Dallas gallery hopping

I prowled the scene this afternoon. Here's what I saw and thought.

At Barry Whistler Gallery, Lawrence Lee is still up and shining with some of the most elegant lines I've gazed upon since I first got acquainted with Fragonard's tree drawings back in the days of Bush I. Lee mines old racist depictions of African Americans and his supple imagination to produce some truly witty narrative-based graphite and ink and tea and who knows what drawings of crazy-assed tall tales that probably make sense only to him. So why tell the stories? Because they look great. And there's always that astonishing line of his.

The image above is from Lee's show at the now-defunct Clementine Gallery in Chelsea a couple of years ago. He's getting better.

Road Agent may or may not be defunct also. It still has the "Installation in Progress" sign on the door from last month. As I understand it, gallery owner Christina Rees has accepted a position as director at TCU's off-campus exhibition space over in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth 1, Dallas 0.

Dunn and Brown is offering Dale Chihuly glass stuff to discerning folks in the Metroplex. Why? I don't know. Maybe the bills are coming due. Still they had a kickass small group show in their "project" space with works by Trenton Hancock (whom I love and not just because he once speculated that everybody's soul looks like a pre-teen Caucasian girl), Jeff Elrod, Erick Swinson, Vernon Fisher, etc.

Swinson's savagely trompe l'oeil sculptures of a pre-hominid creature and a stag shaking off the bleeding"velvet" from its new antlers take the Halloween prize for amazingness and craft.

Down in the Design district, Conduit offered Michael Tole and Joe Mancuso. Too many flowers on one picture plane (yes, that's the point) and painstaking renderings of Chinese decor. Cool, but why? I can't say. Somebody tell me.

I tried to see the new stuff by Dornith Doherty at Holly Johnson, but the place was temporarily shut when I dropped by. Should have called first, I guess.

Over at Marty Walker, I caught a sneak peek of William Lamson's new work, and it was a pleasure. Building on his videos from last year, he set up several ad hoc machines designed to use wind and waves to make drawings during his recent tour of South America. The Chilean coast wave works were delicate and appropriately atmospheric. Others were bolder and more aggressively "expressionistic." Whatever that might mean when a kite is doing the expressing.


Above: William Lamson, Kite Drawing Jan. 31, 2009. 740-915 PM. Colonia Valdense, Uruguay.

The Goss Michael Foundation offered a small Mark Quinn survey. He's the dude who cast his own head in his own blood. If he makes it, he means it. Got it?

Quinn's Mother and Child (Alison and Parys), 2008, a marble sculpture of a nude woman and her baby, was an extraordinary thing to behold. Handsome and at peace with her body, Alison was born without arms and with improperly formed legs. Gallery literature quotes him as saying "She's very beautiful, she just looks different."


He's right.

Cow Hill tonight

(Image from Keri Oldham's Web site)

I'm just back in from the front porch, the coyotes are howling out on the prairie and the street out front is damp. It shines under the lamps.

Last night we attended an opening for Peter Barrickman and Keri Oldham at Centraltrak in Dallas. Keri used to be a gallery manager at the now defunct And/Or Gallery. I reviewed a show they had last spring. Keri's watercolors are endearingly creepy, a blend of fashion illustration and automatic drawing where somatotype and psyche meet on an uncomfortable picture plane.

Barrickman's work is all over the map, but the fractured and squashed pictorial space of a landscape and idiosyncratic expression would seem to be his interest. Not surprisingly, collage enters into the mix often. Collage can do that to space.

At present, I'm imagining a review of Amy Blakemore's show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The magazine's deadline is Tuesday, and it's not yet written. Tonight I'm thinking of remembering the times I was disabused of comforting, but false, notions of how the world is. Amy's pictures are like that. Hard as stone and sweetly, achingly melancholy. Here's a beautiful picture. You loved him. He's dead. But still you love him. Let this picture's beauty comfort your loss. It's not love, but beauty is at least something.

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.

Archiving stuff

I've spent some time this afternoon puttering about in Google Docs to see if it can be a useful cloud computing tool. So far, I've uploaded over a dozen art reviews with the intent of sharing them with associates and interested parties. Google made this link to one of them.

Here's another one. And a third.

I'm a lousy archivist of my own work, so I'm hoping this tool proves worthwhile. Now if I could only find the rest of my reviews.

Richard Patterson review

My review of Richard Patterson's current survey at Dallas's Goss-Michael Foundation is online at Glasstire.

Patterson is a YBA who has relocated to Dallas where he's having a fine time romping around in ultra-American culture and making paintings and sculptures which display equal parts wit and craft.

(image via James Cohan Gallery)

Elrod review

My review of Jeff Elrod is online at Glasstire. His small show of post-digital abstractions is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Image above is Portrait (2003) from the Texas Gallery Web site.

Working

My wife and I visited the Dallas Art Fair yesterday. Because I flashed my press credentials at the door, I got a badge and a thick packet of stuff about the fair and the galleries therein.

It was a real deal. Real dealers doing real deals abounded. Art was everywhere and it was for sale. Major names. The chips were bluer in some spaces than others, but all chips were on the table.



Any worries about the state of the art market in our depressed economy weren't acknowledged. Instead we were treated to Cy Twombly hand-altered prints, Donald Judd wood cuts, a Henry Darger watercolor, and works by lesser known folks. All were desirable. All were available.

The little Jeff Koons Balloon Dog I saw (a few hours into the experience and after we'd both reached the saturation point) summed it all up most eloquently: A sweet object of desire, shiny and bright, which could be mine for the right price.

Art interventions

A number of feminist and socially conscious blogs have reported that some delightful wag of an artist/vandal/interventionist in Berlin slapped stickers onto ads in Berlin's subway to make the images of smooth skinned celebrities (Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, Christina Aguilera) resemble an open Photoshop window.



It is an act of poetic compression which squeezes issues of desire, its manipulation, oppressive standards of feminine attractiveness, consumerism, alienation from the public sphere, mass media and conformity into a simple trope. That makes it very good art, I'd say -- not because of its estimable content, but because of the way the content is delivered.

Things like this have been done before, of course. As long ago as the 1950s, artists in Europe associated with the Lettrist International and its offspring, the Situationist International, defaced posters in public places. Their process was called "decollage" since it involved not adding an image to a given image (collage), but removing parts of an image to discover what lay beneath.


The image above is an example of decollage by Mimmo Rotella. The quasi-Ab Ex composition is no doubt attributable to the international spread of that style in the post-war period. Artists like Rotella can be seen as practicing a kind of archaeology of public spaces, digging up hidden images beneath the surface and allowing a Surrealist swarm of associations to result.

The Photoshop-like alterations in Berlin, on the other hand, are both additive (literally sticking stuff on posters) and subtractive (uncovering hints of the images' history).

Department of why not

Houston's Art Guys are selling their name and their abject logo (above). Their Web site indicates the logo was the winning entry in a 1993 competition. Esteemed curator Walter Hopps was the juror. Imagining what the other entries looked like is, of course, futile.

The asking price for the Art Guys brand and logo is a hefty $500,000, which may sound like a bunch in the current depressed market, but as one of the Guys points out it comes to only $20,000 a year over their 25-year career.

Along with their announcement that they are engaged to a houseplant, the sale is designated an official Art Guys silver jubilee event.

Art, money, and big waves

Dave Hickey in Vanity Fair:

Numbers tell the story. In 1976, Michael Milken was estimated to have earned $5 million at Drexel Burnham Lambert. By December of 2007, hundreds of times as many people were bringing home staggering multiples of that amount every year. This radical redistribution of wealth created the illusion of “high art prices.” In fact, art prices have fallen as a percentage of the buyer’s disposable income, so art is statistically less important to the people who buy it. The question of how good the art is and how long it will last is of much less consequence.

So think of the art world as a beach and money as the surf. Waves roll in but they always suck back out, leaving a few masterpieces, taking some beach with them. When a really gnarly monster rolls in, the best we can hope is that it will leave some beach behind and a few treasures in the sand, along with the wreckage and the bodies—because the wave will suck away. And when it does, as it is doing right now, the whales will either hold or dump. If they hold, art will remain a stable-valued, low-liquid commodity. If the whales dump at cut-rate prices, the art world will undergo its first catastrophic value re-adjustment in 40 years. It won’t be pretty, but it will be exciting to watch.

Talking and writing

I'm actively procrastinating honoring a review commission. It'll happen, just not today. The ideas are coalescing. The images and wider-world references and associations have begun to arrange themselves. I've not written it, however.

Today instead I did a bit of yard work and noodled about in my studio and on the Web. Here's something I found on line this afternoon via a link at Smith Magazine:

Of course I don't think only about writing. I spend time with my wife, family and friends. I read a lot, watch a lot of politics on TV. But prose is beavering along beneath, writing itself. When it comes time to type it is an expression, not a process. My mind has improved so much at this that it's become clearly apparent to me. The words, as e. e. cummings wrote, come out like a ribbon and lie flat on the brush. He wasn't writing about toothpaste. In my fancy, I like to think he could have been writing about prose.

Yes, I had that cummings line in mind before I began. I knew I was heading for it. By losing the ability to speak, I have increased my ability to communicate. I am content.

The writer is film critic Roger Ebert. The quote is from a Sun-Times blog post that dates from late October of this year. I recommend it.

Nice guy

Weird image:


His name is Jeremy Newton, and he's a graduate student at a university where I used to teach. He was invited to participate in a group show at Centraltrak in Dallas. The opening was tonight. That pink scumble of stuff above is a detail of a carpet of Pink Pearl eraser rubbings Jeremy made last year. The guy's a natural. He scattered a layer of eraser rubbings on a gallery floor before he'd ever heard of Barry Le Va. Maybe he still hasn't heard of Le Va. I don't know.

The trouble with what I saw tonight, though is that idiot gallery visitors don't look where they're going. Jeremy told me that his initial installation with the piece humbly and simply lying on the floor didn't work out because oblivious folks kept stepping on it. He had to set it on a low pedestal for the opening. Much was lost. Confining his oddball material to a raised platform took away some of its stubborn, mute factuality and made it only "art."

I've seen it in other contexts, and it's better than that.

Wretch/retch

Paul Cullum, writing in Vanity Fair, discloses a memo from horrible, horrible factory painter of tepid banalities Thomas Kinkade to the director and crew of his film, Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage. At least that's the title in Cullum's piece. IMDB lists the title as Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas. Whatever.

The memo contains 16 items which Kinkade wanted the filmmakers to bear in mind while working on the project. Here's one:

15) Nostalgia. My paintings routinely blend timeframes. This is not only okay, but tends to create a more timeless look. Vintage cars (30's, 40's, 50's, 60's etc) can be featured along with 70's era cars. Older buildings are favorable. Avoid anything that looks contemporary -- shopping centers, contemporary storefronts, etc. Also, I prefer to avoid anything that is shiny. Our vintage vehicles, though often times are cherished by their owners and kept spic-n-span should be "dirtied up" a bit for the shoot. Placerville was and is a somewhat shabby place, and most vehicles, people, etc bear traces of dust, sawdust, and the remnants of country living. There are many dirt roads, muddy lanes, etc., and in general the place has a tumbled down, well-worn look.

Everything should have a pleasing coat of moss on it. Like Hobbits and really stupid fixer-upper village dwellings in the rain. Jean Baudrillard, writing of the death of reality in "The Precession of Simulacra," says that nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I guess not.

The movie was released on DVD November 11 with no theatrical run, presumably because it's abysmally awful. Iceland, which is bankrupt and starving, will host a theatrical release tomorrow. Poor Iceland.



Warning: viewing the trailer is not advised. It is included here for evidentiary purposes only. Just use your imagination to conjure a feeble Peter O'Toole mouthing "Art is about LIFE." Poor Peter, money must be an issue for him. Just like Iceland.

Painters can make good films. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and The Butterfly is wonderful and moving.



And Robert Longo's film based on William Gibson's story, Johnny Nmemonic is engaging, proto-steampunk stuff.



But this Kinkade stuff makes me shudder: there's an audience for it. They walk among us and like moss-coated memories of shabby miracles.

New review

My review of William Lamson is online here.

Channeling Barthes

Todd Gitlin has discovered his inner French semiotician.


Frolicking in the playground of cultural myths, Gitlin concludes:

The warrior turned lawman confronts the community organizer turned law professor. The sheriff (who married the heiress) wrestles with the outsider who rode into town and made a place for himself. No wonder this race is thrilling and tense. America is struggling to fasten a name on its soul.

I anticipate some really infuriating campaign ads coming out of this analysis.

Kara Walker in Fort Worth

Kara Walker's lecture at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth last night was sold out. Think about that a moment. I'm talking about Cow Town, Texas.

We were a little late getting there and it wasn't clear we'd get in. Tickets were distributed beginning at 5:00. We rolled in at 5:20 to a line of what seemed like hundreds of people. When we got to within a dozen folks of the ticket desk, word came down that all the seats in the auditorium AND in the overflow area in the museum's cafe were taken. I'd called from home, though, and my press credentials did their job.

Walker was an uncomfortable speaker. Talking doesn't come easily for her. It's as though she doesn't trust language to carry her intended meanings. Or rather the one-step-removed meanings of our language can't convey the direct, unmediated content she wants us to experience. She spoke of her traveling show (Minneapolis, Paris, New York, an now Fort Worth) as a "wandering soul," and remarked that viewing this latest installment surprised her: "I'm not the person I think I am."

It became apparent that she is engaged in a struggle to come to grips with her relationship to the discourse of painting and what it means to her "black body." My notes include references to "deeply felt ambivalence," "contradictory impulses," and "unstable identity." Abstract discussions of being and representing might be stimulating pastimes. Walker is out to embody the discussion, to enact it in flesh.

On the way home, I told my companion that my notes from the question and answer period included "the white guy talks too much."

"Well, duh," she replied.

Fun pastime

I'll be writing my garbanzos off in the coming couple of days. One topic I must cover is William Lamson. His short balloon killer videos are really good stuff.

But if you need something to occupy your time over the weekend, let me suggest you read up on synthetic CDOs-squared, which are basically collateralized debt obligations whose underlying securities are not anything ordinary like mortgages or bonds, but are themselves collateralized debt obligations. Oftentimes the lower level CDOs are created solely so that they can be further bundled into their squared cousins. This does not violate any known Wall Street incest laws.

Once you are able to properly assign a fair market value to synthetic CDOs-squared, Hank Paulson has a really good job just lying around waiting for you. (Hint: they're decidedly not really good stuff.)

Gallery sights

Some things worth looking at in the Dallas gallery scene (in no particular order):

1. Richie Budd's funny, insouciant and encrusted sculptures at Road Agent Gallery.

Beneath the slops and pours of nameless plastic guck (in this and other sculptures) are items like a dried mouse cadaver, a popcorn machine, dangerous-looking firecrackers, and a Sony Walkman. One piece, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon (Jamielee Lee), includes a light show, a fog machine, a soundtrack, and (best of all at an opening) a cooler that dispensed cocktails. I'll likely write about it for somebody in the coming week. What I write is up in the air -- which is to say I'm baffled, but impressed.

2. Allion V. Smith's photos -- "Hall Pass" is the show's title -- at Barry Whistler Gallery.

Shot mostly at Dallas' Booker T. Washington magnet school for the performing and visual arts, Smith's cool images deftly evoke a vivid sense of the flavor and aura of a particular place. Pictures are silent, but this show has a soundtrack that has nothing to do with audio recordings. You can see what the place sounds like. My initial reaction was they should be exhibited as a group in a university classroom building. I know just the place.

3. Jackie Tileston's paintings at Holly Johnson Gallery. Quoting extensively from classical Chinese landscape painting and God knows what else, Tileston's works generate an insane, but somehow convincing, sense of pictorial space.


I guess it's the willful shifts from crisp edges to atmospheric washes, but what I find satisfying and instructive is the fact that she can make a painting so divided against itself still seem complete.

4. Aaron Parazette at Dunn and Brown Contemporary. Hard-edge abstraction meets retro-cool typography in paintings of surfer dude vocabulary words gone all strange.


If I can wrap my brains around a portion of his project, I'll whip out a review-like item on this show as well. They look extraordinary, and busting up reading by means of letter forms is a project after my own heart.

Dallas Video

We attended a panel discussion on video art today at the DMA. Organized by the Dallas Video Art Festival in conjunction with a video series currently running at Conduit Gallery, the DMA, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and other sites in the region, the talk consisted of off-the-cuff observations about the medium by the show's curators -- Bart Weis, Charles Dee Mitchell, and Carolyn Sortor -- and Paul Slocum, whose And/Or Gallery was host both to an interesting show I reviewed recently for Art Lies and to some of the video festival, too.

Slocum is a hacker and newer-than-new media artist who has a band called Tree Wave and a blog here (if you may be susceptible to seizures, beware the frenetic wallpaper). Years ago, Slocum took a beginning painting class from me, as he reminded me after the DMA event today. He says his paintings were mediocre. I can't remember his paintings, but I do remember him. That may be evidence to support his estimation of their value. It's good to see him doing well in his nerdly niche.

The presentation included snippets from a number of videos which either have already run in the series or will run in coming weeks. (The festival lasts five weeks) Notable snippets included Jon Pylypchuk's demented "Dating Game" reenactment (starring wieners -- the boudin blanc was an albino), Guy Ben-Ner's disarming "Moby Dick" retelling in his kitchen (co-starring his daughter), and Dominic Angerame's "Anaconda Targets," which consisted of unedited cockpit videos of smart bombs doing their terrible work on an Afghan battlefield.

As is usual for such Sunday afternoon museum talks, most of the discussion lingered on the surfaces of things. (Not that there's anything wrong with surfaces. Someday I'll write of my belief in mere appearances and the allure of skins.) Still, I'd have liked to hear a bit more about the recursive -- or redoubled -- concepts of time these artists addressed. Sortor was always on the brink of saying someting about it, but it never happened.

Observation to take to the bank: Dee Mitchell, discussing "Anaconda Targets" opined that the artist's not editing or otherwise altering the images or the audio rendered it a readymade documentary. Chew on that a moment and the importance of the surface may begin to appear.

Quoted -- sorta

An article in the LA Times quoted my review of Robert Wilhite's Bomb at Barry Whistler Gallery. They didn't say it was me, natch, just some unnamed art critic in Texas.