B.S. Houston Art Blog: 3/15/09

Thursday, March 19, 2009

and Away

Stephen Cullar-Ledford

I'm going to Austin for the weekend. If you're there check out THIS. If you're not check out THIS and THIS.

Checking in with DUAL

Houston street rat DUAL has been busy!

Check out some highlights:

posting up big in Austin

Making wheatpaste with beer in Deep Ellum, Dallas

Houston photoshoot by Studio78

...back in Screwston; "Yes those are vaginas you see. And very well depicted, if i may add. Going by the name SEXY ATTACK, hopefully they'll be lots more to enjoy from this artist."

DUALSTREETS

Thursday Morning Cartoons

It's Bunnyphonic!

2006, Chelsea, NYC

"She dresses up as a bunny and plays tragic sounding songs on her accordion."
-WhatISee

bunnyphonic at the 500 E, Marfa, Texas
-tania

Rrose Rising, 2007, Amarillo

2007 Texas Biennal

Bunnyphonic in a Gary Sweeney woodcut

fun with plastic signs, 2008

"I Love Beuys", 2007

Bunnyphonic will be at Colab this Saturday!

Click the pic

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Great Moments in Artist Lectures

Julia Wallace @ the Spacetaker Speakeasy

pic by Christian Ochoa

John Runnels sez:
I am Collecting Cigarettes
for another ART project

ALL BRANDS WELCOME

Please Save Your Butts 4 Me

If you are Interested in pARTicipating
Send an Email or Call
For more information

Email john runnels
motherdogstudios[at]earthlink.net

Call and or Drop Off @ mother dog studios

Speak Easy, Speak Often

Talks by Julia Wallace and Gwendolyn Zepeda
Tonight!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
6:30pm - 8:30pm

Winter Street Studios
2101 Winter Street
Houston, TX

7138681839

info@spacetaker.org

an informal atmosphere, creative dialogs/talks/presentations about their work. The evening is designed to introduce local artists to each other to encourage conversation.

Gwendolyn Zepeda:

Gwendolyn Zepeda was born in Houston, Texas in 1971 and attended the University of Texas at Austin. She began her writing career in 1997 with her long-running site gwendolynzepeda.com and as one of the founding writers of Television Without Pity. Her first book was a short-story collection called To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him.

Zepeda’s first children’s book, Growing Up with Tamales is a 2009 Charlotte Zolotow Award Highly Commended Title. Her first novel, Houston, We Have a Problema won praise from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist for its wit and upbeat story.

Julia Claire Wallace:

Julia Claire Wallace is an emerging artist born and raised in Houston, Texas. She is currently finishing up her BA in painting at the University of Houston. Her performance based work deals with the body, sexuality, and relationships. She is a leading figure in Houston’s favorite surprise aerobics dance squad, sexyATTACK. She also serves as a facilitator in Performance Art Lab, a Houston Art Collective known for various acts of art mischief.

Picked up and posted by Houstonist!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Too Much Cake: New Performances @ Co-Lab

Too Much Cake: New Performances

Co-Lab

613 Allen St
Austin, TX 78702
(512) 300-8217
http://colabspace.org/

Event: Saturday, March 21, 1-11:30PM

Please join Co-Lab for Too Much Cake, bringing performance artists from across Texas to this showcase of emerging talent, linking postmodern strategies to street performance and appropriation. Using the mainstays of Conceptualism and Performance art as a starting point, these artists bring the outside world into their work, initiating a dialogue with popular culture. Many works in the show are being exhibited for the first time. Artists in the exhibition include Daniel Adame, Balls Deep, James Beard, Bunnyphonic, Aisen Chasin, Patrick Doyle, Emcee Eats, Michael Anthony Garcia, Cody Ledvina, Misc. Diskette, Christian Ochoa, Frank Olson, David Waddell, and Julia Wallace.

On view March 21, 2009, the event is organized by Co-Lab and The American Wandering Club. This event is being held concurrently with EASTSIDE ESCAPE.

Everyone has a reason, and in Texas it’d better be big. In the center of the country a distinct meme has emerged, coupling populism with interdisciplinary art. Indulging in gluttonous capitalism for the past decade, far away from recognition-hungry New York and fame-seeking Los Angeles, the artists of Too Much Cake have freely experimented with the corpse of performance art, eviscerating the ‘need to be present’ inherent in careerist gamesmanship. Creating communities in Austin, San Antonio and Houston, these artists bring their lives into their work and take their art home with them.

Lineup:

Trail of Love, 2009

1:15 - 1:30 Patrick O'Brien Doyle

sexyATTACK at Museum of Fine Arts Mixed Media Party, Christian Ochoa w/ sexyATTACK, 2008

2 - 2:15 Christian Ochoa

Harvesting Baby Fear, 2008

2:45 - 3 Cody Ledvina

Like the Pulse of Stars Projected on the Dome of a Planetarium, 2007

3:30 - 3:45 Misc. Diskette

4:15 - 4:30 Frank Olson

Dr. Pepper, 2008

5 - 5:15 Julia Wallace

Untitled, Westheimer Block Party, 2008

5:45 - 6 Aisen Chacin

Sister Golden Hair, 2007

6:30 - 6:45 Bunnyphonic

Marker Head Marker/Drawing In Space, 2008

7:15 - 7:30 Daniel Adame

Homeland Security Tour (Dick Cheney's House), 2007

8 - 8:15 David Waddell

¡Vístete!, 2008

8:45 - 9 Michael Anthony Garcia

9:30 - 9:45 James Beard

Hurricane Bear with the Galveston Daily News, 2008

10:30 - 11 Balls Deep

11 - 11:30 Emcee Eats

Monday, March 16, 2009

Lessons in Advancement of the Whole

What to do when an artist has a few shows under their belt is a common quandary around the world and here in town. Pushing your own work is exhausting, and walking the tightrope between being forward-thinking and overbearing is tough. Trudging away in the studio (or garage or kitchen table) is the best way for an emerging artist to hone their craft, but talking with other artists, curators, writers and the like is equally important to artistic development.

Considering the amorphous nature of artwork today- community focused, genre-jumping, medium-integrating, collaborative, site-specific and/or crowd-sourced- not many are sure of what to do with their own objects they produce and value. Keep making them, but don't be hemmed in my the thinking that what you produce as an artist is only those bits and pieces of your life. It's your whole life that you have to offer, and if you don't use it- you lose it.

Artists today are the writers and curators of yesteryear, and harnessing the ability to articulate your vision in words and network within a group of friends is really all you need to do. Learning the ins and outs of marketing, blogging, documenting and selling art come with the territory. No one is going to do it for you, and one of the best ways to get into future shows is to organize one today.

One of the best examples of the process is CUMANANA, at Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. Organized by ex-CORE Fellow William Cordova, the show features artists from Houston, Miami and New York that Cordova knows and has worked with. Being an Art Institute of Chicago and Yale graduate doesn't hurt, but Cordova was opening up the definition of an artist back in Miami in the 90s- throwing underground shows in houses, storefronts and empty buildings- and he has brought that sensibility to his aboveground career.

As the online revolution completely redefines our society, it is not only artists who are losing their identities, but it is artists who have the best ability to experiment with new structures of organization and modes of expression and help steer the progress of culture into a new paradigm.

Clay Shirkey, in his recent Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, draws strong parallels between today and the dawn of the 16th century, when people didn't know what the fuck the printing press and newly distributable books would do to society. We're not reliving 1968 any more. This isn't reimagining the October Revolution or the storming of the Bastille. This is talk of cultural schism, destruction of order and reformation of political power. Maybe this should be the age of manifestos again, but anyone calling for revolution is sorely misguided.

Shirkey argues for the unknowability of technological revolution "During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points...

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing... Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

Though his specifics relate to the sadly dying newspaper business, Thinking the Unthinkable is full of lessons for any industry today. Experiment. That's the new rule.

Curators like Hans Ulrick Obrist have been elevated to the scrutiny of the artist (his self having spawned artwork by other artists about him, including Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (ventriloquist performance #1) at the CAMH right now) and artists need to strike right back. The structure of the artworld is up for grabs.