Get Your 2 Cents In

Across Alabama from the Menil parking lot, at the corner of Mandell, an abandoned building has been commandeered by taggers for the last few years. Christmas (or somewhere near) meant a busy night and the new stuff is great. DUAL, 2CENT, FRANK and BRANDED plastered the whole facade.

the Jim Love Jack, 1971, was catchin' some pretty light...

La Destrucción: New Year's Eve

La Destrucción
American Wandering Club at The Silo
4601 Clinton Drive
Houston, Texas

44 years after Argentine artist Marta Minujín created the first Happening in Paris the American Wandering Club will usher in 2008 with their own version. In the original La Destrucción the artist destroyed all her artwork, inviting others like Christo and Lourdes Castro to burn paintings and mattresses. Seeking a more collaborative event the American Wandering Club has invited artists to bring work from 2007 to The Silo on December 31^st in order to usher in the New Year. At 4:44 pm paintings and sculptures will be lit aflame, immediately followed by a performance by the Windham Brothers.

Please join us at 4 pm New Year’s Eve in the Warehouse District at The Silo, a former grain warehouse without a ceiling and a perfect view of the sky. Festivities will continue throughout the night presented by ACK, the Art Car Klub. Artists will include Betsy Askew, Paul Barces, Joey Bender, Adrian Brooks, Eli Brumbaugh, Sean Carroll, Brian Moss, Brian Rod, Shane Tolbert, and Vanessa Voss. Please call 832-724-9464 for more information.

To Do List: Houstoned Blog about it HERE.

Threadiness

Announcing a new $3 million ad campaign for the city's image has spurred on 8 pages of comments on chron.com, here are some good slogan suggestions.

- Houston, where if you mess with the bull, you get Joe Horn.

"Houston.....PRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH HAAAAAH HAAAAH HAAAAAH HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEYA"!

"Houston: A City Without a NEWSpaper"

For all of you that think Houston is bad, try living in Corpus Christi.

It is bad idea to have Barb and old George help this city because all they do is hurt this city...thank goodness their idiot son is going to Dallas...they should move with him, because Dallas is better suited for elitist Republican racists...

"Houston.... Are you my babby daddy?"

Where else are you going to find that is so cheap to live, and your wealth puts you above the law.

Houston is great! Now, go away!

Hollow Men Are We

organizers Brumbaugh and Calle








E.T. Scarecrow took a tumble out of the tree


Turnip Head!











this is the bus with the skull on the back... no one knew where it was from...





Adrian Brooks brought a scarecrow to burn...






there were two rasta concert promoters crashed out who had thrown a party the night before
what the fuck went on there?!?




constructing the rich scarecrow eating poor scarecrows




pics by Chester.Soria

The Dimes- that drummer probably doesn't appreciate this pic... haha...






who hired strippers?











Stole a few pics from the Free Press blog about it HERE.

B.


Grant Olney


The Jon Benet

Enrique's 80th Birthday Party

Britt Proves That the Chron Writes

Nice to see THIS article about Angie Fraliegh and Michael McKean up at Inman now, but Chron writer Douglas Britt seems to suck balls when it comes to allusion.

"The amateur porn vibe carries over into all the paintings, even though none of them is explicit."

Demonstrating that it doesn't matter what a writer is writing about (he'll bring up whatever he likes) Britt launches into a triple toe loop trying to get McKean's sculptures and Robert Ryman in the same sentence.

"The Builder and Science bears some resemblance to a Robert Rauschenberg assemblage (if you're shallow), but both times I saw this show, the artist I couldn't stop thinking of (because I was thinking of him already) was minimalist pioneer Robert Ryman because of McKean's intriguing use of white paint in all three sculptures."

His last word on the Robert Ryman work at the Menil is cute: "The meditative environment that tiny room created made me wonder what a Ryman Chapel would be like, until I realized I was already standing in one." Aww...

Robert Ryman in more interesting times, Ledger, 1982

Well I think that the Ryman work sucks. Curator Sirmans cut a perfectly fine gallery in half and put three incongruous paintings together. The two white paintings and one grid work are a perfectly plausible excuse for the average museum-goer to say "What the fuck? Who cares?" and I'm inclined to agree with him.

The darkened gap above the temporary wall sucks attention away from what little there is to focus on in the room. The doctor's office lobby-like space promotes visitors to enter, circle and leave without a moment's rest, and Ryman is not an artist where you want to challenge viewers' attention spans on a race to zero. Without a lick of context or magic (come on lets spice up the lighting!) you may as well be looking at it in a book- save for the occasional brushstroke an avid visitor can detect. Feel free to examine the wall for more exciting tidbits!

First Door on the Right

The Green Box, Duchamp

The Menil Collection has mixed up their Surrealism exhibit, unearthing exceptional sketches to replace work rotated away or lent to other institutions. In the room with a copy of Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box sits a new collection of early conceptualist-dadaist artists. Two abstract collages by Kurt Schwitters, two constructivist sketches (one by El Lissitzky), a machine drawing by Francis Picabia and two Max Ernst collages.

'Globetrotter (in der Zeit) [Globetrotter (in time)]', El Lissitzky

A delicate, painted watercolor, the El Lissitzky piece is a perfectly balanced composition of pink and grey geometries with an airplane's propeller threatening to swirl the rest right off the page. On yellowed paper in low light, the lightness of El Lissitzky's brush makes the impassive Russian- who wanted to strip history clean and reign over a new history of art- seem like a man sitting at a kitchen table painting offhandedly and drinking coffee with a vengeance.

Untitled, Max Ernst

The original of an often reproduced Max Ernst collage is on display and like Dali's The Persistence of Memory it is much smaller that one would imagine. He must have made it with tweezers. The other one reminded me so much of Married to the Sea...

Best picture while googling...