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!

A Moderate View

In admitting appropriation and pastiche into the canon of acceptable strategies, “materials”, we have regressed as a culture to the mental age of adolescence- emulating as a defense mechanism for half-baked outright invention.

The postmodern is mannerist. We are walking down a blind alley with the explosion of globalization and cross cultural acceptance. We have walked into a trap that we have lived through before. With the recent explosion of the net worth of Chinese contemporary art the assumption of the mannerist role is complete. The trends and media of abstract and figurative work have become shadows of their former selves since the 1990s and a reevaluation of the means and goals of art is necessary. We were supposed to be moving faster. We were supposed to be past this sort of thing. Guess not. Much as the Mannerist period in Italy in the 16^th century relied upon the imitation and re-configuration of the Renaissance masters, postmodern art has garnered the valued attributes of appropriation and pastiche to fill the space since a truly original individual has labored in the name of art.

Where the two differ is in historical respect to allegory- Mannerism differed not from the previous era in their use of the strategy, whereas postmodernism’s allegory is the invention or resuscitation of a method seen little in modernism’s graveyard of symbols.

DEBRIS: Hunting for Bullshit

Sounds like international oil company The Hunting Group LLD, with some deep pockets and silky ties, is a little insecure about their new position in Houston. Moving their headquarters from London meant leaving posh digs in the UK's capital for McMansions in Sugar Land, but it has also relieved these suits of their scruples as well (let's assume they had some at some point). In a windfall for Texas artists they brought their $50,000 Hunting Prize with them to the Lone Star State, and the hundreds of people who signed up to enter the competition this year were starry-eyed with promises of recognition and prestige. When this year's strangeness started with a 'short list' of 104 artists; it appeared the corporation couldn't get their shit together and make a decision. No biggie. When they sent out an email requesting entrants to wear a blazer and tie to the award ceremony April 28th it only rubbed a few people the wrong way, last year's winner Francesca Fuchs did look a little funny in all those pictures surrounded by Armani suits wearing her "I'm not an Artist" tee shirt. Whatever. The same email asked artists to arrive an hour before the event; here the little things came into focus quickly, exposing the event as a sham publicity stunt free from critical thought or respectability.

Now it's tough to say a big prize and a big check are bad things; these guys can do whatever they want right? They just have to live with themselves, that's all. Unfortunately the class conflict that came with this year's prize was a bit too much for me to respect these bastard nouveau rich and their representational painting prize. Arriving an hour early at the Decorative Center Houston, a furniture store on Woodway with an excessive lobby, artists were led upstairs to a separate hall where they dined on chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese before being asked to return downstairs and stand next to their paintings, hung in a hallway, for the duration of the event. This degrading display of strength by the Hunting oil company was only compounded by the immense spread of hors d'oeuvres, crab and shrimp in the lobby provided for guests. Unraveling the bullshit, with or without credible jurors, begins with the massive 'short list' provided for the event which served as a show of force by the corporation, compounded by the order to 'stand by your painting'. Shilling for rich people and shuffling your feet for quarters is not the way to ingratiate yourself to anyone except patronizing facelift victims and their whiskey-addled cheating husbands. Most artists try to let their artwork speak for itself, but the ingrates at Hunting decided a mouth stuffed with macaroni and cheese speaking through clenched teeth at the indignity of it all could do it better.

Michael Tole, Untitled (2006)

When the prize was announced, given to unknown 28 year old Michael Tole of Dallas, it was the creamy icing on a bullshit cake for The Hunting Group, The Decorative Center, and Houston's newest art award. Although I do not know whose bright idea the whole debacle was, the utter disrespect displayed by all involved leaves the artistic community in need of a spine and the Brits at Hunting in need of a good kick in the ass. Treating artists like shit just means that shit artists will enter your competition next year. Seeing as the Prize seems to go to representational painters, perhaps this is what Hunting is looking for- a diminished impact and a good 'ol fuck you from anyone worth his salt in Houston. Give the prize to idiots, it's yours to give away- but don't think many people will want to put up with your crude condescension for very long. Tole's photo-realist paintings of Faberge eggs promptly went on sale in May at Conduit Gallery in Dallas, where they should stay, surrounded by mediocrity in a culture of egotistic materialism.

John Biggers at Texas Southern University

The distinctive work of John Biggers emerges after the artist traveled to West Africa, digesting the geometric folk artwork of the culture he first experienced on an UNESCO trip in 1957. The Web of Life, completed in ’58, did not benefit from this new influence- befitting the plodding timeline of mural painting in America after the singular influence of Diego Rivera, the most visible of the Mexican muralists. Biggers’ iconography is taken literally from Rivera, with lanky worker figures (sparse versus Rivera, echoing the rural environment of African-Americans) as well as symbolic fetal figures and smooth, illusionistic rounded limbs at home with Leger’s cylindrical figures. A feminine biomorphism breathes mystery into the painting, as Lee Bontecou may have done twenty or thirty years later. This emerging characteristic of The Web of Life, after the wooden early attempts under the tutelage of regional muralists, is cut short by the cultural introspection of the artist’s identification with West African abstraction. Quilting Party (1981) is a dense and symbolic work, a reconciliation with Precisionism, Op Art, Hironymous Bosch, and Pattern and Decoration; as well as a refined taste for nocturnes and chiaroscuro. The symbolism of the triptych panels is as mythological as a ceiling fresco of the Carracci, albeit drawn from an altogether different history. Executed in conte crayon, the wax medium lends itself well to the dark tone of Biggers’ mood. The artist’s influence may well be measured in his dedication to Texas Southern University and the generation of painters currently working in Houston; Bert Long Jr., Rick Lowe, and Robert Pruitt.

Twombly and Rothko at the Menil

Cy Twombly and Mark Rothko stand out as carrying the banner for America’s rightful place in art history through fifty years, from the development of Rothko’s mature style in 1949 through Twombly’s Lepanto winning Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. The two artists express an obsession with literature, bridging back to European painting of the Enlightenment. Mythological scenes melt with contemporary relevance for Twombly. His experiments with painting broaden the atmosphere Rothko was operating in just a few years earlier, their aim and their sources are not dissimilar. Both men seem to be analytical about their intentions and their results, Rothko referencing Nietzsche’s early Birth of Tragedy, Twombly naval history. Flat painting with an atmospheric depth is a formal characteristic of both painters, and a depiction of light emanating from the painting’s surface. An internal light source was integral to Rothko painting in his prime, subtle in the dark and brooding scenes found at the Rothko Chapel. Especially in his late work Twombly softened his ground to include subtle color and depth; Untitled, 1994, in the last room of the Twombly Gallery of the Menil campus, is a great example. Earlier ‘Blackboard’ and ‘Monet’ pieces use depth in similar but more synthetic ways.

Dogme 95

Much as Sweden’s Edvard Munch would have his greatest influences abroad in the fin-de-siclé of the 19^th century, Dogme 95 has had a profound effect on world culture more than its influence on the film industry in Denmark. Munch fed the symbolism of Robert Blake and the violence and horror of Ernst Kirchner among the German Expressionists. Dogme 95 has amended the language of film concurrent with a renewed interest in documentary; it has also given license, indirectly, to millions of filmmakers making videos in internet subcultures. The success of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006) demonstrate two perspectives on the changing nature of ‘realism’ and the world’s access to defining reality. The former proposes a realism in fiction, enhancing its attachment to the real world through low quality cameras, bouncing handheld camerawork and improvised dialog. The latter advances the documentary genre to include a performance in a controlled and scripted setting. Both edge towards the reality film has not been able to give us as a representative medium, despite its strengths.

The Dogme 95 manifesto was drawn up in one night in 1995 by Vinterberg and von Trier in frustration with the state of film production; fat, dogmatic and self-referential, “An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love.”[i] They published their minimal referendum on the state of film in Denmark as a collective of four directors, the first four to create Dogme films. Along with the bombastic manifesto railing against the bourgeois and espousing the avant-garde was an included list of ten Dogme Rules designed to facilitate the democratization of film through active research by professionals into the possibilities and tendencies of an unencumbered filmmaker through radically subjective and limiting rules.

Festen (1998)

Idioterne (1998)

In the mid ‘nineties Denmark produced only fifteen to twenty films a year, but in 1998 two Danish films were included in the Cannes Film Festival; Festen (The Celebration) by Thomas Vinterberg and Idoiterne (The Idiots) by Lars von Trier. This introduction to the first two Dogme films shocked international critics. Festen garnered praise while Idioterne received scorn. For both films their salacious plots earned them infamy.

Festen’s celebration pivots around a man’s son revealing his father’s incestuous past at the dinner table during his 60^th birthday. The character driven plot revolves around three siblings all coming to the table with their own shady past and secrets. The eldest son Christian has been living abroad for over a decade and his return to Denmark for the occasion is unexpected. His twin sister Linda committed suicide in the very hotel where the celebration is taking place over a year ago, a lingering mystery that no one is ready to confront. Middle child Helene is a hedonist successful in media relations in the city. Her transgressions are broadcast through her scandalous love affair (with a black American) and her penchant for smoking (marijuana). Early in the film she discovers her sister’s suicide letter, which she attempts to hide, but Helene is dragged off of her laissez-faire fence by the increasing turmoil between Christian and the family. Youngest brother Michael is an outright louse, abusively negative to his wife and children, adoring and patronizing of his siblings and parents. While attempting to first keep the peace and later to right past wrongs Michael reacts violently. By the end of the film Michael has asserted himself within the family, cutting off ties with his father and becoming a domineering patriarch in his own right. Deviating from popular norms of the film practice, the ending to Festen is an open-ended statement filled with small victories but without a proper resolution of the main conflict.

Festen

The film work, according to Dogme standards, is entirely handheld. Camera angles are most often at eye level or below, as in a home movie. Director Vinterberg held the camera himself as much as possible. He darts around rooms focusing on where the action is. Typically filmmakers frame their shot, excluding information by focusing on the edges of the lens. A more amateur, and intuitive method is employed here as the camera decides its placement by what is in the center of the frame, inclusive instead of exclusive.[ii] Several innovative placements ground the camera in real space. In one scene the camera rests on a table as hotel waitresses set placements for breakfast. While one does not identify with the camera as one’s eye, a referential realism is established through the concreteness of the recognition of real space, a relationship between the objects- the camera rests on the table- and an everyday recollection dismembered from the omnipresent perfection of the mechanically placed Hollywood camera. The early morning Scandinavian light is atmospheric, lending the air a warm grey light as employees in white shirts move rhythmically, clinking silverware in symphony. As Helene searches for her sister’s suicide note in a hotel room, the cameraman stands on an armoire, looking down on the scene from above. The camera’s unsteady frame in a human hand, the actors’ nonchalance as if alone along with the gravity of the search make the scene seem as if it is viewed from the perspective of a spectre, the presence of Linda perhaps. The Dogme project, beginning here in Festen, is an established plot style as well as a stylistic school from the outset, but as the movement internationalizes the aim of these films changes with differing cultural influences and perspectives on filmmaking.

Maria Falconetti, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Idioterne was rightfully described by its creator as "a film by idiots, about idiots, for idiots."[iii] Featuring an orgy and scenes of penetration, the film follows a group representing eleven types of idiot spazzing in public and squatting in an abandoned house. As the plot unfolds it becomes apparent that most of the group is pretending in order to escape from their societal obligations. Director Lars von Trier has found inspiration in the work of 1920s Danish director Carl Dryer, and sadistic tendencies define the method of both auteurs. For The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Dryer sexually and emotionally tortured his actress in pursuit of the perfect onscreen performance by his lead, Corsican stage actor Maria Falconetti- who never appeared in a film again. Similarly von Trier invades the lives of his actors in an attempt to achieve the right emotional register to perform. Since most of Idioterne was filmed naked, the director also got naked for his role as cameraman. Many scenes required the normally sane actors to freak out, flop around and spout inanities, which the director encouraged on a regular basis as a social function of the community established around the making of the film. While not filming, the line between the characters and their creators- actors, crew and director- blurred in the small abandoned house where it was shot. The intense alienation from regular society was further complicated by the concurrent filming of a documentary on the making of the film, Radikal Idioterne, by Roberto Schinardi. Lars von Trier is controlling, paranoid and obsessed in his documentary moments (also shot as a Dogme film). The actors are emotionally tortured, absorbed into their adopted personas as much as the director is obsessed with his subjects. Idioterne transgresses in daily life as well as film practice, a larger experience surrounding the temporal film they are ostensibly gathered to create.

The third Dogme film is another complicated familial situation filmed by established Danish film and television director Soren Kragh-Jacobsen. Mifune (1999) centers on successful businessman Kresten and his relationship with his mentally handicapped brother Rud. Like Helene in The Celebration, Kresten is a representation of the hedonistic ways of success in the city in contrast to the historical temperament of Denmark represented here by the countryside and simpler or mentally handicapped persons. The brothers bond over a favorite childhood game, Kresten pretending to fight Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune- the lead in Seven Samurai and other Kurosawa classics. The impetus for the film was in fact the death of the legendary actor in December 1997, and Kragh-Jacobsen’s fondness for the actor throughout his career. Between Kresten’s new marriage in the city, his trip to bury his father where he rediscovers his brother, and a call girl on the run he hires to look after Rud; things are headed for a sappy love story. An about face from the genre of Pretty Woman and Risky Business, Mifune begins a similar love story with a repentant materialist executive and a hooker with a heart of gold. Bonding over their mutual devotion to mentally handicapped siblings, Kresten and Liva start a tentative romance in the run down shack where the brothers grew up and the feeble Rud now resides alone. The lover’s paradise never materializes as it did for Julia Roberts though, as the moralist slant so typical in major budget films is here subdued and contradictory. Departing from Hollywood norms, a purposeful ambiguity leaves the ending of the film hanging between dark comedy and tragedy.

The King is Alive (2000)

The forth of the “Fathers of Dogme” is young director Kristian Levring, and his second full length feature after a decade long hiatus The King is Alive (2000) is a masterpiece of cinematography and message. For unknown and diverse reasons eleven people end up on a bus headed ‘south’ out of Namibia. After hours, maybe a day spent traveling, the veracity of the compass is questioned- and deemed false. Where the group has appeared is almost magical. A former German silver mining operation, the long abandoned town is awash in sand dunes, an organic reclamation by the desert. The town is a desolate, picturesque ‘nowhere’; hardly shelter for the weary traveler. The first to die is the most able wilderness survivor of them all, and struggling to survive without feasible hope for rescue is taxing on them all. As the eleven begin their sharp decent into chaos, an intellectual among them suggests performing Shakespeare’s King Lear for their final act. All who are new to the plot participate in the morbid sketch as increasingly complex psychological and sexual dramas begin to unravel the stranded passengers. Levring’s camerawork is smart and controlled; he expressed difficulty with the Dogme ban on personal taste and aesthetics. The intense light and alienating darkness, the immense dunes of the Kalahari and the intimate faces of his actors all attached themselves to the director as he went about his work, not focusing his camera on action as much as framing his shots- albeit looser than conventional cinematography. Filmed on digital video and transferred to 35MM film, the saturated colors of the transferred medium glow with life. The pixilation of the original digital becomes soft edges and unusual gradients, but they do not diminish the documentary style of the film. Truly a masterpiece of this new style The King is Alive stands out as a picturesque detour on the road to democratized filmmaking.

Julien Donkey-Boy (2000)

The first American Dogme film was attempted by director Harmony Korine, who had made a splash in the ‘nineties with Kids and Gummo, two explorations of contemporary American teenage life, urban and rural respectively. Julien Donkey-Boy (2000) is ripped from the director’s own life, a portrait of his schizophrenic uncle who resides in the Queens Home for the Criminally Insane. The plot is very fluid, as the director worked from a framework instead of a proper script and encouraged improvisation on the spot. Korine constructed a twisted familial situation around Julien including a pregnant and delusional sister (Chloe Sevigny) and an abusive drug addled father played by Werner Herzog- one of the director’s heroes and the director of Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), one of the most brutal portrayals of insanity in the 20^th century by lead actor Klaus Kinski. Korine’s grandmother plays a role in the film that she may not even know she is playing; she does not know English and is in her seventies. In violation of handheld camera rules the director employs hidden cameras for his actors to interact with the ‘real’ world in several scenes on the streets of New York. Harmony Korine takes the reductive elements of film transfers to new lows with a process leading his film from digital video to 16MM and then blown up to 35MM, leaving a gritty, desaturated look. While the plot and pacing recalls the earlier Dogme films, the American environment prompts more violence, abstraction and surprise twists. With this film the movement began its internationalist trajectory, resulting today in 177 Dogme films from the world over officially sanctioned by the group.

Italian For Beginners (2001)

Danish films of the late 20^th century tended toward nationalistic takes on traditional Hollywood genres. With Denmark audiences, films such as the nostalgic Twist and Shout (1984), romantic comedy Kinamand (2005) and crime drama Pusher (1996) performed very well, although they had much less success with non-native audiences. The art house Dogme flicks fared less well at home than their more traditional counterparts, although the enchanting Italian for Beginners (2001) was a breakout success for the box office and the art house. Lone Scherfig’s love story is far from lighthearted, but the dark emotion of earlier Danish Dogme films and their open ended plots is nowhere to be found. In keeping with such films Scherfig uses a loose script with much improvisation by her actors; the director’s devotion to them is palatable in her trust and her camerawork; and she delves deeply into the characters’ lives, heartbreaks and triumphs. Beginning with the new priest in town, Andreas, and his difficult time as a widower in a new city the film flows through several chance encounters that lead to an introductory Italian class at first populated only by older housewives. Andreas’ acquaintance Jorgen Mortensen is a bumbling and soft-hearted hotel clerk in love with a young Italian immigrant; Jorgen’s best friend Halvfinn is an angry cook that falls for a sensuous hairdresser with a tortured past and a good heart. As these and other couples begin to find each other the plot comes together without contrived Hollywood devices. A softening of the intentions of the original Dogme directors, Scherfig is innovative in her use of the specificity of the Rules without resorting to superficial action or genre devices.

Emily Watson, Bjork and Nicole Kidman

The non-Dogme films of Lars von Trier Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), and Dogville (2004) demonstrate the director’s familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of the Dogme Rules. Breaking the Waves uses little overdubbing except for lushly shot transitions of the Scottish countryside, long single shots of beautiful scenery set to evocative Seventies rock classics. The camera is handheld for much of the film, and no special effects are used save the final fifteen seconds. Dancer in the Dark is exclusively shot according to Dogme rules except for hallucinatory dance sequences for which the director used dozens of tiny camera set in strategic spots in a metalworking factory, and the fact that he shot it in Sweden and set his film in America in the 1960s. Dogville cleverly inverts the Dogme dictum against constructing a set for a film by employing the minimal theatrical device of the theatre play Our Town using an imaginary set in a soundstage defined by drawn lines on the floor and clearly labeled areas of action- “Street”, “Old Mill” or “Tom’s House”. Mixing handheld and machine steady shots, von Trier has taken the lessons of his Dogme years into the international world of film without losing his revolutionary zeal and has become a star in his own right. Working with Emily Watson for Breaking, Icelandic singer Bjork for Dancer and Nicole Kidman for Dogville, von Trier has kept up the directorial dictatorship of his hero Dryer throughout the past decade, leading Bjork and Kidman (at least) to say they would never work with him again.

As early as 1999 Thomas Vinterberg declared the Dogme experiment dead, adding that it would still probably be good for directors to make one Dogme film in their lives. The revolutionaries believed that their creation had already started to become institutionalized, and for that reason was no longer viable. The Dogme ‘genre’ can be seen in American films Anniversary Party (2001) by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who acted in The King is Alive and Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) by artist Miranda July of learningtoloveyoumore.com. Meanwhile, the Hollywood blockbuster has shown no sign of slowing in our new century; they have learned nothing from their Dogme counterparts. Instead the revolution has been broadcast over the internet, with unconscious following of the Dogme Rules proliferating on sites like Google Video and Youtube. The self-fulfilling prophesy of Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier has not set filmmakers free from the constraints of technological advancement, but it has become reality for the rest of us.

---

[i] Von Trier, Lars and Thomas Vinterberg. Dogme95 Manifesto. Self published. 1995.
[ii] von Trier, Lars. Dogville. Director’s Commentary. 2004.
[iii] http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/c98us.html.

DEBRIS: Cannibal Ross

The University of Houston art department has really been engaging this spring, stocking large amounts of lecturers and visiting artists into the last few months. If you missed the Intermedia Lab exhibit at G Gallery in the Heights check out the Collaboration projects on the third floor of the Lawndale. Hurry up! New things like this never stay up for long. The Intermedia Lab was composed of artists with one notable writer (who sold all of her drawings opening night); Collaboration is composed of teachers and students of many departments working in small cells. Both exhibits excelled in energy and depth, boding well for the school and the city’s future.

Speaking of the city, they’d better put that rail line right down Richmond. Sorry to be insensitive but you can’t pay attention to a few landowners when Houston needs a spine. Uptown Galleria needs congestion relief, Downtown Montrose needs an audience. Hell, imagine a 24 hour rail line about ten blocks from most shit you’d want to go to? It’s not like people would ignore it, the short line they have now carries 40,000 people a day. I want to be able to quit driving.

Rice University’s “Art for Profit” is going to have a tough time living up to last year’s great show, the Art Guys curated this one though, and its funny that the press release has a whole paragraph on their history. Hmmm…

Down at CSAW, I Love You, Baby is back in circulation, filling their iloveyoubaby.org site with creamy nonsense for the first time this year. Lots of it involves guns.

Thank you goes out to William Betts after holding down the fort as Interim Director of the Lawndale Art Center as they searched far and wide. After Christine West settled in as Director Betts bowed out as Chair of the Programming Committee, where he forced more than fostered but succeeded in starting a resident artist program that will be a lasting legacy; and also opening two third floor galleries, outdoor spaces and hallways as new places to exhibit in the Lawndale. He will be missed but never forgotten by that building on Main Street.

Sunday, May 6th, Leslie Hewitt joins the subjective circle of speakers who have made “The Artist’s Eye” talks at the Menil wildly different with “On Andy Warhol (3:00 pm). May 11th opens an exhibit of great mid-century painters that was bequeathed to the Menil Collection by David Whitney. With seventeen precious Jasper Johns drawings at the heart of the exhibit, look for the not-too-shabby fringes to be full of seldom seen Oldenbergs, Lichtensteins and Warhols.

A Little Indecision

Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces

Monumental? Not so much. Personal? Naah… Evocative? No, not at all. To the average visitor to the Menil Collection these days the exhibit furthest to the left- past the vitrines of Tlingit masks - must seem like an irritating joke. Wandering through what seems to be a bunch of cardboard boxes nailed to the wall or rolled in sand and set piled on the floor must be a frustrating experience for anyone looking for the Picassos. Maybe a little lyricality permeates this disdain constructed by a perception of worth through traditional materials. The rhythmic placement of familiar, throwaway forms needs a bit of attention to be appreciated, but recognizable forms like airplanes emerge in Nabisco Shredded Wheat and Bende de Sureté / Twin City / Nipples. Centrally focused rectangular works hold a picture plane, even if the image is made by staple holes, masking tape and the name CASTELLI. Maybe it seems pathetic- even to someone familiar with the blistering juxtaposition of images central to Rauschenberg’s Combines of the 1960s. Imperceptible to viewers is the process of the artist; moving away from New York, living on an island, at a time when he could have rested on his laurels and reproduced his acclaimed images in luxurious retirement.

Even before entering the cul-de-sac darkened gallery one has the chance to compare an equally massive Northwest American Indian tapestry with Rauschenberg’s Radiant White / 952, a sprawling narrative of boxes dismantled and distressed but without obvious trace of the artist’s hand. With a little bit of backing up one can see the two large works at once, both narratives not tailored to be preserved in museums under ideal conditions. The former work’s transcendent nature is established anthropologically as one in a series- this painting will decay and be repainted, recreated. While Rauschenberg’s intent was to have his work sold and preserved he could not have known how long his compositions would last. The usually enlivening natural light provided by the unique ceiling of the Renzo Piano designed building is cut off here in the Cardboards and Related Pieces exhibit to preserve the dangerous state of color in the medium. They are all mounted on plywood and have a matte fixative coating- both steps Rauschenberg took to mitigate their susceptibility. Rauschenberg didn’t sell one at the initial opening in 1971. Quite a blow to the sustainability Robert has now shown through five decades of practice, this uncertain time in the artist’s career is demonstrated through the need to recover many of his paintings from European collectors in order to mount this exhibit. Why take such a radical, unreliable step at a peak of the artist’s career?

To historicize a bit some works like Untitled (cardboard) and several of the Venetians look back at Eva Hesse’s relation to the floor and flexible materials; and Lake Placid / Glori-Fried / Yarns from New England seems to look to Joseph Beuys with the impression of a narrative emerging from a simple staff into real space. Rauschenberg did not veer far from the path of thought he had helped forge in New York in the 1960s. Nearly monochrome paintings were the artist’s forte after he left Black Mountain College in the 50s with a bit of a Joseph Albers hangover, so the solid sandy-mud brown of cardboard filling space was not foreign territory to him- perhaps reflecting on Donald Judd’s writing about space as well. Some of those early monochrome paintings hang with the Picassos on the other side of the building. The beaten, pliable, very human cardboard varied much from Minimalist work; and distress was never cleverly hidden in the Combines the artist constructed in the debris-filled streets of New York, as the world convulsed with the upheaval of the 1960s. To paint all of these influences with an imperceptible brush Rauschenberg deconstructed himself on Captiva Island. In the face of the impressive beauty of nature and without the typical discarded materiel of his last body of work in New York, Currents #55, the artist returned to impressions of Albers’ vibrant reductive paintings, finding his own vernacular in his environment and in clarity of composition.

The first body of work, from 1971, is labeled under the subset (cardboards), and these painting take up the first four or so galleries- mixed slightly with the Venetians of 1972-3. Angularity is the mode here; Rauschenberg constructs rectangular picture planes for some works. They are missing the negative space of the more sculptural narratives and uneven rhythms of some longer, more complex works demanding the wall behind them be seen as a ground. Reaching out from the wall in regular, referenced heights determined by the material, boxes become vessels, voids, pyramids and towers. In the opening gallery on your left Gun Tackers / Skin Pack / Brushes / ITT / Glass holds serene service over the rest of the room with a centralized trinity of large boxes; several smaller boxes crowd together suspended by twine reaching up for the downward open end of the central box. Entering the second gallery the brilliant color of Volon is uncharacteristic of the typical cardboard box. The work reveals a bit of its brown undercarriage in wear and tear- illuminating the earthy qualities of the large expanses of cardboard in the rest of the exhibit through sharp contrast thrown by the color as a highlight in an expanse of aqua blue. Also in this gallery is a familiar work to the regular Menil visitor, National Spinning / Red / Spring, which is owned by the Collection and has resided next door to the Warhols in the museum for the last two years.

As Rauschenberg obsessively focused on his medium in 1971, he began to consider the banal branding, record-keeping and shipping labels worthy of a little tweaking. First hand-printed pieces of torn tape and distressed labels appeared in the Cardbird boxes; the artist focusing on the reproduction of an object most would ignore as detritus or actively discard as waste. I imagine someone threw out one or two of the works as they were first introduced, and I hope Rauschenberg laughed his ass off at his own absurdity. In another experiment, the decidedly smaller Tampa Clay Pieces appear without the epic construction of the larger wall pieces, even more boring. Going to throw out one of the pieces would shock the hell out of you though- the heavy unglazed clay is molded and colored perfectly to simulate a much lighter material, the cognitive snippet of an illegible label adds to the object’s throwaway appearance. Both groups of work were made in small editions with the help of artisans, experimenting with printmakers at Gemini G.E.L for the Cardbirds and Graphicstudio Florida on the Tampa Clay to figure out how to create them.

Concurrent with such an investigation into his material, Rauschenberg moved forward with his minimal compositions by embracing emotional curves and more fluid materials. Nastier trash. Trash that has been in a wet gutter for a week. Tar paper mashed into slashing amorphous brushstrokes. Sackcloth and soiled, wet cardboard mashed into turbulent waves and leathery skin. Usually titled Untitled (Venetian) although there are exceptions, this series was inspired by trips to the Roman city of Titian and Giorgione and their violence of expression and penchant for emotional outburst is alive in the crumbling, magically gruesome contextualization of worthless materiel lurking here in the darkened gallery.

Less connected by experience is the Untitled (Early Egyptian) series featured in the last (or the second) gallery in this circular exhibit. While the artist did want to travel to Egypt, he never did make it there, content to study in books and his own imagination the implications of early Egyptian art, artifacts and life. The resulting pieces carry the thought of a man slathering glue on ten-foot boxes and rolling them in the sand on a Florida beach, a whimsical construction for the most mystical of the cardboards. Behind utterly banal vertical constructions familiar to anyone who owns a garage. The artist painted hyper-neon colors that become light- a faint fluorescent glow- when the work is about eight inches from the wall. Peer around if the guards let you and the source of light is a flat plane of paint; either exposing the Early Egyptians as fake antiques or lending a mythic glow to what appears to be boxes covered in sand. Through the Venetians diverse found materials began to creep back into Rauschenberg’s mind, and a bicycle included in one Egyptian seems to signal the artist’s intention to return to the land of imagery after purging from his work the very thing that made his career in the 60s after four years.

Hopefully a cathartic period in the artist’s career, the early 70s were a painful time for much of the progressive movements and utopians of the previous decade. Hunter S. Thompson put it vividly; “you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” Much of the art world felt the same sentiment; political artwork grew sharper and harsher than Rauschenberg’s collages and Combines that won him the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Minimalism and Conceptualism tried to wipe imagery and the object off of the map. Painting was dead, as it has been many times since. Though Rauschenberg’s work received quite amiable criticism at its introduction in ’71, it was not the success his previous work had established. It has been thirty years and only now are the Cardboards receiving retrospective attention.

Are we “filling in” the artist’s career by exploiting his lesser works? I like the show too much to agree with that, and it seems perhaps very relevant to art now. Cardboard has grown in acceptance as an art medium in the meantime, as has impermanence in general. Making the world more real by exploiting perceptual and conceptual breakdowns, or “a filter to make it look more real”, is appreciated and these Cardboards benefit from that. Radical restrictions and the resulting focus of imagination or clarity is a focus of contemporary work by artists like Andrea Zittel and Lars Van Trier’s films. Hell, it was even on Oprah last week. Rauschenberg started off where anyone does; you begin with the possibilities of the material. The image of JFK floating under an astronaut is lodged in art history as these cardboard constructions will never be, but in the frame of our new century this group of works evoke the complexity of even the simplest of structures and an exercise of impermanence that we can see reflected widely and often in art today. Perhaps the preservation of objects, ideas and artwork is the responsibility of the art world- not in making them permanent, but in constantly remolding the object in our eyes. The boxes will one day be archaic, the labels are already nostalgic. While they are still within our grasp as ordinary objects they evoke a strong disdain for the commodity of it all, especially important to be preserved by the institution.