? Why did it take nearly a decade out of school to understand how amazing it was to be able to take a class with Thomas McEvilley? And why were there only three people in it? Why did Rice Gallery, one of the most exciting spaces in Houston, turn their backs on its students and deny them a senior show?

To be clear, Visual and Dramatic Arts department (VADA) has a lot of great things going on. When I was there, the faculty was excellent, and as people like George Smith, Bas Poulos, and Darra Keeton have retired, it seems they have found excellent replacements in Chris Sperandio and Natasha Bowdoin, and I’m sure they will find someone great to fill the sculpture faculty position. Rice’s decision to team up with the MFAH and have a constant influx of Core Fellows as adjuncts was stellar, and I can say first hand how formative that was for my undergraduate experience. But there have also been missteps within the department, like alienating probably the best lecturer I’ve ever had—David Brauer—because students complained that he graded too harshly. What the hell? Has anyone heard of Rice students filing a petition against their chemistry professor because, gee, he’s just too tough?

And this brings me to the student culture. Rice’s student body consists of the most creative, innovative, quirky, nerdy, funny, open-minded people I have ever met. This is why I found their indignant attitude towards the arts as a discipline, towards its power as an instigator of critical thought so confounding. I remember the sideways glances, the thinly veiled looks of contempt upon telling anyone at school I was an art major. I mean, how impractical is that? What kind of job would I get? And I think a lot of that doubt and even shame pervaded students within the department. It is common for students at Rice to double, even triple major, but it says something when every student in the department is a double major. In fact, I distinctly remember being the only student in my class who only majored in art. Why is that? There’s no way to be totally sure, but it certainly speaks for a lack of confidence in art’s purpose as a discipline and rigor within the department.

To be completely fair, I’m pretty old; I graduated nearly a decade ago (Martel ’05). It’s quite possible many things have changed since my time there. I hope they have, and there are obvious indicators to suggest times are indeed changing within the department. The development of grass-roots student run and alternative spaces like Matchbox and the Emergency Room have become exciting mainstays not only for the campus but for the Houston arts community in general. The Cargo Space is an innovative mobile residency, one of the very few mobile artist residencies in the country, at least that I’m aware of. Unfortunately, these endeavors were done in spite of Rice’s support, not because of it.

And that brings me back to the powers that be: what propels Rice’s blasé attitude towards the visual arts? Just ask Rice’s PR rep, B.J. Almond, and he’ll retort, citing the university’s public art program and its plans for the Moody Center of the Arts. The argument against plop art is too easy: as pretty as it is, it doesn’t tangibly affect the students and their education. The Moody Center of the Arts is a little more difficult; it’s harder to criticize an institution that doesn’t even exist yet. As exciting as it seems though, the evidence suggests that the Moody Center is more interested in garnering public attention and collecting donations than fostering an excellent visual arts program. The vice provost for interdisciplinary initiatives, Caroline Leveander, was quoted in Rice News as saying that “there’s a trend in elite higher education to build art centers on campus and raise awareness of the arts” and that “the new center should help recruit highly talented faculty and students in the visual and performing arts.” Call me crazy, but I think a good way to recruit exceptional talent would probably be to establish an MFA program for them to be able to attend. OR A BFA PROGRAM FOR THAT MATTER.

While the “Harvard of the South” continuously turns up its nose at its own artists, it is interesting to note that actual Ivy League schools like Columbia and Yale not only support their art students and faculty, they are among the best in the country. It seems that those universities are dedicated to the utmost excellence in all disciplines, not just the ones that the people running the show deem most important. So I think the real question isn’t why Rice doesn’t support the visual arts, but rather why isn’t Rice embarrassed that it doesn’t support the visual arts?

I hate to say it, but perhaps the demolishing of the Art Barn is a good thing. It seems to be shining a light on issues subsumed within yet simmering at Rice University for a very long time. Maybe this is what VADA needed: maybe this will somehow inhibit people from settling for the university’s PR placations and instead ask it to nurture its students and faculty that are trying so hard to make their program better.

Lonestar Explosion 2014 - The Artist Is Pleasant by David B. Collins

Dean Liscum

I've been confronted with many things when viewing performance art by David B. Collins: shrink-wrapped suicide hotline conversations, naked strolling down Westheimer with a clothed entourage, a naked body covered in green paint. Now I can add to that list a peanut butter sandwich sans nudity.

 
The Artist is Pleasant by David B. Collins

Collins piece was a one-on-one interaction in which audience members were invited to sit across the table from him. The two of them would exchange pleasantries, and at some point Collins would offer to make his audience a peanut butter sandwich. From what I witnessed of the performance, it was a plethora of pleasantness or at least superficially so.

I say superficially because it wasn't pleasant for me. The title is a pun on the phrase "the artist is present" and the concept of being fully present, of being in the moment. The piece made me wonder if the artist is pleasant, meaning he's conforming to societal norms so as not to offend or insult anyone, can he also be present as an artist? Isn't the artist, specifically the performance artist, supposed to challenge us in some way, to move us out of pleasant-ville if only for a day trip? When I go to see performance art, I expect and want to be challenged to embrace, to avert, to intervene, to abandon what I'm confronted with. I don't expect or want a cup of pleasantness and a side of peanut butter with my performance art.

I boycotted the sandwich. I grew up on peanut butter and pleasantness. I've had enough of that shit. I want my performance artists present. I want them intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally engaged. If that means naked and smeared with peanut butter, so be it. If that means I'm shocked, disgusted, or emotionally scarred for life, so be it. The pleasantries, I can do without. They leave their own marks.

The audience, however, played along. No one challenged Collins or his menu. No one got belligerent or confrontational or naked. No one asked him to do anything inappropriate in "pleasant" company. And he didn't. Collins was a perfect gentleman, which was pleasant but not very satisfying. Unless, frustrating audience members with pleasantness was the objective of Collin's pleasant-present dichotomy.

If so, bravo. If not, I prefer him naked and green all over.

The Pan Review of Books: The Blazing World

Robert Boyd



The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt is a rich, complex novel disguised as an anthology about the work and life of Harriet Burden, a recently deceased artist. The conceit of the book is that it was edited by I.V. Hess from Burden's notebooks with additional sections from contemporaneous publications (reviews, articles, etc.) and testimony by people who knew Burden.

Burden was the widow of a successful contemporary art dealer, Felix Lord. While married to him, her own art career was at best moderately successful. After he died, that modest success dwindled. She came to believe that it was her status as a woman that held her back in the sexist art world. So she developed an elaborate plan to put on art exhibits of her work using three men as fronts or "masks." The first, Anton Tish, was a callow youth who gained a tiny measure of fame after "his" show. The second, Phineas Q. Eldridge, a black, gay performance artist, was highly sympathetic to her eccentric project. The third mask was Rune Larsen, who simply went by the name Rune, an already successful young artist. The book is primarily about these three shows and what happened after.

Obviously feminism is a major theme here. But the book is quite tricky--it leads you down one thematic path and sneakily changes course, several times. When I started reading it, I thought of Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under many pseudonyms (or masks) that were quite distinct personalities. (Pessoa is acknowledged early on, as if to get him out of the way.) Also I thought of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing,  a novel where the protagonist writes in several differently themed notebooks, as Harriet Burden does in The Blazing World. And like Burden, The Golden Notebook's protagonist, Anna Wulf, suffers a mental breakdown.

As I read it, I was really taken with the voices Hustveldt created for the "contributors." So instead of writing an essay about the book, I thought I'd quote some of them and add my own annotations. 

I don’t think anybody really knows when she first started thinking about pseudonyms. She published one dense art review under the name Roger Raison in a magazine in the eighties, dumping on the Baudrillard craze, demolishing his simulacra argument, but few people paid attention. I remember when I was fifteen, our family was in Lisbon, and she went over and kissed the statue of Pessoa. My mother told me to read him, and, of course, he was famous for what he called his heteronyms. (Maisie Lord)

Maisie Lord is Burden's level-headed daughter. She is a documentary filmmaker who has spent considerable time documenting her mother's odd, chaotic life, including a full-length documentary about a schizophrenic denizen of Burden's Red Hook compound.

Over time, however, I learned that the boy [Anton Tish] had attended the School of Visual Arts, did not know who Giorgione was but considered Warhol the most important artist of all time, which must have explained his silk-screen obsession. Rather than celebrities, Tisch did silk screens of his friends, presumably because their proverbial fifteen minutes had or would come. He explained that his art referred directly to Warhol while also pointing to the phenomenon of reality TV, although it was difficult to glean this information from the banal images he showed me. He liked the term conceptual and used it a lot, not unlike the way Edgar used man. Anton was not a bad kid. He was just stupendously, heartbreakingly ignorant. (Harriet Burden, notebook C)

This harsh portrait of Burden's first "mask," Anton Tisch (whose name she changes to "Tish" for the exhibit), is funny but rings true. We've met that guy before under different names. Burden is that she is better educated than everybody else in the book. She has read everything. Whatever else it is, The Blazing World is a novel about Burden's mind; her interpretations of history, philosophy and science. She has to teach Tish her own highly idiosyncratic history of art to get him up to speed to be a convincing front.

Mostly, the art business has been about men. And when it has been about women, it has often been about correcting past oversights. It is interesting that not all, but many women were celebrated only when their days as desirable sexual objects had passed. (Rosemary Lerner, art critic)

The book's feminist themes will be pretty familiar to anyone who is familiar with Linda Nochlin, the Guerrilla Girls, and so forth. Lerner is an art writer working on a biography of Burden who has, since her death, risen in the estimation of the art world--correcting an old oversight, as it were.

After her parents and then Felix [her husband] died, this monolith of adversarial forces seemed to grow rather than diminish. An enemy with a masculine, not a feminine face, it swatted the likes of Harry away like a mosquito. She had fantasized about her revenge for years, and now it had come—sort of. (Rachel Briefman, childhood friend)

But the abstract feminist motivations for the "mask" exhibits aren't the only motivations. They are wound together with a sense of resentment Burden feels over how her work has been ignored. Because by the time this anthology is being written her work has become highly esteemed, her resentment seems justified in retrospect. But for her friends and contemporaries, it must have seemed self-indulgent, if not a little crazy.

Yes, my husband and I have been collecting for years now,” a woman in a Chanel suit told me. “We just bought a Kara Walker.” (The idea here: Tell black artist about another black artist.) “Her work is soooo powerful, don’t you think?

[...]

When The Suffocation Rooms were shown, they were read through me—P. Q. Eldridge was exploring his identity in his art. White boys, the Anton Tishes of the world, have no need to explore their identities, of course. What is there to explore? They are the neutral universal entity, the unhyphenated humans. I was pretty much all hyphen. (Phineas Q. Eldridge)

Phineas Q. Eldridge is one of the most likable characters in the book. He becomes a good friend of Burden's in the course of their project together, and by virtue of his own status as an outsider, he is sensitive to the small but significant racial/sexual distinctions between how people view "white boys" and how they view people like him or Burden. This makes him a good conspirator for Burden.

She had drunk too much, and I could feel the self-pity mounting as she rolled off the names of women artists suppressed, dismissed, or forgotten. She jumped up from the sofa and stomped back and forth across the room. Artemisia Gentileschi, treated with contempt by posterity, her best work attributed to her father. Judith Leyster, admired in her day, then erased. Her work handed over to Frans Hals. Camille Claudel’s reputation swallowed whole by Rodin’s. Dora Maar’s big mistake: She screwed Picasso, a fact that had obliterated her brilliant Surrealist photographs. Fathers, teachers, and lovers suffocate women’s reputations. These are three I remember. Harry had an endless supply. “With women,” Harry said, “it’s always personal, love and muck, whom they fuck.” And a favorite theme of Harry’s, women treated like children by paternal critics, who refer to them by their first names: Artemisia, Judith, Camille, Dora. (Phineas Q. Eldridge)

This book is crammed with information. Because it's a novel about a particular person, you have to take some of the information with a grain of salt. Burden isn't a completely reliable narrator. But for me, there is a lot of "further reading" suggested by its contents. It's not enough that Burden feels that she (and women artists in general) have been shortchanged; names must be named.

I worry over Bruno’s refusal to come with us. Maybe it is Phinny’s hand that makes me think of Bruno, my mauling lover. I am back to life under his hands, his rumbling voice, his jokes, but he said, I hate that art world shit. It’s worse than the poetry world, and that’s pretty bad, but there’s no money in poems. Just egos. (Harriet Burden, notebook B)

"Bruno" is Bruno Kleinfeld, Burden's boyfriend--a not very successful poet, but a hell of a nice guy. Both he and Burden are oldish--they have grown children. Kleinfeld loves her art but doesn't quite understand it. Burden doesn't like Kleinfeld's poetry so much, but loves his prose memoir and encourages him to continue it. Kleinfeld really doesn't get her need for revenge--to him, the whole game of the art world is a sick joke to be avoided if at all possible.

[T]he Goldberg study, 1968. Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached. The same results were found when they were presented with a work of visual art. Goldberg study revisited, 1983. Men and women students rated the essay with a female name attached more poorly than with a male name attached. And so it goes, but there is a twist as the research progresses in the 1990s. When expert credentials are attached to a woman’s name, the bias disappears. For artists, expertise is fame. Sex and color don’t disappear; they no longer matter. (Harriet Burden, notebook B)

For all the academic references, this is a key passage. Burden is not just fighting sexism or getting revenge, she is conducting a personal version of the Goldberg studies. She believes that the reception of her art will be colored by the supposed identity of the artist--and furthermore, its meaning will change. By the way, these are real studies. Burden's theory that fame can replace expert credentials rings very true.

The subterfuge was right up Rune’s alley, a ploy that wowed him because, if it all went as planned, he could become the biggest art world kidder of them all. He would expose the critics (some of whom he hoped to draw and quarter) as clowns. This was the man’s vulnerability, Harry claimed. There were those who called him a con artist, a panderer. Plus the market scared him. Up one day, down the next. He didn’t want to go the way of Sandro Chia, dumped on the market by Saatchi, never to recover. Rune lived like a pasha, indulged himself; he needed upkeep. (Bruno Kleinfeld)

Rune was the third "mask," but unlike Eldridge and Tish, Rune was already a successful artist--and within the context of the novel, a good artist. But unlike Tish, who was just a dope, and Eldridge, who went along because he liked Burden but otherwise had no particular stake in the world of art galleries, Rune was deeply involved in the art world and was a very clever, savvy player. Bruno is parroting Burden's assessment of Rune in the passage above, an assessment that turns out to be quite naive.

[...] she got that wrinkled, knowing look on her face, which always let me know a big explanation was coming, and she launched into a story about James Tiptree, the science fiction writer. According to Mother, for at least ten years no one actually saw Tiptree in the flesh, not even his editor. His secret identity caused a lot of speculation, and there were some people who thought that hiding behind the pseudonym there might be a woman, not a man. Robert Silverberg, another science fiction writer, wrote an introduction for a book of stories by Tiptree. He weighed in on the sex question and argued that just as no man could have written the novels of Jane Austen, no woman could have produced the stories of Ernest Hemingway or James Tiptree. Mother loved this part of the Tiptree drama because Silverberg’s faith in the writer’s unimpeachable masculinity turned out to be misplaced. When the actual person stepped out from behind the pen name, the macho Tiptree turned out to be Alice Bradley Sheldon.

But Mother stressed that nothing was simple. After she had invented Tiptree and before she unveiled herself as Alice Sheldon, the writer took on another persona, a female one she named Raccoona Sheldon, whose work was rejected by a number of publishers and deemed inferior to Tiptree’s. The writer, who had been praised as a man who could write feminist science fiction, now had a female mask, too. My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don’t wear but simply have—the ones given them by nature. That’s the title of my third film, the one I’m working on now about my mother: The Natural Mask. The revelation that James Tiptree and Raccoona Sheldon were two sides of the same person didn’t make life simpler for Alice Sheldon. Although the women who had been friends with Tiptree by letter, including Ursula Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. “When you take on a male persona, something happens.”

When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. “You get to be the father.”

As her daughter, I didn’t like hearing my mother talk about being the father. I felt a visceral jolt under my ribs, but I started giggling and said something like “Oh, Mother, come on, you don’t really mean that.” But Mother did mean it. She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man—not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her—and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: “Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power. [Maisie Lord]

Even though this novel is set in the art world (and some if the best parts are the descriptions of Burden's artworks--they are good enough that they make you want to see the "real" art), the story of science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr. seems like a possible source for the book. If so, it's pretty odd that Sheldon/Tiptree's true story would be recalled in the course of the novel.That a feminist science fiction novelist like Le Guin--a woman of incredible sensitivity--would nonetheless express a preference for Tiptree over Racoona Sheldon seems to confirm the Goldberg study and Burden's own contention that the meaning of the work is changed if we know it's by a woman or a man. But Sheldon's story also brings the theme of mental illness or breakdown back into the story. The violence committed by Burden in the story is far less serious than what happened with Sheldon, but it is still quite shocking when it happens. (There is an excellent biography of Sheldon: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.)

With your name on my work, I said, it will be different. Art lives in its perception only. You are the last of three, and you are the pinnacle. I could hear the cracking passion in my voice. I altered my tone to one of calm deliberation.

He liked the idea of pulling a fast one, but my ideas felt outdated, a little lame to him. We live in a postfeminist age of gender freedom, transsexuality. Who cares which is which? There are lots of women in art now. Where is the battle?

No, I said to him, it’s more than sex. It’s an experiment, a whole story I am making. Two down, one to go. After that, I retire from the game. We will find a project, I said. Hadn’t his work The Banality of Glamour focused mostly on women’s faces and bodies? Surely he knew that women face pressures men don’t. I had suffered from the cruelty of the beauty culture. I knew what I was talking about.

He smiled a gentle smile, and he said, Harry, you have your own style, your own elegance, your own femininity. He wanted to be kind, but I boiled—fists clenched, fury rising. He had offered me condescension, compensation. Don’t worry, Harry, you count, too, he was saying, even if you are funny-looking. I bristled at him and growled, But that’s not the point. The point is the trap, the suffocation. I turned away.

No pique from him: You want to wear me for one exhibition. It was a good phrase, “wear me.”

I told him yes, that was it exactly, except that by “wearing” him I might find something else in myself. This is what I was trying to explain. [Harriet Burden, Notebook O, the Fifth Circle]

Here Burden specifically identifies the "mask" project as an "experiment"--she is replicating the Goldberg experiment in her own way. Rune seems to be eager enough to play along, but Rune has his own agenda.

To go much further would be to risk "spoilers." And there is a mystery threading through the work that readers will want unspooled gradually. Despite its odd form and intellectual subject matter, Hustvedt want you to feel the need to keep reading. There is a plot here that the reader wants to see through. (In this way, The Blazing World resembles the novels of Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. Apparently they have even shared characters in their novels.)

I'm always interested in novels that are about artists or otherwise set in the art world. But The Blazing World transcends that interest. It is unusually fine.

Gagosian Tweets

Robert Boyd

Gagosian Gallery is actually something like nine galleries, located in several countries on three continents. As of 2012, it was estimated that its annual sales were 1.1 billion dollars. Gagosian Gallery is in the business of selling extremely high-priced consumer items to very high net worth individuals. So why the hell would they buy an ad on Twitter? Who are they trying to reach?



Yet here it was, on my Twitter feed! Are they hoping to snag a few hedge-fund managers as clients this way? Seems doubtful. Of all their enterprises, only Gagosian Shop seems to sell things within the price range of any of the 99%. Gagosian's Twitter ad is a small mystery to me.

(Jordan Crane, by the way, is a really good cartoonist. Check his work out.)

In Review – René Magritte at the Menil

Paul Mullan


René Magritte, The Memoirs of a Saint, 1960 (The Menil Collection)

In a catalog essay for the major 2006 exhibition “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images”, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michel Draguet flatly states that the artist “contributed decisively to the development of what would become known as postmodern theory”. Among these theoretical concerns are, of course, the historically constructed and variable character of representational apparatuses – including painting – and those apparatuses’ impact on the accessibility, for us, of objective reality. This has been a persistent and controversial point in debates around postmodernism.

“Memories of a Voyage: The Late Work of René Magritte” is currently on exhibition at, and organized by, the Menil Collection and is derived primarily from the museum’s large, permanent holdings of the artist’s post-1940 work. Assistant Curator Clare Elliott, with Menil Director Josef Helfenstein, curated. The show complements “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938”, which has been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Menil, and the Art Institute of Chicago and is also now in Houston. Viewers have the opportunity to, once again, reexamine these ubiquitous images and the objects upon which they are based.

In western painterly conventions, the curtain has been integrally related to the window, posited as a transparent opening into the world. The curtain in The Memoirs of a Saint (1950) is not hung flat and neither reveals nor conceals a window; instead – violating the laws of gravity – it rests vertically in an otherwise-empty, stage-like setting. A low light radiates from the left side of the “stage”, beyond the boundary of the canvas; the curtain casts shadows, thus confirming the floor. However, no ceiling can be discerned; the background quickly darkens, but the intersection of the floor and a rear wall is not apparent.


René Magritte, The Invisible World, 1954 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The Invisible World (1954) is similarly staged. A strong light comes from the left foreground, rather than from the seascape seen through the open balcony doors, and casts a sharp shadow to the right of the boulder mysteriously occupying the room.

The red, pleated curtain in The Memoirs of a Saint wraps around an empty space on the “stage”, creating a cylinder that is open and into which the viewer can peer. As with much of Magritte’s work, this key figure – the open drum – is centered; lies in the medium distance; and occupies the bulk of the canvas surface. Its inner side, unexpectedly, is a flat image of blue sky and sea. The top right corner of the curtain is folded back, indicating the landscape continues as the inner side wraps around and out of sight of the viewer. Curiously, any imputed light from the bright interior sky does not cause the curtain edges to cast shadows.

The Memoirs of a Saint is – whatever Magritte’s expressed opposition to symbolism – an allegory about the process of representation. The source of the landscape image is indicated nowhere; there exists no transparent window or open curtain which would reveal an outside objective world. So, the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis such a world is rendered as indeterminate. There is only the image directly inscribed on the curtain itself, an apparatus actively constructing our understanding of this hypothesized world.


René Magritte, Evening Falls, 1964 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The key figure in Evening Falls (1964) is a picture window (a single pane of glass, rather than multiple panes supported by wooden separators or muntins, which can impede a view). The setting is a domestic space: the curtains are drawn back on both sides of the window and held in place with sashes; and there is a skirting board running across the exterior wall. The large pane has shattered inwards, with fragments scattered on the floor underneath the sill. However, those sizable fragments unexpectedly still hold the image that can be seen through the jagged hole in the window: a landscape, complete with castle ruins atop rolling hills in the far distance and a sun.

Contra postmodernist readings, there is, in this case, more than a hint of traditional realist epistemologies. The source of the image is available through the damaged window pane; source and image do not merely correlate, but are identical. Moreover, the upper sun is insistently centered in Magritte’s work, in the window, and in the break. It is as if the force of the real, that sun, has guaranteed not only the appearance and veracity of that representation but simultaneously ruined and frozen its apparatus.

The duplication of the landscape is, of course, analogous to the afterimage created by looking at an intense light source, such as the sun. Further, the human eye is unable to directly perceive the true form of the sun, as such a extended gaze would destroy sight. In Evening Falls, that inability is allegorized by way of the suns’ abstracted, geometric form, a modeling strikingly different from the thin, illustrative style that Magritte used in the rest of the artwork and throughout most of his long, mature period. Each disk is a perfectly circular and thick, smooth application of bright orange oil paint that sits atop the surface of the canvas, as if it could be peeled off like a sticker. This effect is strengthened by the orange, which, relative to the artist’s typically subdued and recessive color scheme, projects forward from that surface. (All of this is clearer, only when the actual work is seen in a gallery, not merely in digital reproduction.) The landscape is brightly and evenly illuminated with a light that emanates from elsewhere.


René Magritte, Memory of a Journey III, 1951 Oil on canvas (The Menil Collection)

The face of a background cliff extends all the way past the top of a set of open balcony doors in Memory of a Journey III (1951). The room’s floor, doors, and traditional still life elements -- the table, book, fruit bowl, wine bottle, and drinking glass – have unexpectedly petrified into the same craggy rock seen from the balcony.

Those boulders perilously stacked atop one another should be large, thus signaling a background in the far distance. Their color scheme and tinting, though, is almost homogeneous with that of the foreground, suggesting instead a background in the near distance. In conjunction with the absence of a horizon line, this has a tendency to flatten out the composition and is evocative of modernism’s definition of painterly specificity. This also gives the interior a sense of claustrophobia. Inside and outside are illuminated from the left by a similar, low light, as if both occupy the same compressed space.

The balcony doors would normally act as an aesthetic site, framing a view of nature and separated from that nature. In this case, conversely, nature has rushed forward from its aesthetic representation and seized the entire world. The question of the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis an objective reality is mooted.


René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933 Oil on canvas (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

Featured in the “Mystery of the Ordinary” galleries is The Human Condition (1933). In another domestic space, a painted canvas is perched atop an easel and parallel to a picture window behind it. The viewpoint of The Human Condition is not perpendicular to those two planes, but at a slight angle from the right and at a medium distance. The stretcher’s right side – raw and white, with a row of nail heads – is visible; its left side visually, from our standpoint, overlaps the a narrow section of the left curtain. Seen through the window – those parts not blocked by the canvas centered before it – is a daytime landscape: a blue sky with clouds, a hill in the far distance, vegetation, and a foreground path. The painting-within-a-painting itself depicts more clouds and vegetation, the remainder of the path and hill, and other elements which align neatly with those of the image visible through the glass at the rear.

At first pass, then, the landscape is seemingly “completed”, hinting yet again at a realist epistemology. This completion-effect can occur, though, only from the perspective of the imaginary viewer just to the right of, and at a medium distance from, the easel; from any other perspective in the imaginary domestic space, the elements in the canvas would not align with the window’s image. Conversely, the canvas, if it was fully composed strictly from that imaginary viewpoint, would have to include the sliver of curtain blocked by the stretcher’s left side; but that is missing. So, the canvas is derived from two incompatible positions. .

As with The Memoirs of a Saint, the source of the canvas’ image exists nowhere, given that portions of the window are blocked. In that sense, the correlation – or non-correlation – of that representation vis-à-vis objective reality is again rendered as indeterminate. Further, that representation has no possible, direct referent, given its derivation from two positions unable to occupy the same place in any “real” world. This is, of course, one of the liberties long taken by painting.


René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929 Oil on canvas (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

Lastly, included in the show is 1952 gouache-on-paper version of The Treachery of Images, made famous by Michel Foucault’s equally inescapable essay This Is Not a Pipe. Foucault’s little book has been crucial, particularly in the way that it elliptically gestures towards the socially constructed character of images and their disjunction vis-à-vis language, for current postmodernist readings of Magritte.

The selections in “Memories of a Voyage” are mostly distant from the concerns of such readings. Evening Falls is concerned with longstanding questions about the limitations of human perception; The Human Condition, about the history and conventions of painting. Such dialogues were present in western art long before the development of postmodern ideas in the twentieth century. Memory of a Journey III posits an alarming ossification and collapse of the human world, and representation, into the natural world. While works such as The Memoirs of a Saint manifest a skepticism akin to that of contemporary postmodern thought, Magritte’s broader oeuvre – however ubiquitous and familiar it may seem today – is heterogeneous and resists any single narrative.

“Memories of a Voyage: The Late Work of René Magritte” is currently on view at the Menil Collection until July 13, 2014. “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938”, is on view at the Menil until June 1, 2014, followed by the Art Institute of Chicago from June 24, 2014 to October 13, 2014.

Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists

Robert Boyd

This is a trailer for an upcoming movie about the Chicago Imagists. It will premiere in Chicago in May.

 
HAIRY WHO & THE CHICAGO IMAGISTS - Official trailer from Pentimenti Productions on Vimeo.

The Chicago Imagists were a group of painters in the 60s and 70s who did highly stylized, often grotesque non-abstract paintings. They were frightfully out-of-step with what was happening in New York, where art history was being written. The best known of them are probably Ed Paschke and Roger Brown, and the Hairy Who (including Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum) is the most well-known sub-group of this movement.


Ed Paschke, Hop Head, 45 x 60 inches, oil on canvas, 1970 

I first became aware of them in the early 80s when I was taking a class from William Camfield called "Art Since the 40s." He showed just two slides of this work, and one, by Jim Nutt, caught my eye. I ended up writing my paper for the class on the Hairy Who. I wish I still had a copy of that paper, but I'm sure I'd be embarrassed by it now.

What I didn't realize at the time was that this was a local movement. It was a Chicago thing. These artists all knew each other and were all influenced by one another. There were local institutions (art spaces and galleries, of course, but also schools and bars and living rooms) that facilitated a sharing of ideas. This scene had its connectors who brought artists together and helped make things happen (Don Baum, for example). And I'm fascinated by the mechanics of such a scene.

Over time I've come to realize that what happened in Chicago has happened in other places. Los Angeles is an obvious example. All these regional scenes have suffered from being mostly outside the official canon of art history--just two slides in an art history class. The whole multi-museum series of exhibits under the umbrella of Pacific Standard Time in 2011 and 2012 was an attempt by Los Angeles to boldly claim its place in art history.

I'm committed to Houston's art--what its artists are making today and its art history. I know there are plenty here who worry about Houston being willfully provincial and inward looking. I don't really think this is true. Houston artists have as much connection to the world as anyone (and given the fantastic accessibility of people and information due to the internet, we have way more connection to the art world than artists in the 60s and 70s did). We get a new infusion of artists from elsewhere every year because of the Core Program. In any case, I now think being provincial is good--if it leads to art scenes like the Chicago Imagists or the L.A. artists who arose from the Ferus Gallery scene.

It goes without saying, then, that I am really looking forward to seeing Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists.

Lonestar Explosion 2014 - Untitled by Nikki Thornton

Dean Liscum

Opening night of the Houston Performance Art Biennalle was at Box 13 and it began with a set of simultaneous performances by the Houston-based performance art collective Continuum and coalesced by the title Bound.

From the entrance, I could see several performance in progress. None of the performances collided or collaborated. Rather, each neatly and quietly transpired within the confines of its assigned space, its invisible performance borders. Nikki Thornton's piece immediately grabbed my attention because it was both such a spectacle, but also not at all.

Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

At the front of Box 13's large open space, Thornton, dressed in all white, sat on a white sheet on the floor with a pigs head between her legs. With a needle and bright red thread, she methodically sewed the pigs lips together.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

The piece was performed in silence. No music. No humming. No talking. Only the sound of her hands working the snout into position and the thread pulled through the flesh. She didn't acknowledge the onlookers or affect an attitude of disgust or disdain or desire toward the pig. She completed the task with an air of detachment.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

The white clothing, the placement of the pigs head between her legs, the blood lent to the work a visually superficial-sexual, possibly virginal quality. Perhaps, if this were the only performance in the space and it occurred on a dais, it would feel sexual or sacred. But it isn't, so it plays out profanely on an old linoleum floor in the corner.


Nikki Thornton, untitled, Pig Head, Red Thread

It feels familiarly uncomfortable. When I was may be 8 and used to run through the aisle of K-Mart playing hide and seek, inevitably I would come across a woman and child. She would be squatting in the middle of the aisle breast feeding the child or changing it's diaper or spanking it's exposed ass. She might make eye contact or she might not but she wouldn't stop. She would simply press on until the deed was done.

That was more than my little catholic in-training  self would know what to do with. So I wouldn't say anything. I'd run off not looking back because I was trying to fit together the nakedness and the intimacy and the matter of fact-ness while trying to give her some of my shame and realize that she had no time for it. 

Watching Thornton's piece gave me that same impression. She gave no indication of the symbolism of her clothing or of the position of her legs or of her relationship to the pig or of her choice of location. She simply performed her task and left, leaving the audience to deal with whatever associations-meanings-emotions it conjured up in them.