[Previous entry: "Huge sculptures in spectacular places - How?"] [Next entry: "Abolish the NEA"]

04/05/2006: "Winter Lecture Circuit"

My winter lecture circuit didn’t take me to so many states as last fall’s, yet I managed to drive as far northeast as North Adams, Massachusetts, to drive as far west as St. Louis, and to fly as far south as Houston. As luck would have it, I even got caught in the Blizzard of 2006.

January
Having heard that the Indianapolis Museum of Art had finally opened its Contemporary Art Wing, I stopped by on a return trip from Chicago. One Ernesto Neto installation there resembled a Sandy Skoglund “stage set,” while another hanging sculpture featured words like “naõ (no)” embroidered on it, which several disenfranchised women agreed to sew in exchange for wages. Neto’s participatory nest (a cleaner version of Helio Oiticica’s sand boxes) inspired many viewers’ comments, yet the museum effectively squelched it. Despite the high number of positive and grateful notes scrawled in casually sited Neto catalogs, his catalogs contained notices requesting people not to mark them. It’s a rather small price to pay for an artist to receive such an unsolicited outpour of appreciation.

Although much of the IMA’s contemporary collection has found new galleries, too few works are actually new. Ellsworth Kelly designed the installation for his work comprising nearly a dozen, irregularly-shaped colored panels. Robert Irwin’s hovering disc looked better than ever and to everyone’s surprise, the curator freed a Bill Woodrow sculpture from storage. Other than a temporary mural by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, there were few real surprises.

A few weeks later I attended artist/curator Maiza Hixson’s performance/power-point Presentation, “Curatorial Experimentation with Nucleocentrically Inclined,” that accompanied her exhibition, “Oh Boy,” which addressed images of male sexuality at Louisville’s New Center for Contemporary Art. Daring photographs and videos were in abundance. New York artist Laurel Nakadate fearlessly “interacts” with strangers (men) in their homes, all the while sexually taunting her playmates. Also included were Mariette Pathy Allen’s documents of life before, during, and after sex-change operations, as well as Valerie Belin’s images of plastic muscle men. A few days later, I dropped by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, to see its current exhibitions. After spending over an hour scowering “The Whole World is Rotten,” whose most engaging work was Coco Fusco’s Angela Davis documentary, which she energetically culled from actual archives. “Rotten” connected slavery to civil rights to Black Panthers to today’s African-American condition, I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing Fernand Leger’s avant-garde film Ballet Mechanique, which perfectly complemented David Ellis’ mechanical drumming performance with paint brushes and paint cans.

February
En route to Colgate University, I visited the Delaware Arts Center Gallery in Narrowsburg, New York to see rather bland still-life paintings. Colgate had a faculty exhibition in its School of Art gallery, which included interesting works by Marion Wilson and DeWitt Godfrey, and there was a charming Alex Katz/Richard Serra/Chuck Close exhibition in the Dana Arts Center’s Pickering Gallery, one of Paul Rudolph’s most exciting buildings. Reminiscent of 1960s’ “sunken pits,” each floor’s gallery had a built-in lounge, enabling social sites to dovetail with the political life of public art engagements. On my way to my sister’s house, where I got caught in the Blizzard of 2006, I stopped by the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, where I saw Richard Pettibone’s wonderful retrospective, which doubled as a contemporary art survey, since his four decades of painted and screened copies of artists’ works pay homage to their efforts.

While at my sister’s, Amy Lipton and I drove to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, where we enjoyed the permanently installed Camera Obscura, as well as Jane Harris’ imaginative op paintings, Cyrilla Mozenter’s stiched felt drawings and vessels, Jennifer Zackin’s wacky Tibetan rifs, Todd Hebert’s Ruscha-like abstracted landscapes, Catherine Opie’s mundane and politically-charged photographs, as well as Karkhana, which featured the fascinating collaborative drawings by graduates of Pakistan’s Miniature Painting School. Despite the all-day Sunday blizzard, the roads were totally clear by Monday, so I headed up to Mass MOCA on my way to Alfred University. After eating an unusual vegetarian paella at Café Latino adjacent Mass MOCA, I explored Kamrooz Aram’s drawings, which seemed inspired by Iranian miniature painting, and Carsten Höller’s Amusement Park, which seemed influenced by the very American concept of a midway, filled with amusement rides. Amazingly, he managed to fill one gallery space there with six giant (no ferris wheels, but bumper cars, several circular rides, a “Twister,” and a “Gravitron Thriller”) amusement park rides. Unlike his prior works, these were not participatory, though the entire installation was clearly experiential, given the glowing lights and slowed down rotations. In one room were video screens with infra-red cameras that produced distorted and delayed imagery.

At Alfred University’s art gallery, I was introduced to textile artist Joan Livingston’s sewn felt paintings and sculptures and her wall of colorful, intriguing resin-soaked felt cones. The Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art was closed, but I peaked in through the window. It seemed unusually small for an “international museum.”

A few days later, I flew home to Houston for my annual parental visit. Fortunately, my parents enjoy contemporary art as much as I do! I was especially eager to see Sabina Ott’s exhibition at the University of Texas- San Antonio Gallery on the west side of town. An accumulation of several years of work, her exhibition comprised dozens of paintings with exploding imagery, sculptures featuring topographical surfaces, stickers and a soundtrack. Its dazzling imagery and subject-matter were nothing short of provocative. We headed back east, toward downtown and set off to Art PACE, whose only exhibition featured Dutch drawer/video artist Arnoud Holleman, whose personal photo/text stories required a great deal of concentration, yet ultimately proved thoughtful.

Our next stop was the glorious San Antonio Museum of Art, which is beautifully sited in an old brewery. One of the temporary exhibitions featured hilarious 19th century poems accompanied by related drawings. SAMA is billed as the world of art and its vast collections of Asian, African, Colonial and near-eastern art are stupefying. It’s like a petite Metropolitan Museum of Art. Our final destination, before a delicious Nouvel Mexican dinner at Rosario’s, was the McNay Museum of Art, sited in Mrs. McNay’s gorgeous tiled home, adjacent a contemporary sculpture garden. A total treat, it is fortunately open late Thursdays. Here one realizes the efforts of great organization, since most of the McNay’s modern and contemporary collection was culled from local collectors (very little was actually Mrs. McNay’s), which means that she inspired others to help her form this massive collection, perhaps to SAMA’s dismay. This collection ranges from op/abstract paintings (such as a Valerie Jaudon and a John Miller, which one rarely appear beyond Los Angeles), to early 20th Century masters like O’Keefe and Modigliani to Impressionist works. We totally enjoyed a traveling exhibition of inventive women’s prints.

Friday, we set off to make the rounds in Houston, beginning with “Girls’ Night Out” at the University of Houston’s Blaffer At Gallery, which featured photography/video by two generations of female artists (4 born before 1960 and 6 born after 1969). The popular Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s five-channel video here featured women surviving several unusual psychological disorders, such as clinging to the underside of beds, crawling along bridges, laying in mud puddles…). Unfamiliar works by younger artists Sally Tykkä, Elina Brotherus, and Shirana Shahbazi rounded out the show. Mel Chin’s solo exhibition “Do Not Ask Me, on view at the Station Museum, was the most impressive solo exhibition in recent memory. Chin’s inventive works, like a home-made armor system for a Humvee’s underbelly, several hand rendered comics, a wall splatter simulating blown up carcases, or a chart comparing three countries’ wealth, arms, and oil, simultaneously inspired wonder and fury. Having just seen Cincinnati’s David Ellis exhibition, we were surprised to find a second, and even more thoughtful one here, which transformed oil barrels into drums, since Houston is an oil town, after all.

Our next stop was the Contemporary Art Museum, which offered a survey of Glen Ligon’s work and a project show for Houstonite Robyn O’Neil. Unfortunately, the Ligon show did not expand my enthusiasm for his work, though I see a pathos that was previously well hidden. O’Neil’s consistent ink drawings of clumps of men in sweats provide double as interesting sociological surveys of man’s relationship to nature. The Menil exhibition of Eva Hesse drawings proved to be one of the biggest treats of my life. One can’t even imagine assembling so many drawings from so many corners of the earth… Nevertheless, the shear variety, whimsy, precision, and vocabulary of forms, was mind-boggling. What a disaster that this imaginative artist died so soon. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s “Indelible Images (trafficking between life and death)” offered a potent mix/political cocktail of North and South American artists, including Teresa Margolles, Regina Silveira, Oscar Muñoz, Daniel Martinez, and Felix-Gonzalez-Torres. One can’t imagine how Margolles’ works are received in Mexico. Her video tracks the dark, barren roads women take to return home from their jobs at maquiladoras, while her walls’s bricks were formed from sand collected at the sites where sexually-abused women had been left for dead. Muñoz’s fragile imagery, sometimes floating on water or frozen in ice, specifically addresses people’s sudden disappearance. Gonzalez-Torres originally used red/white/blue candy rockets to create untitled(for a man in uniform)1991, but since the manufacturer stopped producing them, red, white, and blue lollipops have been substituted! We welcomed a delicious meal at Montrose’s self-serve Gotham Café.

Last September, Speed Art Museum curator Julien Robson organized “nowhere, an exhibition of five Louisville artists for a gallery in Graz, Austria, which was scheduled to travel to the New Center for Contemporary Art, so I was psyched to attend this energetic opening, which featured Cynthia Norton’s band members playing unusual instruments. The next night, the Art Warehouse organized a Mardi Gras Benefit for Katrina Relief, which proved to be way wilder, as Cincinnati bands played music and “Barnyard Burlesque” performed their raucous strip-tease acts. Local artist/event organizer Emily Sullivan invited attendees to toss 100s of bottles at a wall-painted target that read “In Memoriam.” It took nearly 30 minutes for people to break all of the bottles, many of which inadvertently popped off the wall, rather than broke on impact as one first expected. With all of the glass flying, it’s a real miracle that no one’s head got knocked or finger nicked. “In Memoriam” demonstrated the real spectactle of public aggression.

March
While working in Saint Louis, I briefly stopped by both the Saint Louis Art Museum, which was purportedly showing a minimal exhibition, and the Saint Louis Contemporary Art Museum, whose Great Rivers Biennial, comprised of three juried solo exhibitions by local artists, was on view. SLAM’s minimal show was so minimal that we had already exited it (filled two galleries) and entered several others before we realized that it was over. Perhaps you wondered, as I did, why SLAM’s Richard Tuttle canvas Octagon wasn’t included in his survey. According to a guard whose worked there 15 years, they never de-install it…they sometimes place things over it. I guess they wanted it to hang in an adjacent gallery during their “minimal” exhibition. The Contemporary’s Biennial presented three different practices: Moses makes objects built from collected hi-fi hardware, Matthew Strauss produces large photographs of tiny hand-crafted objects, and Jason Wallace Triefenbach created a camping/graffiti sprawl that included videos of the artist’s in situ performance. Upstairs was the Glen Ligon work I Am a Man, a print that includes the print of his original painting of an “I Am a Man” sign plus a print of a museum condition report, which once characterized his painting’s condition situation. Ernest C. Withers’ famous photographs of the I Am a Man protest were featured a second gallery.

March 10- University of Cincinnati Myers Gallery, Carlos Runcie-Tanaka
Carnegie Museum, Covington, Kentucky
Riverside Café- Covington

Indianapolis Museum of Art- www.ima-art.org
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati- www.contemporaryartscenter.org
Delaware Arts Center Gallery-www.ArtsAllianceSite.org
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University- www.pickerartgaller.org
Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art- www.ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu
Mass MOCA- www.massmoca.org
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum- www.aldrichart.org
University of Texas-San Antonio Gallery- www.utsa.edu/a-gallery
artpace- www.artpace.org
San Antonio Museum of Art- www.samuseum.org
The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum- www.McNayArt.org
Art Museum of the University of Houston- www.blaffergallery.org
Station Museum- www.stationmuseum.com
Rice University Gallery- www.ricegallery.org
Contemporary Art Museum- www.camh.org
The Menil Collection- www.menil.org
Museum of Fine Arts Houston- www.mfah.org
New Museum for Contemporary Art- ?
Saint Louis Art Museum- www.slam.org
Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis- www.contemporarystl.org