Over/Under

J. Evins

via Houstonist

Apropos of Nothing

Britt from the Chron sez:


DumpTruck Divorces a Sculpture

live performance at BBAP

DumpTruck


Sunday, June 28, 2009
5:00pm - 7:00pm
Buffalo Bayou Art Park at Sabine Street Bridge

DumpTruck is an open collaborative of artists founded by Cory Wagner, Mat Wolff, and Noelle Mason. In this performance, Wagner and Wolff will be divorcing themselves from "Trap," a sculpture located at BBAP. Please join us for a ceremony of engaged southern gentility.

The most beautiful shit's in their Warehouse

Flower Man's installation, BrownEyedBombshell

Troy Schulze has his take on the CAMH's No Zoning show up on the Houston Press this week, and he drops the news that he is recently divorced. Look for "Schulze Marries a Tree" this fall.

The Other Foot

That's supposed to be art? That monstrosity is so ugly! I'm more offended that that piece of garbage is exposed to the public.

i seen gang tagging that looked better than that crap

I wouldn't want that mural on my building. If ever vacant, she might have trouble ever renting the building because of it.
-comments on ABC13

City Controller Annise Parker, used to using art to attack political opponents, is now the target of a political hit job by another mayoral candidate, Roy Morales. Using Reginald Adams' MOCAH mural on the side of a building Parker owns, Morales contends that the work is a conflict of interest for Parker. Oh yeah, both of them are running for mayor next year, and this is just the beginning of a full-on back-biting session slated to begin next spring. After Parker's participation in the Dolchefinko dust up over Houston Arts Alliance funds last year it was clear that she was against local money going to art projects- the production of the mural was funded by Waste Management, United Way of Greater Houston, CenterPoint Energy, AT&T, Chamberlin Roofing, JE Dunn and Texas Business Alliance- all people who would like to be on the good side of Parker should she be elected mayor.

This privately funded mural seems to be a great way to funnel influence to Parker, she gains altruistic advertising about the mural and there is no link between Parker and the funders if you don't pay attention to the details. Parker gets to make her point about publicly funded artwork being a wasteful sham by peddling her influence through art. Everybody happy yet?

It is unfortunately worse. That mural looks like an elementary school cafeteria. MOCAH calls themselves the "the city’s most prominent public art developer" and the mural "the first public art project in the city to honor Houston’s broad diversity" and both are total bull. At this rate Parker's pony MOCAH is leagues behind the HAA, ranking below GIVE UP and DUAL and slightly above the guy who writes GOD IS GREAT on bus stops.

The willing hypocrisy in this case is terribly fun, and I do hope that Morales gets to trip up Parker if for no other reason than her insistence (against all logic) that the mural is "not permanent". Hell, even MOCAH's site says that the mural is permanent. Parker is one of the architects of the late 90s ordinances that shut down the Westheimer Street Festival and attacked public spaces in Houston, she also claims to have "created a civic art program". A wink-wink nudge-nudge "donated" mural on the side of her building won't halt her ambitious bull run for the mayor's seat, but I sure as hell hope she doesn't get there.

-thanks bill for the 13 tip!

Big Shot

Bubble Gun, Robert Pruitt
(winner of the 2004 Big Show)

Have you never been in an art exhibit? Have you just been in 2 or 3? Have you ever lost an art competition? Do you want to win one?

If the answer to any of these question is YES, or if you are just an artist with gallery representation, enter the Big Show!!!

Artists interested in entering their work for The Big Show 2009 should hand deliver up to 3 original works June 24 & 25, 2009. For complete submission guidelines, please click here.

Guest juror, Laura Fried, Assistant Curator for the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, will
select the show from submitted work.

The exhibition will be on view July 10 – August 8, 2009.

For complete information on The Big Show, click here.

Live Long and Falter

chron's got a new logo, guess they don't think that gene roddenberry's ghost is gonna haunt them :)

The Only Time You'll See a Rainbow in the Dark

Helpful Hints :)

In the interest of public safety, please refrain from bringing the following items into the Festival grounds:

• Alcohol and other beverages (yeah, right)
  
• Food (less room for beer)
  
• Coolers (put it in your backpack)
  
• In-line skates (there's beer all over the ground)
  
• Laser pointers (you'll blind the buff angel dancers while pointing at pecs)
  
• Radios (no one wants to hear your Ani Difranco tapes)
  
• Skateboards (use your skateboard hand to carry beer)
  
• Fireworks (less room in your backpack for beer)
  
• Weapons (Montrose has seceded from Houston)
  
• Audio recording devises for recording of any live performance (who cares, it'll be on youtube tomorrow)
  
• Professional camera equipment (you're gonna get jacked if you do)
  
• Video recording equipment (ditto)
  
• Pets (people on inline skates are gonna slip on your dog shit)

+++plus: the Chron's thinly veiled blogger arm is SOOO gay

DEBRIS: More than Enough to Shake a Stick At

After a sugar high comes the inevitable crash. It’s a lesson seldom learned by children, but apropos of all sorts of substance abuse that kid will encounter. A spring full of amazing exhibits this year has left me nowhere to go but down, and I have appropriately become irritable, sleepy and withdrawn. I’m scanning the horizon with bloodshot eyes as my hands start to shake and my brain feels tortured with anguish. Where will my next fix come from?

Slama, Abduction

I’ve been to the Contemporary Arts Museum, but the Torsten Slama show makes me want to kick puppies. Seriously, the “What the fuck is this shit” quotient has to be exceedingly high for this exhibit; the plaintive landscapes with wonky Modernist buildings in anal-retentive exactitude and man-boy seduction scenes in pencil are so barren of emotion I was waiting for a warehouse fire or a rape scene. At the Blaffer Gallery, Existed: Leonardo Drew mashes both Robert Ryman-inspired exactitude and Bob Rauschenberg-style accumulations of detritus into dreary claptrap. Whatever cultural context Drew professes to illuminate is buried in the same sand that his head is in. Brent Steen’s drawings at Inman Gallery can’t even give enough to the viewer to be as dreary as Drew’s instead they come off as both lazy and uninspiring. Marlene Dumas’ massive show at the Menil Collection may have merit as postmodern portraiture, but unless you really get into it, they’re only going to make you depressed about South African racism, exploitation of women, heartbreak and dead babies.

Marlene Dumas, Lucy




Cruz-Diez

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s installation of painted crosswalks is terribly pleasant to walk across, but the one-off nature of his project- confined to the street directly in front the Museum of Fine Arts- leaves me thinking that unless he went big and painted a whole neighborhood in them its just a navel-gazing exercise magnified by all the press this paint on the street has gotten. The Texas Sculpture Roundup at the Art Car Museum suffers from the opposite problem; the whole place is stuffed with large sculpture, but the presence of bad work with the good drags the whole show down. Where will it all end?!? I may jump in the bayou if this doesn’t get any better. Maybe the summer will kill me off; I’ll just lie in the sun all day, drinking salt water, slathered in baby oil, next to a pile of burning tires.

thanks for the tires, kid.

Summer Activities in Houston

Clutch Nuts

Jerk Circles

via Chron