Houston trip -- two kinds of strangeness

My wife and drove to Houston last weekend to see the Amy Blakemore show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and to spend a little time away from this tiny town.

Blakemore's photos are powerful evocations of disillusionment and fading memories. Some of them are evocative of the emotional content in James Joyce's short story "Araby" in their sense of melancholy epiphany: "I thought it would be better, more than this..." Other times, her blurred and granular exposures suggest tilt shift digital photo processing. Always they are strange and haunting.


(Images via Inman Gallery)

Before we left for home this morning, we visited a Salvation Army thrift store on Washington Ave. in Houston because of an article I'd read in the NY Times about some works said to be by Salvador Dali that are up for sale there. Opinions vary concerning their authenticity, naturally, but I've seen them in situ. The drawing, sculpture, and prints are indeed on display in a glass case in the thrift store.



I took some pictures of the display, and my wife got a real bargain on a light sweater and some tops.

Kentridge in Fort Worth

My wife and I paid a visit to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth today. We drove to Cow Town to see the William Kentridge show, and holy mother of charcoal, the man is much better than I thought he was. I already knew he was remarkable, but the FW show is a revelation. Here's a version of a film that's in the show:



The title is Journey to the Moon. It may be in the exhibit, but my recollection is that this is not the same film. A room with multiple projected videos offers a variety of related pieces, many of which are titled Fragments for Georges Méliès. Méliès was the film pioneer who created Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902 -- a landmark in early cinematography and filmic story telling. Coming a century later than Méliès, Kentridge's videos locate the 21st century artist in the history of movie making and conflate drawing, performing and filming. Not to mention conflating artist with model, director with performer, and process with content.

I took some notes today, but I need another shot at it all before I can review it. Two and a half hours in the museum wasn't enough. That's one of the troubles with video. Duration is like that -- it just takes time to haul it all in. We'll hit it again tomorrow after we check out of the motel.

Last weekend

We visited San Antonio last weekend, and I learned there are several missions in the city besides the Alamo. Unlike their famous sibling, these other missions are maintained by the National Park Service. The Alamo is owned by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and is located across the street from a Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum and other crummy tourist pits. I shot the image above in the ruined residence hall of Mission San José on the southern end of the modern San Antonio. I shot the image below the same morning in front of the Alamo.


The mission church was reconstructed after its dome collapsed in the 1870s, but much of the structure dates from its founding in 1720.


That's the west facade of the mission church. It is still a working Catholic church where mass is celebrated regularly. Mission San José had the good fortune not to have been the site of a much mythologized battle, so it gets no Christmas tree. And the crummy wax museum geeks leave it alone.

Alamo

I almost forgot...

My wife and I are in San Antonio for a conference. Our hotel is across the street from the Alamo. The Alamo sprinklers are running tonight:


All is well.

Tomorrow I'll gallery hop while she confers and conferences and more.

Report from San Antonio II

We got our biscuits as previously advertised. Yum. Sausage gravy, bacon, fresh fruit -- all good things. But lordy, those biscuits.

After that we did the Alamo City gallery crawl. A modest show of small colored pencil drawings at Joan Grona Gallery by Bill Amundson -- a smart caustic take on suburbia and market-driven real estate consumption -- won my heart. Also at Grona were works by Min-Tse Chen (post-manga obscure narratives, mostly in ink on paper) and an installation by Jason Jay Stevens about something. Maybe it was Schroedinger's particle/wave voodoo. Maybe not.

It was too early to get into the Blue Star Contemporary Center, so we drove up to the San Antonio Museum of Art, which is located in a rambling old 19th century brewery. It was good to see works by Bill Davenport (a lumpen little crocheted beer bottle coozy) and Ed Blackburn in their collection. The whole contemporary art exhibit was rather densely installed, though. Everything wanted more air and space, especially the Stella.

Back at Blue Star, we saw a show featuring artworks that dealt with time -- duration, passage, past, future, etc. Joey Fauerso, who exhibited a watercolor and a video at SAMA as part of their recent acquisitions show, presented a video at Blue Star, too. While the didactic label's references to spiritual transcendence fell a bit flat, the lovely imagery of watercolor figures dissolving and being washed away left me both satisfied and ready for more. Also most informative was seeing an assemblage by the late Linda Pace in this context. It was Pace (of picante sauce) funding that led to one of San Antonio's more celebrated art venues: Artpace, which was our next stop.

The current show at Artpace features their four international artists in residence: Marcos Ramirez ERRE (don't know why he usees all caps in that last bit), Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and OLiver Lutz. All were expansive and assertive. Automobiles figured prominently. So did the dynamics of majority/minority social group relations. And the individual's position relative to the social surround. Lutz's Paint it Black at first appeared to be a room of monochrome black paintings with an inexplicable NASCAR race soundtrack, but an adjacent room held video monitors playing surveillance tapes of people (me included) looking at the paintings which -- through the magic of video -- had been transformed to images of a race and its spectators. Sketches for the installation, also in the video room, prove Lutz can draw like a trooper.

There was more, but I've hit the highlights.

Tomorrow, we're off to Austin. There's a video show opening tomorrow night at Art Palace Gallery I need to see. Also dinner at a place my daughter recommended to us.

Report from San Antonio I

First, all you burglars reading this: we have a house sitter, and he knows where the gun is.

We're in the Alamo City tonight, having driven down from Commerce through the insane traffic in Austin and the torrential rains of Hurricane Dolly's periphery. I have to say that the Prius proved its mettle in Austin's stop-and-go Interstate traffic. We got over 48 miles to the gallon, with some five-minute stretches tallying 100 miles to a gallon (according to the car's computerized energy monitoring system) because we were running mostly on batteries.

But Dolly brought us more than downpours and traffic. The cheap motel I booked for us here is also occupied by scores of evacuees from Brownsville and other hard hit areas of the lower Rio Grande Valley. Many of them are badly behaved, unsupervised children, but then some of the adults aren't exactly Miss Manners either. The stairwell smells like the dumpster behind a KFC franchise, and empty cigarrette packs and crushed styrofoam drink cups litter the halls.

And the TV is broken.

Note to self: look out for evacuees. They aren't especially invested in their temporary digs. But these are easy complaints for me to make. Brownsville got hit with a category 2 storm that messed it up pretty badly. Large portions of the Valley are without power and significantly damaged tonight. Still I sure wish the guy who just knocked on my door by mistake hadn't done that. My gun is back in Commerce with the house sitter.

On the upside, we had a good meal at the Blue Star Brewing Co. just down the road from motel hell, and tomorrow I'm going to hit a few art spots in the same business-cum-art complex. Not all will be stellar, but perhaps a few won't suck. I really don't know what to expect. It's been a long time since I was last in San Antonio.

We've decided that our day will begin with biscuits at the Pioneer Flour mill's restaurant, however, and I know that'll be very good indeed. Those guys have been working on their biscuit recipe for almost 150 years. Crap, they may not be open for breakfast.

My hopes are pinned on brunch.

Gettin' outta Dodge

We're almost done with the term, and that's good. Next Monday we're off to the Big City to see some art -- Richard Prince and Kara Walker and Lawrence Weiner and Martin Puryear and (if there's time) those fine Richard Serra pieces at Dia Beacon. Also there's a show of works by an alumnus of TAMU-Commerce, Lawrence Lee at Clementine Gallery in Chelsea that we need to visit.

Oh, I forgot to say earlier that the painting is 24" X 68".