Thievery and Trueness

This interview with LACMA Director Michael Govan is my new favorite toy. Poaching sentences and switching "L.A." to "Houston" is better than writing it myself!

Dan Flavin, untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection), 1973(Courtesy Museum Associates/LACMA)

The South has been growing, obviously. It’s also the generational thing. I almost think Houston is at the point where there’s no such thing as Houston artists anymore. Like New York, there was a point when there were New York artists, then all of a sudden it was just artists. I feel like that’s starting to happen here. Doing a Houston show now would be almost a nonstarter, I think, because of the diversity of practices and the number of artists. Also, the fact that Houston hasn’t yet hit critical mass attracts somebody like me because the museums are behind, like way behind.You just look at Houston and you start thinking, it’s going to catch up, right? How could it not — there’s not been a city in history that hasn’t had personal wealth, ethnic diversity, thriving business and good geopolitical location that hasn’t competed on that level.

Well, as far as I can see, cities have often changed their compositions over many ancient centuries to the present. And there’s always been culture and great cities, and it’s taken different forms depending on the kind of shape the city took. So let’s say all the future cities look like Houston. New York looks like Europe, but [what] was the last city you saw that was like New York? Shanghai, Beijing, Mexico City, Seoul — they all look like Houston. And so there’s going to be a different model. We’re just going to be part of that.

Until you reach a critical mass of prestige, you don’t get there. And that’s continuously eluded the MFAH in particular, and other museums, [...] we just don’t have the prestige that the Museum of Modern Art has. Now, we’re not going to get it instantly. You’re going to have to build it over time. It’s just a matter of investment. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem.If everyone with a good art collection in Houston donated their art collection in town, for example, critical mass would be instant. I’m not saying that’s going to happen tomorrow, but what you can see increasingly, given the interest in art collectors growing here, is that you don’t have to go far.

The place is littered with stories of people taking their marbles and going off somewhere else. There are two reasons: One, it’s somehow inherent in the place, its separateness and all that. The other is that there hasn’t really been a good enough idea to rally around. You know, a contemporary art museum is a great thing, but not everyone loves contemporary art.

Ahhh, theft. It makes a good point!

Come on Down!!!

You've only got three hours to get into the BIG SHOW down at the Lawndale on Main!!!

Did you hear about the Discovery Green project? This thing makes it look like it would be alright to live in downtown. That big hole next to the George R. Brown Convention Center isn't going to be a high rise or a parking garage, they're pulling out the big guns for a park. Bill White has plugged away at getting it done, investing big bucks where he usually skimps, like in all other city functions.

Also, ten or twenty years after all the hype, Houston will have a concrete skatepark for once. The site will include rails and half-pipes and is scheduled to open next summer near the Sabine Street Bridge west of downtown.

Four on the Block

No good openings this weekend? Oh well. There are four good galleries off the corner of Alabama and Main in Midtown, and this month they all have cool shows too. Brave the the sweat and the Texas heat and mosquiters for a little action. From north to south:

Darren Waterston at Inman is a little bit metal, his watercolor washes always come with a skull or a creepy castle hidden somewhere. Pretty cool, but kinda like fantasy posters.

Peter Lamb at CTRL looks like he makes little collages and paintings, but these are big-ass six foot prints. Good video and a sweet little installation in the back too.

Misaki Kawai at Kinzelman has made a reputation out of her found fabric and trash installation and sculpture. Her paintings here aren't as awesome, but they are still giggle inducing.

Young-Min Kang has some whirling scenery slices at Finesilver, recommended for acid trips and getting rid of pesky perceptions about reality.

Outposts on the Range

Christian McClain + Lauren Kelley

Houston has two new advocates, courtesy some of those ex-pat artists that flow like blood from this city. Up in Chicago Sam Duncan and Vicki Fowler have opened Motherland to explore their love of artists from Texas and the Pacific Northwest- and to try to reach the collectors, artists and students of the Windy City. Opening recently, plywood drawings by Christian McClain and video by Lauren Kelley.

Texas Firehouse

Up in Brooklyn Wyatt Nash has led the Texas Firehouse from a warehouse overlooking the Washington Bridge into "the best rooftop BBQ view in town". Houstonians Jason Villegas, Seth Mittag, Allison Hunter, Scott Calhoun, Peter Precourt, The Sugarbeats and God's Temple of Family Deliverance round out the Texas-fried lineup along with former Press writer Lance Scott Walker.

Guitars in Backyards

A little get-together behind the house...





thanks for the videos Derek!

The Real (Art) World

Woe is me, I didn't get into Diverseworks' Big Brother-style art residency this year. Oh well. Guess its back to the drawing board. At least I can watch this year's guinea pigs on the 24/7 webcam starting July 16!

congrats to:
Rachelle Vasquez, Mindy Kober, Keijiro Suzuki, and Patrick Phipps
who all recieve $500 and one month of air conditioning!!!

People!

Thanks to Elaine, Joann and Vanessa for holding it down at Andy Taylor's karaoke birthday party at CSAW last night!

Channel 13 weatherman Ed Brandon was there, but I don't know which Andy he was showing up for... maybe just having a beer after this weekend's mixed-up batch of thunderstorms.

Teaching children to put their fingers in light sockets since 2003

Every summer, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston's Teen Council organizes an exhibit of work by local high school students that provides invaluable insight into what interests young artists today. This is the last day to check out the kids in the basement! "Impulse" strays far from traditional artwork — a sign of the ingenuity and impulsiveness of Houston's young artists.



Read more about it here and here.

Femininity: Many Reflections (Salli Babbitt)
LIT. FIG. (L. Brandon Krall)
Deborah Colton Gallery
through June 30

Deborah Colton’s austere third-floor gallery vibrates with energy this month as two artists take on femininity and language with a highly subjective eye. As more art businesses open in the warehouse on Summer Street, Colton has become the axis of a growing center next to David Addicks’ foundry. The two artists featured here demonstrate in turn a commitment to Houston’s talent, and projecting influence on the community with international artists relevant to our local trajectory.

Salli Babbitt has focused her sculpture on the flashpoint image of the Barbie doll for years, literalizing an American bipolar relationship with the action figure that has lasted through three generations. Her mutilations, humiliations and disfigurement don’t quite take the extra step of being gory, softening her critique of the forlorn idol. In rows across a canvas or wrapped around a cone in an ad-hoc altar Barbie’s are alternately red, gray or glittery, gold and other colors creep onto other paintings as well. Wall sconces are a favorite of the artist; The Three Graces, Pompeian Orgy and others occupy the well-lit gallery overlooking David Addicks’ gigantic Beatles statues in the parking lot next door. Too awkward to be Pop, too minimal to be teenage angst, Babbitt charts her own awkward course working with molded plastic females. Babbitt has also included disjointed abstract paintings, some with scrawled handwritten letters scratched into wet paint. Owing much to her charitable work with Multiple Sclerosis patients and physically disadvantaged persons, these works are a labor of love for the artist but take away from the show overall.

Half of an all-out assault on Houston by New Yorker L. Brandon Krall, LIT. FIG. dovetails with QUA, concurrently at G Gallery on 11^th Street in the Heights. Krall has been in town working with Deborah Colton many times, including the significant exhibit WORD last September. Her solo work this time around also demonstrates the artist’s interest in the enigmas of wordplay. Opening with a series of short videos from several dinner parties Krall threw in her apartment, artists act out popular idioms with everyday items; walking on eggshells, writing “IT” on someone’s face and wearing too many hats. These videos are part of an ongoing series improvised in many locations. The straightforward camerawork makes for a screen test atmosphere- like Warhol’s but a bit more fun for the audience. Among others, sculptor William Stone, literary critic Fillipo LaPorta and Valeria D’Andrea sit in front of a fixed spot while a party goes on all around them. Mostly known by the din on the soundtrack or a figure darting in and out, the relaxed atmosphere transferred well to the video, and the context for the rest of the exhibit is laid. After a short physical demonstration the riddle is spelled out on the screen; “starting with a blank slate”; “poring over a book”. Props are displayed around the room, absurd collections and juxtapositions. As part of the collection GLYPT, from the Greek for ‘carve’, a glass vitrine contains metal readymades engraved in a delicate script with the artist’s figurative literalities in Latin and English. Working with The Art Guys, Jack and Mike, Krall ambitiously constructed a large wheel to take for a hike- an old wagon wheel pivoting on two Live Oak branches. The version here, Wheel for Walking in Texas, is the sixth in a series. The artist has made and used several of these contraptions to occupy herself on walks through the city; a smaller one is included in QUA, where the wheel’s relation to the I-Ching is more pronounced. As distinct halves of an artist’s output the two exhibits are coherent alone, but they are more illustrative of a creative process when taken together.

Red Velvet

an excerpt from a draft for the catalogue of RED VELVET: Making a case for domestic tranquility.

The first and last portions are from the essay, but the central parts about Bill, Kelly and Donna are from the original draft- longer and a little disjointed but I really wanted to compare Davenport to a Lord of the Rings character and put it out somewhere. It seemed too good!

Opening Friday June 23, 6 - 8pm and on view June 24 through August 18, 2007 at Vine Street Studios.

Featuring Matthew Bourbon, Thedra Culler-Ledford, Bill Davenport, John Hartley, Donna Huanca, Kelly Klaasmeyer, Nancy Lamb, Nancy O'Connor, Whitney Riley, Tim Stokes, Anderson Wrangle and organized and curated by the kids at Rudolph Projects Artscan Gallery.

The blood red of a velvet cloth is an accomplice to arousal, never an inert companion to one waiting, watching or wanting. Red Velvet embodies a reevaluation of tranquility from a notoriously fleeting state into an internal harmony in the face of superficial strife. We are not afraid of sex and violence, loneliness and fear. Our most familiar and universal environment- the home- brings a vibrant reality to these paintings and installations while maintaining a façade of populism, and comfortable with it. Fragmented everyday references are expressed through images and materials; the inverse of Blue Velvet, which sought to insert a new, horrific image into the world of the white picket fence. The 1986 film by David Lynch takes the cleanliness of the American dream as nothing but a cover for violence and vulgar eroticism. He breaks down his characters, emotionally and physically beaten into submission. No one here desires to lay themselves naked; they are in complete control of their opportunities as artists.

[...]

Feeling the disparity of post-modernism’s flaws deeply, several artists in Red Velvet attack the tradition of materials and images at once, simulating the real world and the art world. Houston’s Tom Bombadil, Bill Davenport has focused his conceptual work of late upon fake stone and wood. In installations referencing the Disneyfication of our environment Davenport constructs interior spaces out of foamcore, these contrived walls, supports and structures juxtaposing the cleanliness of the white gallery with a clean imitation of dirty, gritty, authentic reality. As J.R.R. Tolkien said of his characterization of Tom, “if you have… renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…” The same lightness of being resides in Davenport’s sporting take on life and art.

A new mother and artist and writer to boot, Kelly Klaasmeyer’s proximity to the materiel of childcare has intensely altered her view on the world. She presents Huggies and Boudreaux’s Butt Paste, hand painted oversized cardboard boxes of consumer products. Klaasmeyer dryly twists humor out of these amusing titled and images; the transformative process of rearing a child compliments the artist’s Pop sensibilities with easy targets for manipulation. [...] Klaasmeyer dryly invokes a surreal twist on the overwhelming accoutrements of modern life, referencing both famous hand-painted Brillo boxes and feminist documentation of a woman’s trials and tribulations.

Working with felt, fabric and found objects, Donna Huanca can hardly step back from her collage murals without stepping back from her own life; she balances her creations between family portraits and characters of her own imagination. Her scenes of familial bliss are so jarring to the viewer these fractured figures are nearly abstract, save for detailed and recognizable faces. Their personal meanings cohabitate with her father’s role in the Bolivian military pursuing Che Guevara through the Andes and Huanca’s identification with the heroic struggle between the two contextualized in the epic search for meaning in the 20 century. These narratives and the scraps of culture that become live materials in her hands are proper fuel for her rash, bursting compositions.

[...]

The case for domestic tranquility’s existence is a precarious one, as these and many other artists demonstrate, perhaps the solution is in the admittance of discord into the expected solution. The artists exhibiting here at Vine Street are aware of their distance from reality; they find worth in their materials and images regardless of their purity in morality and tradition. Reversing a comment about Blue Velvet, perhaps here in Red Velvet we have a pragmatic reconciliation; harmony without quiet, serenity sans silence. “This is not American darkness; --- this is lightness without a happy ending.”

Big Freakin' Deal

Since the days when the Lawndale was holding Black Flag shows and Smurfs came on Nickelodeon, The Big Show has done something about the summer slump. It may be 90 degrees outside but at least it’s not over a hundred. August sucks. Bring your artwork to the Lawndale on June 27^th and 28^th to be included in Houston’s long-running open call. You can find info and print an entry form here . It’s kind of like taking the city’s pulse, but it is open to all artists in Angelina, Austin, Brazoria, Brazos, Chambers, Colorado, Fort Bend, Galveston, Grimes, Hardin, Harris, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Matagorda, Montgomery, Newton, Orange, Polk, San Jacinto, Trinity, Tyler, Walker, Waller, Washington, and Wharton counties. I don’t know where half of those are.

@the 2006 California Biennial; artist Kate Pocrass. (Photo: Andrew Berardini) Right: Biennial artist Kianga Ford with 2006 California Biennial curator Rita Gonzalez. (Photo: Carla Rhea, courtesy OCMA)

There’s a hell of a lot of artists inside the loop anyway, and they’d better all come out and represent all the groups and genres out there. Art students, outsider artists, graffiti kids, photographers, Sunday painters, drawers, painters, sculptors and designers all get equal time in front of guest juror Rita Gonzalez from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Picked out of three stories stuffed with artwork Rita has the unenviable task of constructing a show out of Houston’s massive artistic output in just two days. Last year there were nearly 400 artists, which isn’t all that there is out there, let’s make it hard for her this year and give her an accurate picture of what we have to offer while we’re at it.

$30 entry fee, or ten bucks a piece if you bring three works, $50 for entry and membership; members and entrants last year get 5 bucks off. Lawndaleartcenter.org

Extra bonus points for installation work- most submissions are paintings and there is more floor area than wall space so do yourself a favor and stand-alone. Submit them deconstructed with a pic of the installation for ease of use. All entrants notified by June 30^th, everyone is invited to the opening this July on Friday the 13^th 6:30 to 8:30pm!