WhinyBabyLand by lauralark

One day I may be meeting you and hearing how you've changed your life by saying, 'Farewell to Fat'.

2010-05-26T12:13:00.002-05:00

(Image: Michael Jackson Sad Clown - David DeVries)

Thank you, Richard Simmons. I could not have found more moving words of farewell myself.

That's right, Whinybabies--Whinybabyland, although unofficially defunct for quite some time, is no more. Similarly styled rantings may be found on another blog. Somewhere. Out there. Shining, alone.

However, be forewarned: When we say similarly styled, we do not mean that content will resemble that of Whinybabyland.

Thanks for your loyal support!

Farewell to Fat! --Your most faithful keeper of the WhinyBaby flame.

The Point Almost Poked My Eye Out

2009-03-07T15:52:00.002-06:00

My latest I'm With Stupid post on Glasstire: A look at girls of all ages in funny outfits. Beauty Knows No Pain: Images by O. Rufus Lovett and Leah DeVun at the Houston Center for Photography in Houston.

I'm With Stupid

2009-02-27T19:07:00.006-06:00

Dear, patient, tolerant WhinyBabyLand readers:

As you may have noticed in past months, there hasn't been much to read here. I've let you down, and I'm sorry. I know that many of your lives have been darkened by sadness and pain--pain that can only be caused by the lack of solid, self-absorbed, rant.

But for those of you who were wondering if there would ever again be a place to read the maudlin musings of a frustrated faux Erma Bombeck/Fran Liebowitz/Andy Rooney/David Sedaris wannabe-type, wonder no more! I'm With Stupid is the new avatar for WhinyBabyLand!

Same great taste, Different location--Here's my maiden post on Glasstire.

Enjoy!

I was more fun when I was blogging, but whadda gonna do?

2008-07-19T19:14:00.003-05:00

I miss writing my REAL whinybabyland shit, just because I don't have to be professional and I can be, like, all fucking snotty, and man-o-man do I miss hurling the insults. There's just not time, what with all of these bloody Glasstire reviews! Damn their oily hides. Anyway, I've got 2 new pieces on there (new to me, anyway--I think one of them's been there for a while): NeoHooDoo: Art For a Forgotten Faith @ the Menil Collection, Houston, and Mark Fox's Dust @ the Rice University Art Gallery.

Go! Read! The only excuse you could possibly have is that, if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother...

That's a Negative

2008-06-13T15:41:00.004-05:00

Holly Andres, “Behind the Old Painting,” 2007, C-Print at Quality Pictures Contemporary Art.

Portland-based artist/photographer/writer (formerly of Houston, TX) Chas Bowie, who once brought us the totally awesome blog YOUR DAILY AWESOME is back in the blogging business. For those of us who were bummed when Bowie quit showing us cool shit (even though it was probably taxing to find something cool every single day, we can now be happy again. According to Bowie, "The goal of That's a Negative is to provide a voice of critical discourse about the medium, to examine the lineage of contemporary trends, and to attempt to make sense of the practice and theories of global photography. I am exposed to photography in Portland more than anywhere else in the world, so the site will also serve as an ongoing record of photographic activity in Portland."

He's already got some great stuff up, so check it out.

Another Wonder of the World Wide Web

2008-06-10T18:15:00.004-05:00

OK, at the beginning of the year I said that I was taking myself off of MySpace
and Facebook because I felt too old to be doing such hoo-la-la. I mean, when one of the friends' 14 year old kid asked me to be her friend on Facebook, I felt like a big loser. But hey! What was my problem? What's wrong with having friends not simply of all races, creeds, and colors, but of all ages, too? Heck, bring it on.

So anyway, I actually did take myself off of MySpace, but it's simply not that easy to do with Facebook. I couldn't do it, anyway. But I can't seem to send off a personal message to a single person without accidentally sending it to 50 people. Oh, but there are so many joys to Facebook! Now that I'm back on it, I can piss off half the day by playing Scrabulous. And I can discover the joys of the Edinburgh-based comedy stylings of Idiots of Ants:

More importantly, I can keep up with loads of people I haven't seen or even thought about in years! One such person is Robin Jones, a guy that was going to the University of Houston when I was in the Creative Writing Program there and was teaching Comp 101 as a teaching assistant. Talented Robin was always popping up in the most unexpected places. Once he burst into my classroom, tap-dancing and singing about wanting to know about gerunds. Another night in some late '80's December, I was sitting in Cafe Express with a couple of friends, and a Santa Claus freaked me out when he made a run for me and sat on my lap. Needless to say, Mr. Claus was, in actuality, Mr. Jones.

Well, he's one of those people I hadn't seen or thought about for years. No, that's not true. Every time I've thought about gerunds, or Santa, for the past 20 years, he's the first thing that pops into my head. So now we've found each other again on Facebook, and the magic's back in my life! I thought that I was the biggest pop-culture geek on the planet, but I've found my match. Robin Jones has three pretty amazing blogs, and they all address everything from Robert Culp to Mannix. It's well-written, pretty entertaining stuff, and if you get bored with Facebook, you can always spend hours watching old TV trailers. I know I do:

Your Fiend Mr. Jones
Mr. Jones Challenges You to Cast a Fictitious Remake
You Know the Face...
He's a real find.
Even if he doesn't know what a gerund is.

It's Old. It's Weird. It's at the CAM. And on Glasstire.

2008-06-03T09:03:00.004-05:00

Yee-haw. I've written a review on The Old, Weird America at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston on Glasstire. Y'all click on over. It's more fun than a barrel full o' angry beavers.

Patrick Phipps' "It Took The Night to Believe" @ Domy Books, Houston: May 9-June 27

2008-05-19T15:40:00.004-05:00

A long time ago, my niece got this thing for Christmas that was something like the Visible Man anatomy model. Except this was just a visible head, kinda. It was clearly not meant for educational purposes; if you pushed a button, viscous green goo would trickle from its nose. I think all of the orifices did something of the same nature, but I remember the runny nose the best. My niece was like, "Cool!" I hadn't seen anyone get so worked up over a toy like that since a Power Ranger.

It fascinated me and weirded me out simultaneously, but, like my niece, I was like, "Cool!"

I had the same feeling when I studied Patrick Phipps' new sculptures in It Took the Night to Believe over at the Domy Bookstore. The sculptures, fashioned from plaster bandages, newspaper, masking tape, airbrush colors, acrylic paint, gesso, and model railroad landscaping supplies, have this odd fragility and a distinctly human quality. That is, if you're human and you've just been knocked around enough to require medical attention, and then, having gotten it, you had a dozen more mishaps.

It's interesting how his work has evolved from his drawings and paintings. His 2D stuff always had a rough, visceral feel; the way he let his paint drip, and his use of graphic materials and subject matter, done with such painterly flair, was done with such immediacy, you always knew you weren't far away from the artist himself.

One gets the same feeling here, but one also gets the feeling that, perhaps because they each have such a presence, that these are a band of Phipps' monstrous, misshapen, but still treasured children.

Phipps admits to having been influenced by both Franz West and Rachel Harrison, but I think there's more West here. Harrison's work has that blobbed-out look to it, but she tends, especially lately, to coat her objects with layer upon layer of paint, and I like Phipps' work more in this respect. (Keep in mind, people, that I spent a month in RachelHarrisonville, and I'm pretty sick of her stuff.) Phipps' work feels, despite its blobby misshapen quality, extremely delicate and fragile.

I hadn't seen Patrick's work for a while, and was really looking forward to seeing what he's been up to. It Took the Night to Believe came as a real surprise--like, Ewww, Cool.

Some People

2008-05-07T14:44:00.003-05:00

Kickasssss artist Harrell Fletcher, co-creator of the awesome online (and ongoing) project Learning to Love You More , brings us yet another way to relish in the richness of our communal existences. Some People, a new project that we're invited to join in on, is described thusly:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

So this will be a good opportunity to prove that your Aunt Dottie is infinitely more interesting than Paris Hilton--because we all knew she always was--by participating in the project. Or you can just do it to show how cool your ex-wife is, as Peter Max Lawrence did with Virginie Falquerho. Who knows? The person you choose to immortalize may well become the subject of a series of strange videos by Japanese people. It worked for me.

And They Call Themselves Christian

2008-04-28T09:13:00.004-05:00

It's just sad that, after waiting for hours in line to get into the Vatican, women who are missing a leg, or men who are missing a forearm or a stubby hand, will be turned away.

ho ho ho

2008-04-25T07:27:00.004-05:00

I've sold my soul to Glasstire!! I wrote a review on Lifting, a new show at Texas Christian University's Contemporary Arts Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Shit, I figured if I had to go to Fort Worth, I had to get paid for it. It only stands to reason. Why else would you go there?

Anyway, I'm proud of my re-entry into the world of art whoredom, so if you go to Glasstire Articles you can read about it. It's really a great show. Maybe there is a reason to go to Fort Worth after all.

paradise

2008-04-21T16:23:00.002-05:00

Nail salons are just weird.

Because It's Come to This...

2008-04-19T11:12:00.003-05:00

I gotta be honest: I don't know how people find me, and I don't know why they take interest in me, but for some reason they do, and they do. For the last couple of years, I have been hearing from a 22 year old musician named Olaolu Winfunke from Locust Grove, Georgia.

I don't know what he thinks a moon-faced whitey like myself can do for him, but he runs a business called AfricanConnect, where he hawks his music and wares. I go to his website every time I hear from him, but when I saw the "Street Team" on his website, I decided that I liked him and his pals and their electronic Afro-pop, if only for "Street Team" member "Whitney".

Hell, I've never been so enterprising. So there you go, Olaolu. You've worn this milquetoast suburban-raised middle-aged woman who wouldn't know a rap from an ankle bracelet right down. Persistence is obviously the key to winning a plug on the internationally renowned and prize-winning WhinyBabyLand!

Now He Tells Me

2008-04-18T13:04:00.002-05:00

I was recently alerted to a website called The Two Percent which kinda takes the tedium and dirty work out of gallery hopping in maze-like districts like Chelsea. The video's informative and funny, and although I don't completely think that the method accounts for all tastes, I think that it does a pretty good job at painting a wide and informative brush stroke. I just wish I'd known about it while I was up there this time; it seems that sheer fatigue prevented me from seeing some really good stuff.

I also liked the "about" section on the website's founder, David Behringer:

Originally from Seattle, David currently resides in Manhattan. All information presented in 'the two percent' is gathered and qualified only through his regular gallery viewing experiences. David is 30 and has no pets.

Now, there's a man you can trust.

When the Political is Beautiful

2008-04-08T11:52:00.003-05:00

Ya know, I tromped all over NYC looking for good art last month. I did see some, but for the most part, a lot of it started looking the same. I don't know whether that had to do with the current zeitgeist (crap aesthetic, current war or pre-teen inspired skulls), or the fact that I'd just seen too much of it.

Whatever the case, Anthony Thompson Shumate's Stations at Apama Mackey Gallery is a really refreshing change. "Stations", of course, refers to the stations of the cross, and the theme here is faithful in every detail to Catholic iconography; but in this case, the "stations" are actually filling stations: Gulf, Shell, Mobil, etc. One would think that an approach like this would be more than a trifle heavy-handed. But with the exception of a couple of over-the-top details (the wine and wafers offered at the entrance, for example), this show is so well executed, one gets the political references that are not diminished by the beauty of the works.

Hung in the dimly lit gallery are lit, faux-stained glass panels either portraying an oil company's logo or a view of a service station's sign. Each panel is brightly hued and indeed looks like a panel of stained glass. I was surprised to learn that each was constructed of plastic and resin. The atmosphere is strangely cathedral-like, and projected on the center of the floor is an animation mimicking the Roman Catholic insignia, but with the company logos neatly incorporated into it. One half expects there to be one of those "aaaaaahhhhh" sounds--you know, the ones they have in movies when Jesus appears before you--transmitted throughout the gallery, but instead it is appropriately silent. You just get that "aaaaaahhhhh" feel.

In the back part of the gallery, there are novena candles with the same images of the stations on them, along with a number of candles. Like the front gallery, it's solemn. It feels like you should get down and do some serious genuflecting. At first, I thought that this detail, like the wine and wafers at the front, was a little too much, but when I sat with it, I changed my mind. This exhibition is so well-executed, you find yourself a tad confused. Why do I get this feeling of solemnity and worshipfulness in a place with a bunch of oil company logos? Why do I come this close to saying a prayer before a bunch of kitschily decorated candles?

It's all in the atmosphere. I probably woulda gotten the same feeling from signs that said Pepsi and Target in that setting, though the "Stations" theme, at once almost too clever, becomes sublime. I mean, we all know that we're a nation of blindly worshiping gas-guzzlers; it's not as if we need a work of art to tell us that. And generally, when it does, I for one roll my eyes and run for the hills. But, like I said, Shumate makes it work here by presenting such a nice product. You get it, and that's good. But it's elegant and put together quite nicely, so the message feels less pounded into you than placed before you in an artistic sleight of hand.

On another note, I'm quite taken by Apama Mackey's funky, galleristic transformation. I thought that her last space was quite lovely, but this new spot on 11th, with its affixed shipping containers and semi-enclosed porches, feels really Houston. Kind of like an upscale ice house. I'm always interested in what Mackey's up to. She has a passion and enthusiasm that crosses over any line that could be considered practical, and it seems like she's not afraid of anything. Sure, sometimes she's up, sometimes she's down, but she's always looking for new things to show, and she's always fearless in her endeavors. Of course, most gallerists can't afford to do what she does, and I have no idea how she keeps her projects afloat (although working with the Clayton Brothers was most certainly a savvy move) but she's got the kind of energy that Houston needs. I mean, you can do anything here. That's one of things that makes being here more interesting than New York. It's too bad most people don't remember that.

And Finally...

2008-03-30T14:53:00.003-05:00

Well, I leave here tomorrow. This past week was packed with all kinds of peeps here for all of the fairs. My friend Francesca Fuchs came up from Houston for a few days to witness the mayhem, and fun was had by all. Of all of the fairs, the Armory Show was the best, although that's not saying too much. A fair's a fair's a fair. Even the best work would look better if it were hung on the outside on the pier; there's just no romance in those rows of stupid booths. Maybe if we were allowed to shoot at balloons with pop guns or throw ping pong balls at bowls of water so that we might take home one of the goldfish that came in them. Maybe if we could just stroll around gingerly licking at a wad of cotton candy. Ah, now that's my idea of a fair. Fuck, if the Pulse fair had just a funnel cake or two, the fact that their stopped-up trailer restrooms, and comically bad performance art would have been forgivable.

The fair that people were talking about, and that we trotted over to 34th street to take in, however, was the Volta fair. It was probably one of the worst things I've ever seen. Granted, it took place in a swanky office space, and it had beautiful, sweet-smelling restrooms and plenty of foam cubes to sit on when you got tired, but I swear I did not see one thing that was decent. The galleries at the Volta, unlike the other fairs, did not place out a sampling of its various artists' wares; instead, each gallery put on a solo show by a single artist. It sounded like a great idea, but the choices the galleries made on who to show was appalling. There wasn't one single interesting thing going on in there, which was just bizarre. How could so many galleries from around the world get it together so that they ALL showed something bad? Mind-boggling. We should get these folks on foreign affairs.

At least at the other fairs you saw an interesting piece here and there. I was in shock. But at least they didn't charge $30 like they did at the Armory. That would have set me off. I'm sure of it.

There was other stuff going on. Scope was at Lincoln Center this year. And there was something called the Bridge Art Fair that sounded a bit promising but which I lacked the energy to attend. Everything starts looking the same after a while. You get eyeball burn.

This is my last post, at least until I get to Houston and find something to snarl about.

Gut of the Quantifier @ Lisa Cooley Gallery

2008-03-20T16:42:00.008-05:00

Many of you might remember Lisa Cooley from Houston as the director of the ill-fated (I don't know if it was ill-fated...it's not like it got into a car wreck or anything) Mixture Gallery. However, Lisa's recently opened her own place on Orchard, Lisa Cooley Gallery, on the lower East side, and she's really got it goin' on. Her second show Gut of the Quantifier (apparently this title comes from lyrics by The Fall: I'm telling you now and I'm telling you this/Life can be an onward, downward/ Chip-chit-chip-chit-chip--and noooooooo I'm not hip enough to know something like that. I learned that bit of lore from Scott Calhoun) is elegant, subtle, and well put together. Gut, at first glance, seems nearly monochromatic; there are no screaming yellow zonkers anywhere in sight. Use of color in these pieces is quiet, almost sly. I can honestly say that there's not a bad piece in the show, by artists Tauba Auerbach (cool website), Barb Choit, experimental filmmaker and visual artist Paul Sharits, Scottish visual and performance artist Sue Tompkins , Matt Sheridan Smith, Lisa Oppenheim, Dan Estabrook, painter, poet, novelist, and all-round genius Brion Gysin, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, and, last but not least, Fred Sandback. That lineup in itself is like a who's who of cool in the hipster pages. Like I said, all of it was good. However, there are a few in there that really blew me away.

I particularly liked works by Matt Sheridan Smith (crappy photo above). Using figures found on various nations' currencies, Smith (and I'm winging it here, I didn't take notes when I was told about the process) silkscreens the images, coats them with a layer of the silver scratch-off stuff used on lottery tickets, and proceeds to scratch the image off onto the paper. The other images looked more like people you'd actually see on currency: royalty, historic figures. I couldn't figure out where this guy came from until it was pointed out that it was probably a soccer player.

Hey! How come other countries get cute soccer players on their money? Now that David and Victoria Posh-Spice- Beckham live here, couldn't we have them on some money? Photographed by Juergen Teller? By the way, I liked that show at Lehmann Maupin. There's something to be said for shameless commercialism.

But anyway, Smith's work was cool.

My favorite drawings were Sue Tompkins'. They were really simple, but elegant--lightweight paper (newsprint) with clean creases, and unassuming text tucked near the folds. You look like China, one of them reads. I also like the way they're installed, which allows the paper to flutter and float from the wall a bit. These pieces, I think, are emblematic of the subtle beauty that pervades this show.

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez' collages, from the series Weights Measures and Prices are also remarkable. Collage is a medium that can so often go bad if not done properly, but these are exquisite. She plays with notions of decor and design in an unsettling but effective manner. It's too bad that I can't take a decent photograph...sigh.

Like I said, this exhibition has nary a stinker. The arrangement is thoughtful, and the line-up itself is thorough, well-researched, and nicely put together. Cooley's is a small space,

and only about the width of a couple of bowling lanes, but she uses it well. And I have a lot of faith in Lisa Cooley's ability to maneuver through the New York art scene. Her first show, a two-person with Andy Coolquitt and Frank Haines, was a success, and Gut has been listed as an Artforum critic's pick.

I keep trying to get Lisa to run out in the middle of Orchard St. and, a la Mary Tyler Moore, toss her hat in the air.

Check it out--it even looks like her.

working title:

2008-03-17T19:51:00.006-05:00

So, this is how I wound up here on Sunday, March 16, from, roughly, 11 a.m. till 6 p.m.:

Last spring I met artist/curator Jacob Robichaux in Houston. Before I came up to NY, I told Jacob I was coming through and he told me he had a show up at Museum 52 on Rivington: ...bell, string, whistle, cube...

After seeing the show, a series of assemblages and wall pieces, I emailed him and said, Hey, congrats! So he emailed back and asked me to do a performance there.

Huh? I've done a lot of things, but performance isn't really one of them. I envisioned someone in a leotard doing interpretive dance with one of the objects in the installation. I cringed. But I went ahead and said yes, since no one would know me, anyway.

I borrowed the cruddy card table and chair from the apartment I'm subletting, found a manual typewriter in a weird shoe store on E. 72nd St., bought a kitchen timer and a pile of paper and set up shop. The performer was required to select one of the four black envelopes at the entrance of the installation; I got number three:

These were the objects from the assemblage, above. Using the various objects (twine ball, fabric, ring, box, book, painted sticks, bag), I went to work. After five minutes of writing about one or a combination of the objects, I'd crumple and toss my work.

The response, I noted, varied: most of the people who came in or went by clearly thought I was the gallerina, although I couldn't figure out why they would think that the gallery was so cheap that they couldn't afford at least an electric typewriter. Others came in and, noting the frustrated nature of my tossed off pages, asked if I was ok. My favorite response, however, was with the neighborhood kids--I noticed, after a while, that they were clapping and pointing every time I threw a sheet of paper. Look! She just threw one!

I'm gonna go out and buy those kids a TV. They're obviously desperate for entertainment.

The result? 54 vignettes, some interesting; many, predictably, not, beginning with the words "working title". I was ready to throw that fucking typewriter through the window after an hour, though. How did secretaries in the 1950's do it?

ArtTrek 3: The Whitney Biennial: Boy Is My Ass Tired

2008-03-14T08:20:00.030-05:00

I did my second pass over the Whitney Biennial today. You know, I really hated the 2006 Biennial, but looking at this year's batch, I now realize that the 2006 Biennial was better simply because it was so odious. It seemed like everywhere you looked, you went, "Ew. Weird. Ick." And the way it was crammed all together like some bizarre salon-style of shit? There was some good stuff, of course, but the overwhelming contrariness of the thing was just baffling. Well, like I said, I hated it. But at least hate's a response.

This year's show, for the most part, made me round just about every corner with a "Hmmm. Golly. Look's like Art, I guess." Oh, 2006! I miss you so!

Mixed in with the Oatmeal of Art that was this year's Biennial, however, there were a few chewy, chunky raisins full of wholesome goodness and flavor to keep me from rushing the guards and demanding a refund.

Unfortunately, none of these chunky-chewies happened to be paintings. I guess it's just the way of the post-post-post-modern art world, but this year's selections made me think that painting really is dead, at least within the architecture of the contemporary art space. Even works by artists I like--Mary Heilman, for example--looked dated and out of place. Hung at waist level on the 2nd floor in front of the elevators, their bright hues and painterly strokes just don't gel with the surroundings. As I was looking at them, I thought back to her exhibition of paintings at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. They didn't look good there, either. I wondered why such good paintings always looked like shit. After I was through scouring the Biennial, I went all the way up to the 5th floor to see the permanent collection. On view there was a Heilman, in a nice, intimate, clean & well lighted space with a few other paintings of similar size. It looked good, and it looked right at home. I wondered if that was the problem with some of the other painters I saw.

Robert Bechtle (above) was another example of good painters hung bad. I really like this guy's work, but again, it looked out of place. After seeing the Heilman painting upstairs, it occurred to me that Bechtle's work would have been best served had it been put in a gallery with other paintings, preferably, again, of similar size. I'm thinking he woulda looked great in a room with a Hopper or two.

One of my biggest disappointments, however, was the room devoted to Karen Kilimnik's work. Oh, I think we all know how I generally feel about Kilimnik's work. Remind me to tell you, sometime, about the time I tried to stalk her at 303 Gallery. With four or five small, characteristically sloppy paintings installed in a space adorned a fancy chandelier glittering at just-above-eye-level, however, Kilimnik's work, which she usually artfully throws together with aplomb, looked stripped-bare. When Karen's done properly, as she so often is, her splashes of fancy contrast her pathetic painting style and make a statement that only a reclusive, celebrity-obsessed woman can make. Here, though, it's too much to be effectively minimal, and not enough to draw the viewer into her fantasy world. Boy, was I bummed. Now I'll have to track her down and kill her.

But! I've learned my lesson. My inclination is to do a lot of bitching and save the best for last, but seeing as how my computer screwed me over and I lost half of one of my previous posts, and I had decided to save the best for last that time, I shall avoid that pitfall. It's really hard for me; bitching about things is so damned fun. And I will say, without elaborating, that Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhoades suck some huge, major, horribly stinky ass. Rachel got a brief reprieve for a piece or two in the Unmonumental show, but really, Rachel, in the immortal words of the Simpsons' groundskeeper Willie, back to the loch with you, 'Nessie.

But I did see some great shit, so I'll talk about that now and leave the worst (for the most part) where it ought to be.

My favorite piece in the entire show was a 4-channel video by Omer Fast, The Casting. Told on four screens in a series of silent tableaux are two stories narrated in voiceover by a U.S. soldier in Iraq. One is a rather bizarre tale, in which he meets and dates a German girl, only to find that she's a self-mutilating nut who drags him in to meet her disapproving family and then practically kills them driving home. The other is a story in which he, one of several soldiers stuck on a deserted road, accidentally shoots an Iraqi civilian. The stories intertwine seamlessly, and the actors, in seeming freeze-frame, blink and breathe as the camera dwells on their individual moments of horror. The narration switches from one scene to the next without a hitch, exploring the complexity and incomprehensibility of how memories mingle in one's psyche, and how terrifying events somehow resonate equally with absurd, less harmful situations. The beginning, as well as the end, shows the narrator pitching his story before a small group of filmmakers, only to be told that his tale is too long, that something like that couldn't possibly engage an audience. Relating it like this makes such a framework come off as pat, but the chaotic nature of the intertwining stories, in contrast with the mock stillness of the actors in each frame really does mimic the nature of subjectivity and memory. It's a disturbing, gorgeous work.

Matthew Brannon's installation, also occupying a room of its own, was the model of economy. Even the small--probably 8-10' wide and maybe 8' tall--partitions installed to exhibit his modestly scaled letterpress prints seemed perfectly planned for the space. There was a lot going on in this room, yet it neither felt crowded nor overwhelming. His letterpress prints, clean and spare, generally had one or two images, stark, clean, iconographic shapes, with often hilarious text. A lone shape, mimicking a piano as seen from above, reads, guess. no guess again, and then continues to relate how the writer fucked some guy in a piano bar years before.

Another completely hilarious text talks about how the artist suddenly realizes the absurdity of his own being whilst standing in line at an art supply store. There he is, buying art supplies, standing in line at an art supply store, amidst crafters, students. His mildly paranoiac meanderings remind me of the time when I was pulling into Texas Art Supply and I saw Hiram Butler in the parking lot. I said to him, jokingly, Hey! Only artists are allowed to be at Texas Art Supply! To his credit, Hiram drily replied, Real artists don't shop at Texas Art Supply.

He had me there.

Brannon also has a nice installation on the largest wall in the Room. Painted in a flat black are a couple of blocky grids, with drapes of sea-foam green hung neatly to the sides. This guy's a genius with color. Somehow, the work screams color and design, yet doesn't feel like a misplaced thesis by some interior design grad student. A small pink shelf, hung impossibly high and stocked with pink books and bookends, adds to the i'm fucking with your ideas of arrangement sensibility. Nice.

The closest thing to a successful "painting" installation was by Lisa Sigal. Using a wall, including the door, of what looks to be something ripped out of some dead granny's house before demolition, Sigal tacks on a battered awning from an old circus tent. The effect comes off as less vintage than canvas with an aged patina. I found myself looking at this installation with even more interest the second time around.

I guess the smartest way to approach painting in this show was with a tad of irony, as Ellen Harvey did in her installation Museum of Failure. This work is first met with a large black plexiglas wall, with cartoony-looking (think of a gallery wall in a Pink Panther cartoon) wainscoting and painting-less picture frames. One "frame" is cut out to show a red wall painted with tromp l'oeil frames, still-lifes, and scenes from what could be the artist's studio. This red wall is also painted with faux wainscoting, as is the rest of the room. I suppose that any romance one would have about this wall of "paintings" behind the wall of plexi "frames" is shattered by the harsh fluorescent lights installed on the back of the plexi wall. Although each of the "paintings" is realistic, it is executed rather ham-fistedly and doesn't really pretend to represent painting at all, but, rather, emphasizes how one chooses to look at that kind of work.

I've recently taken to loathing things that look purposely thrown together, random, or crappy. Mitzi Pederson, taking crappy- or found-looking objects and with a single element transforming them into pieces of purely poetic abstract sculpture, really makes one re-evaluate notions of formalism. I couldn't really find an image on the web that illustrates the genius she demonstrates with her assemblage of broken cinder blocks. On each raw, busted edge of concrete, Pederson applies a thick, furry layer of charcoal and black glitter. This touch effects a strange metamorphosis on the bricks; they seem weightless, as if, with a swift boot, one could scatter them across the gallery.

Another memorable (perhaps because it was so bloody weird) video installation was by Mika Rottenberg . Installed in a walk-in barnyard structure are (I think) 5 videos of women with impossibly long hair (think Crystal Gale) milking goats to make butter or cheese, collecting water to wash their impossibly long hair, or scampering about trying to herd their cheesemaking goats. Each task the women tackle, whether it be gathering up animals or their own tresses, is almost comically laborious. One woman lies on a high wooden plank whilst the rest ceremoniously thread her locks between suspended metal rings; another scene shows the same woman with her hair cascading a story downward while her co-workers dutifully squeeze water from her just-washed hair into a vessel. Every act is one of economy and ridiculously long hours of work. An entire afternoon produces only one square of cheese, one washed head of hair. Even though, at first, it seems as if you're watching something from another era--like visiting Amish country--settling into the work makes you feel that one thing never changes: a woman's work is never done.

Amanda Ross-Ho's enormous blue plastic catbox, complete with litter, was also a special treat. Mmmm...somehow the words "treat" and "catbox" shouldn't go together. But no matter. Ho's sensibility, somewhat ironic but still crazy with '70's-ish pop references--giant silhouettes of macrame hangings cut from thick black canvas, cruddy prints from little-kid tee shirts (a petulant looking cartoon bear is labeled "stubborn"--think of the little cartoon devils saying "I'm a lil' devil")--is paired with what seems to be random clutter. A framed white-painted bulletin board, riddled with phantom tack marks, sports a snapshot here, a flyer there. You can really feel Ho's playful and self-deprecating spirit here. She's a lil' devil.

Finally, the last (and not least) work I was pretty crazy about was Olaf Bruening's video installation, Home 2. The viewing room, decked out like a scene out of Kon Tiki: screen lashed to a bamboo frame, seating of bamboo benches, set the stage for the travels of Brian Kerstetter, an wild n' crazy white guy out to "experience" the world.

Kerstetter's one of the best things I've ever seen. Fearless, entitled, and naive in that upper-middle-class white guy way, he travels around the world--to Japan, New Guinea--striving for a real experience with the natives. This guy's unbelievable (and unless he's actually a spawn of Satan or a genetic anomaly, he's wearing insanely light blue contact lenses, which make him seem even whiter and creepier); the kinda guy who goes everywhere making everybody laugh. Hilariously extroverted, he communicates with everyone in a grandiose pantomime. He buys a huge bunch of bananas from a native market vendor, then chases her around and around the market as she laughs and screams. He persuades a group of Japanese youths to sport Pokemon masks and march through the streets of Tokyo. He meets some wealthy Arabs (?) in a Japanese hotel and somehow persuades them to tie each other up, as if taken hostage by terrorists, and pose for pictures.

You find yourself laughing in disbelief at every escapade, and Kerstetter always includes you, the viewer, into his schemes as he whispers to the camera. It's as if you and your zany friends travel, Lonely Planet guide in hand, throughout the third world. The jungles are lush, or the hotels are full of things that look foreign and funny to you, and you can always count on the housekeeping or cooking staff to play along with a practical joke. You're laughing as he rather innocently (hey! he's just being friendly! he's just having fun) but completely condescends to these people.

The tone drastically changes, however, when Brian encounters a part of the third world that is neither lush nor charming with local color. Kerstetter is one of these guys that never sits down--his enthusiasm is infectious, and, therefore, so is his disillusionment and dismay. Upon encountering a site that is strewn with rotten garbage and where the natives are burning tires, he becomes so depressed, he tosses his money to passing children.

This work is brilliant; it's a perfect fit for this hyperactive actor, as his intensity magnifies our inability, as denizens of the first world, to remotely comprehend that of the third. And it's a lovely illustration of white liberal guilt, as is clearly demonstrated when Kerstetter dejectedly hands out his foreign bills. Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, followed that novel up with the less successful You Shall Know Our Velocity. In the second work, a novelist who has attained great riches and great success is so burdened by the guilt of having obtained so much money in what he perceives as a shallow way, travels over the world with a few buddies with the express purpose of giving all of his money away. He thinks that doing this will alleviate his guilt and will make him feel as if he's done good, but it does neither. Eggers' characters' adventure of ridding himself of the money, followed the the ensuing feeling of futility perfectly mirrors Bruening's work here. Why can't I make you people have a better life? And what makes me so sure I can give you one?

By now, if anyone has read this far, you're probably thinking: Who does this WhinyBabyLander think she is? Norman Fucking Mailer? Well, if we've all gotta throw our work into a huge vacuum, we might as well do it in a grandiose fashion.

Now, I will wrap up this preposterously long post with the Coulda Been Betters and the Couldn'ta Been Worse categories.

Spike Lee When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Now, in all fairness, this was good. I think. I mean, who the fuck is going to sit through 244 minutes? It's practically impossible. The museum opens at 11, closes at 6. And they don't allow food in there. I mean, come on. I hope that someday I'll be able to see the whole thing on Netflix.

Carol Bove's airy installation, Night Sky over New York was lovely, but what makes her work really great and edgy, in general, is her ability to tie contemporary sensibilities in with her '60's Danish Modern twists. Coulda been better.

John Baldessari. I know I should be more respectful, but here: Bleccchhdessari.

Roe Etheridge: Who proclaimed these photographs interesting? Where can I find this person and stuff one of them down his or her throat?

Michael Smith: To be truthful, Michael Smith is the kinda guy who should, finally, get some real recognition. I mean, look at him! Everything about him and his work says, I'm a Good Guy!
And he's a clever guy. Although the video and Sears portraits shown here at the Biennial were already shown in the CAM's Nexus Texas exhibition, they seemed weightier here. Or maybe they just weren't surrounded by as much crud as at the CAM show. I really hated that show, and wound up calling it Blexus Texas, but you know how I love making up stupid nicknames. Unfortunately, his video Portal Excursion was projected on a big screen at the Whitney, and it just looked, production-wise, like shit. It is a clever piece, although I can't seem to shake the image of 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney out of my head when I watch it.

Phoebe Washburn: Washburn's installation here was neither particularly ambitious nor visually compelling. Some 2x4's here, a couple of gurgling fish tanks there. I'd seen it in L.A. in, what, like 1993? Also, there was something about this whole construction that made me want to point and say, Look, Pop! It's a Habitrail for environmental nuts!

Charles Long: I told you people to keep your crappy-looking papier mache shit at home.

Seth Price: Hi, I vomited up some shapes that kinda look like Africa. Let's trace 'em out and make 'em look like slick panels of polyurethane!

William Cordova: Whatever. Right around the corner from this crappy construction of 2x4's that undoubtedly held cryptic symbols of some ethnic identity, there was a pretty decent crappy construction with plywood and a few mirrors by Heather Rowe. Why must we be plagued with two crappy carpenters when just Heather would do just fine?

Sherrie Levine: Here's another one I oughta have more respect for, but just because I have respect for my Grandma doesn't mean I need to put her in a show.

Frances Stark: Great drawings, but lady, leave your PowerPoint lectures for the university lecture circuit! If you're saying something stupid, it's not going to be any less boring or stupid if it dances across a computer screen.

Leslie Hewitt: I don't get it. Oh, yeah. Maybe I'm not supposed to get it. Is it because I'm white and the references here are so post-identity politics that I'm supposed to assume that this random shit means something? I think I must be a racist.

Eduardo Sarabia: A bodega/warehouse type space loaded with oversized, fabricated items. Visually, this was actually one of the better installations. However, after looking through the free 'catalog' that I picked up inside the show, I realized that each object was actually a part of some huge project this guy has going on, including producing his own line of tequila. Cute, but somebody's obviously got too many production assistants on hand. It irritated me.

OK, I have officially started to look a bit like a mole. My eyes are becoming sensitive to the light.

Until I write again...

More News From the Girl's Room

2008-03-12T10:19:00.004-05:00

I started this post when I was waiting for the cable guy to replace the cable box and the modem. Then I went to the gym, and the gym up here is kinda crappy. There's much to be said for Texas and its wide-open spaces. The machines are really close together--I mean really close together, and there was this fat guy on the machine next to me, and he smelled reallyreallyreally awful, and to make it worse, he kept grazing his arm against me. I almost screamed. Then, when he was done with his workout, instead of getting down off the machine like a normal human being and letting the rest of us breathe, he stood there and read for 15 minutes. Finally, I looked over to see what he was reading, since he hadn't turned the page for a while (how would I know? because he fucking touches me every time he turns the bloody page!) and it turns out that he's been reading an advertisement for handbags out of some newspaper circular.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I think that all 2 of you who read WhinyBabyLand know that I do not have an objective bone in my body, so this experience may well color any and all commentary I have. Maybe not. It's just a warning.

Just thank your lucky stars I'm not the president of the United States or somebody who could do real harm on a simple whim. Oh, wait a second--that is the president of the United States.

Anyway, I saw Shannon Plumb's Together at Sara Meltzer.

Plumb's videos, some of which can be seen on her website, with a slapstick sensibility, are generally pretty hilarious. In Together, which can be viewed on a '70's console from the comfort of a ratty pair of armchairs positioned on an equally ratty rug, Plumb explores the daily life of a couple whose lives were inspired by the artist's grandparents. Shannon Plumb plays both the tired, polyester-clad, constantly struggling wife as well as the rowdy and sometimes mean-spirited husband. She's genius in both roles, but it's the man that makes you laugh the most. Plumb is pretty convincing as the frumpy wife, but she looks nothing like a man in the role of the husband and succeeds only in coming off as a post-adolescent boy with a blonde caterpillar of a mustache. This shortcoming makes the character more than a tad ridiculous, but the artist indulges in the highly comic and makes Grandpa seem both absurd and believable. The video is divided by the days of the week, including Ash Wednesday, in which the wife is trying to pray, whilst the husband does what he can to distract her efforts. The greatest thing about this piece is that Plumb doesn't have any problem turning the narrative on its head to expose what little facade she's created for her characters. In the video's funniest segment, husband and wife sit at the table. Wife subtly annoys husband, and husband returns the favor by playing some sort of air-instrument on the kitchen table. The husband really gets into it, banging his head along to the beat, until Plumb's boy-wig goes flying across the room. The incident humbles him briefly, but as the story moves on to the next day of the week, you see that he's back to his old self.

Shannon Plumb is a funny, perceptive artist, and the silent war between the husband and wife has a lot of familiar aspects to it. For those who've resided with another and have turned around almost violently to find out why the other person insists on making that noise, (and we probably all have) her work, including her past videos, has an undeniable universality. And I don't know if plot or writing can account for all of it. Plumb's a really good actress, but she still seems to look like herself in a stupid wig in every role. There's a sweetness and expressiveness about her face that makes everything relevant and ridiculous at the same time.

I guess the incident mentioned in the beginning didn't make me bitchy as I thought it would. And I can't even smoke in the apartment I'm renting here, and I still didn't get nasty. I must've loved this stuff.

Everything Old is Really a Whole Lot Better Than Anything New Again

2008-03-12T09:23:00.003-05:00

I usually pass Paul Kasmin Gallery by. The stuff they always have on display is so impossibly beyond blue chip, I've either seen too much of it, or I was never interested in it to begin with. Like whenever I pass by some place that has Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg on display. Dare I say it? I don't care! Oh, I like a thing of Johns or Rauschenberg here and there; I really like Johns' sculptures more than anything else. But voice these sentiments aloud, and people treat you as if you'd just called Grandma a whore.

For me, however, there is an exception to the old timer rule. I never, ever get sick of Warhol. Go figure.

However, yesterday, when I was walking past Paul Kasmin (the place I always blow off, as previously stated), and I saw that they were showing Warhol drawings, and I just thought, in my slacker-y way, that I'd seen enough of him and needed to move on. I don't know why I turned around; I have a feeling it had something to do with the pale, pale, Pepto-Bismol pink shade they'd painted the front display wall. But inside were drawings, according to the gallerina, that had not been released by the Warhol estate until very recently.

All were delicate drawings of people of all ages, many of them executed with the ink transfer method he used on his original drawings. Each was of a modest scale--less than 20", which, of course, lent an air of intimacy. But it was Warhol's use of tempera and ink in muted pastels and faded grays--in some pieces filling the negative space around the line drawings, in others cascading down the page and through the lines--that made them so exquisite. I have seen (and loved) a lot of Warhol's drawings--the cats, the shoes, etc. But this set of drawings, all dated 1953, was something I hadn't happened upon before. It was a great surprise for me.

From here on out, I promise not to be closed-minded about all those old farts like--oh, God, what am I talking about? One should never promise to quit being disrespectful and irreverent if one has no intention of carrying that out.

ArtTrek 2: Mission of The Damned

2008-03-07T17:59:00.013-06:00

It's not all that bad. I just like dramatic titles.

"Nina in Position" at Artists Space is a great show. Employing Benjamin's assertion that "to live is to leave traces", curator Jeffrey Uslip put together a diverse and impressive lineup, from Haim Steinbach to Jack Pierson to Roni Horn. My favorite piece in the show, by Mary Kelly, is three black and white transparencies in light boxes, "Flashing Nipple Remix #1". The series begins with a photo of 5 clothed women with their breast and groin areas highlighted like weird jack o' lanterns, while in the remaining shots the figures are removed, but the highlighted areas take over, becoming glowing, static drawings. Beautiful.

Unfortunately, the only image I could grab off the web of Martin Wohrl's (there's an umlaut in there somewhere) work at Spencer Brownstone was of one of his "Gloriole" (is that supposed to mean "Glory Hole", or have I just got my mind in the gutter?) wall pieces. And they're good, don't get me wrong--the sunbursts of various found, hand-cut laminates are nice looking. But the rest of the work, fashioned from antique doors, doorknobs, etc., some cut into goth-looking letters and shapes and mounted on what look to be rickety jungle-gym equipment, were even better.

I really prefer providing my own Krappy Kamera pictures, but I must've gotten a bad batch o' batteries.

Jen DeNike's single channel video at Smith-Stewart was far less annoying than I thought it would be when I first walked in. Young women draped in the original 13 star flag, humming the National Anthem, ceremoniously dropping their flags one by one and exiting the stage. It actually struck me as rather humble, and I was liking it until I read the press release, which said something about how the women in the video were dropping their cloths in a symbolic gesture to show how women are now busting out of the shackles of male oppression.

I suppose it's there. But as soon as I read that, I walked out. Note to self: Never, Ever read the press release

The group show at D'Amelio Terras was a sure-fire snooze, but a video by Sanford Biggers, in which mostly white guys but a couple of black guys clamber up whatever tree that happens to be handy, and in whatever weather. The video was ok, but what made it better was that every so often, the whole room was bathed in a couple of flashes of warm red light.

Note to self: Flashing warm red light makes things better, much like a shot of Jameson's. Next art project, add flashing warm red light.

OK! Heads up! I just want to mention that I absolutely hate George Condo's work, so I normally wouldn't go out of my way to mention it. But, um, sputter! His Christ: The Subjective Nature of Objective Representation at Luhring Augustine is so stupid it's almost thrilling.

But so many of my friends love ol' George! What's my problem? Well, I finally figured it out today. Forgive me if this is too obvious and the rest of you have known this for years, but if you look at Condo's paintings and then think back to those cartoons Don Martin did for Mad magazine in the '70's, you'll see such a strong parallel, you'll never look at Condo's work again without thinking, "Why, Don Martin should be suing this smartass!" or "Martin's so sublime and original! What's this obnoxious 80's painter think he's up to?

Attention: I should tell you that, of the images above, the first is Don Martin, while the second is Condo...

OK, here's where I'm pissed. I had written about all of the stuff below, and my internet connection crashed and I lost all of this. And I'm not writing it again, so I'll just breeze through.

Jean-Michel Othoniel at Sikkema Jenkins: appealing for those of us who love glitz and glam and still wanna drag out our Barbies (Math is hard!) Othoniel's just a Michael Petry without the content, but boy, do those big blown-glass strings of beads look good!
Othoniel fails miserably, however, when he tries to introduce content, as he does with his centerpiece in Secret Americana. That big old-timey covered wagon, interspersed with a few panels of transparent, painted glass and the occasional shiny glass orb made me wanna track down this guy, grab him by the shoulders and shout, "We don't hate you because you're beautiful, but we do hate you when you try to think!"

Oooooh, I had so many good things to say about the Drawing Center! Namely, that whomever it was that deemed drawing a Big Important Thing needs this newsflash: TIME TO FOCUS ON NEW TREND. Christ, does the world really need another a) drawing that looks like a meticulously rendered map of the Congo; or b) another "installation" strewn with colored threads and Post-It notes, where some rube from Iowa can stroll up and say, "Look, Ethel! It's a drawing!" ?

I think not.

I hereby pronounce this fascination with drawing tired. Let's all put down our #2 Ticonderogas and go outside for some fresh air and sunshine.

This being said, however, I did like Andrea Sulzer's 101" x 101" drawing, detailed below, which somehow managed to escape all of the cliche.

Sterling Ruby's show, in the Drawing Room across the street, was a hodgepodge of collage, drawings scratched onto refrigerator-sized blocks of laminated particle board, and a few gestural pieces, like the one seen below.
With the exception of the gestural stuff, Ruby's work made me think one thing: Aw, the poor guy didn't make the cut for the Unmonumental show at the New Museum. His collages, compared to the artists' at the New Museum, were trite, juvenile, topically snooze-inducing, poorly crafted, and his scratched-out refrigerator boxes were neither thought-provoking or visually compelling.

To make matters worse, Metro Pictures has a show of his crappy-looking-but-not-crappy-looking-enough kiln works in its upstairs gallery. One wonders how this kind of shit becomes marketable, let alone fashionable. Go figure. But, hey, Sterling Ruby? What a name! I wish my name was Sterling Ruby. I could be an artstar or a pornstar. The world would be my oyster.

At Goff + Rosenthal Chiharu Shiota's installations were so very Japanese but yet not Japanese. Despite all the visual noise and the feeling that one got of being a fly caught in a web, this work somehow imparted a certain quiet. I'm still trying to figure out why.

And here's a mini-rant for ya: I want to say that I've never, ever seen anything at Leo Koenig worth a good god-damn. Somehow, this Big Daddy of the Bad Boy Club seems to corral the most godawful shit I've ever seen. Still, I mention it because I would like to point out yet another example of the Pre-Teen Skull Fetish Club, here demonstrated in the work of Aidas Bareikas.

Also, I bring this up because I just think it's a shame that Houston's very own beloved/detested Paul Horn never made it to New York. Here he would be a superstar! Christ, just sing the following lines to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys' Let's Make Lots of Money: You've got the trash, I've got the glue gun, let's see Leo Koenig...

Finally, and this is the biggest shame for me, since I'd written 4 pararaphs about this show, and I'd saved it for last, since it was my favorite, but Catherine Sullivan's Triangle of Need was really the best thing I've seen in a long time.

Each of the videos shown in the three rooms at Metro Pictures was thought-provoking, visually stunning, and smart as hell. Like I said, I wrote a lot on it, but now I'm tired, pissed, and hungry, and I'm not going to do it again.

Butchered recap: Woe of Poe meets Nigerian email scams meets Cro-Magnun man dressed up like 19th century dandy. Unbelievable how she made that thing work.

It's funny though. It's been a while since I've really thought that the girls got it goin' on more than the boys, but between Sullivan, Martha Rosler, and Mary Kelly, I'm thinking it might be time to dust off that old Helen Reddy 45" vinyl and start jammin'.

7th Grade, All Over Again

2008-03-06T11:46:00.011-06:00

(Foto of Mark Bradford pilfered from the art: 21 blog.)

Yesterday I got my butt off the couch and saw some art in the New Bowery district. Man, a lot of established galleries have jumped the Chelsea ship to open up shop there, and a few Williamsburg galleries have gone upscale to join that neighborhood, too.

I went to a few galleries, all of which will be discussed, but first I want to say that the "Unmonumental" show at the new New Museum space kicks some serious ass. Three floors of a lot of pretty damned cool shit. Usually, when I'm talking about a show, it's easiest to talk about the things I like, since there are only a few of them; however, in this show, there were only a few things I didn't like. And I only like to talk about things I don't like when I can get all snippy about them, so I'm not going to bother. Oh, okay, you've twisted my arm, I will bother: Sam Durant's work is, in general, pretty stupid. Not worth the cliched thought put into those stupid things.

And although I'm not normally nutty about the kind of sculptures that artists like Rachel Harrison make--it's all subjective here, folks: just looking at all of that goopy clay shit drives me bats--sculptures like the one they showed here really made sense. This show's just so well put together. I don't know whether it's the space--good feng shui--or the placement, or what. It looked good.

And the 2D stuff was pretty great, too. A particular winner here is Mark Bradford's gi-normous collage/painting (he's working on it in the picture above). There were also some great collages by Martha Rosler . I'm telling ya, that woman's old enough to be my mother and she's still cranking out kickass, relevant art. Even her stuff from the '60's still seems fresh. Which is more than I can say for Nancy Spero's work, which was also in the show. Spero's one of those artists that always make me feel guilty for not liking. I mean, shouldn't I be more respectful for a pioneer of feminist art? But if I think like that, I'll have to be thinking that I should also be respectful of Judy Chicago and her revolting triangle of twats known as "The Dinner Party". Bad art knows no gender.

Christian Holstad's work also made me a tad tired. I used to follow it with some interest, but now I often find myself thinking, whilst looking at one of his masturbatory man collages, "Ok, you're here, you're queer, we're used to it, now please turn the page."

I really liked John Stezaker's work: subtle, almost seamless and surreal photo collages. Looking at each one was a pleasant surprise.

But now, dear blog-reader, if you have gotten this far, you are probably wondering, Well, what's up with the 7th grader bit in the title, you WhinyBaby? Well, here is is: do you notice, in the picture of Bradford, that, amidst the silvery papers and the drawings, he has drawn a skull? Well, in my wanderings yesterday, I found that, above all else, the motherfucking skull was the predominantly recurring image.

I have no idea what that's about. I really don't. Are people hearkening back to Van Gogh?

Somehow, I doubt it. Is it that I mostly saw art by 20-somethings, who are enamored with tattoo imagery and a Romantic yearning for Death? Who knows. It is weird, though. I think skulls are kinda stupid as subject matter. But that's just me.

But do you not believe me? Check it out:

At 31 Grand, FRANCESCA LO RUSSO
“WE STRETCH AND CURL IN LIGHT, AND BATHE IN YOUR HOT BRIGHT WATERS,
LISTENING FOR YOU, O, CUMBRE VIEJA” (a dorpy, self-important title if I've ever read one)

Kind of Robyn O'Neil, minus the bizarre subject matter and quirky sensibility. Like, "Hi, here's my boyfriend Zak in some Williamsburg vacant lot!"

Or her paintings: same Frida Kahlo lack of facility, paired with slacker subject matter:

Somebody's mommy shouldn't have let her stay up so late to watch those scary movies.

I did like this small piece, tucked away in the back:

Somehow Hell n' the Hurricane seemed a little less forced here.

And then "Off the Grid" at Eleven Rivington, a group show with Caetano de Almeida, John Hodany, and Michael Lazarus. Paul Hodany's work, which included a machine that really didn't work (thank God I didn't lose my quarter) seemed like something that ought to be picked up by Mattel toys:

I'm not saying that art shouldn't be colorful and fun, but does it have to be so fucking stupid?

And finally, at the gallery show I liked the best, was British painter Paul Housley at Sunday. I just think this guy can paint.

It's so uncool, it's cool.
But still, I round the corner, and there's a painting of a goddamned skull. Am I denying my mortality with my skull-displeasure? Am I simply unwilling to acknowledge that I have one of my own rattling around underneath my hair? I doubt it, and I don't even feel like analyzing it. Enough with the skulls already! Move on to the radial ulna.

Yeah, Once in a While I Still Look at the Shit

2008-02-25T18:30:00.008-06:00

My blogging habits are disappointing, at best (to indicate how disappointing, I should mention that I started this post a week ago). I should be out there, trackin' down that Houston Art World (still, in my mind, an oxymoron)and pronouncing judgment in my usual erudite and articulate fashion. But am I? Heck, no. I'm sitting in front of the TV, allowing young tads like Sean Carroll to blog their brains out and show what a slug yours truly really is.

But hey, I do look at art once in a while, and, on even rarer occasions, I write about it. And I actually left the compound not one day, but a mindboggling two, specifically to see some shows. I think I should receive some kind of award. So here we go! Yippee.

On Friday night I saw Aaron Parazette's show at McClain Gallery, which was eye-popping fun. Sure, you think about your eyeballs popping out of your head, and the last thing you think is 'fun'. Ha. Me Funny. But so much of Aaron's work does revolve around exciting things (surfing) and cool things (surfers), while the vibrancy of the colors, the rather wacky effect imparted by the jumbled-up letters (which spell out words I generally don't understand, anyway, as I don't know surfer lingo), and the tiny pinstripes of color edging each letter all add up to a pretty powerful visual impact. And the work looked great at McClain gallery--it had that white cube thing going, but with a bit more warmth (is it the windows?) than I've seen in a really slick space in a while. If whatever brainiac who desiged the gallery had thought about parking, well, things would be perfect over there.

Next, I hustled over to the Station Museum to see the AES + F exhibition. One of my friends (whose opinion I trust--a rarity, indeed)told me that this Russian collective's work was her favorite thing at the last Venice Biennale.

Well, shucks, I don't know what spins the wheels of them thar furriners, but this exhibition left me, for the most part, as cold as the corpses that were featured, with fancy clothing fotoshopped upon their dessicated hides, in the front gallery of the exhibition space. As I mentioned, this portion of the exhibition was a series of life-sized (perhaps a bit smaller) photos of corpses with fancy clothes put on them. They were exhibited in these glowing light boxes. I was kinda bugged by the whole concept. OK, fine, there's this rotting post-mortality sporting worldly goods. Wow, what a concept. Why didn't somebody from Tales of the Crypt think of something so gol'-danged cool? Oh. Yeah. He or she did. All they really needed to do to slam-dunk a heavy-hander like that would have been to make it a two-person show with Sharon Kopriva.

I have to say, too, that knowing the whole thing was done in Photoshop kind of made it worse. Now, don't get me wrong--it would be bad no matter how you slice it. But the infinite capabilities of Photoshop made the whole thing irritating. I mean, why not do something even cooler with Photoshop? Like make a dead lady with a face like a kitty-cat?

Whatever.

And then there was the seriously annoying, pedantic video. Complete with a score as melodramatic as something out of "The Ride of The Valkyries", this piece of overly pixelated slop was just tiring. Of course, the pixar-type imagery of big, evil, technological things choo-chooing and boom-booming and operatically crash-crashing through the landscape just had to be paired with a sub--oh, I'd say "plot", but you'd have to have a plot to have a subplot--of youths of different ages, creeds, and colors about to do nasty violences upon one another with big bats and knives and swords. Of course, the "real" people look oddly unreal (which I'm sure was the point), but I found myself wondering why, with all the makeup and digitization with even the real people, they didn't airbrush out one fellow's rather troubling acne.

And the operatic, laborious yet cloying, dramatic movements of the actors just added to the heavy-handed quality of the piece. OOOOOO! Violence bad! And here comes the evil choo-choo train, representing evil, insensitive industry!

I think I would have preferred, in the middle of all of this high-handed pomp, a gum-chomping Robert Duvall sauntering on-set, claiming that he loved the smell of napalm in the morning.

One part of the show I did really like, however, was a circular room featuring portraits of adolescent girls. The wall text reported that half of the girls were violent killers, while the other half were just regular-old Teen Beat readers (I can't decide which is more disturbing). The photos themselves were really crisp and nice, and I think I spent 20 minutes in there thinking, "Oh, that one over there, with the purple eyeshadow? Maybe she's the one who hacked up her Uncle Theo! No, wait--too obvious! Maybe it's the one with no makeup and barettes...No, maybe it's..."

Whoever the killers were, it didn't matter. I was fully engaged. And if they did happen to Photoshop these images, which I didn't think they did, they pulled it off without their typical, cheap-shot, Wagnerian drama.

Finally, I swung by for the final day of Katie Pells'"The Best That I Can Give You And Less Than Half of What You Deserve" in Lawndale's mezzanine gallery. I have to admit, I have a rather soft spot for Pell's combination of optimism, cynicism, and whimsy. Beautifully rendered blue and white pastel skies were framed by rather weird charcoal renditions of leering and grinning forest creatures. There were many scenes like this with wide, mirrored frames (not quite sure about those mirrors--they were very clean and square, whereas I think they might have been more effective as baroque and ornate)
on the side walls, but the best piece was the large wall mural, with a few mounted forest creature drawings scattered at the sides (does that make sense? they were standing up). One huge disappointment for me was that I erroneously assumed that, like many of the people who showed up at the opening, I would be able to get my picture taken in front of the mural. I like being part of the art. Dammit. That'll teach me to leave town for art openings. All in all, though, I think Pell's one of the more clever women artists I've seen. She's always full of surprises. Whee!

Well, that's my dated report. Most of the shows are closed now. I'm in NY for a while, livin' la vida Brooklyn. So if I run across anything that I can be ultra-bitchy about, I'll be sure to talk about it. And, seeing as how the Whitney Biennial opens in a few days, and all of the revolting art fairs open at the end of the month, I don't see how I'll be able to avoid it.

Another Wonderful Way to Waste Hours on the Web

2008-02-16T15:57:00.003-06:00

James Westcott, of the online mag Art Review asked me to mention the publication in my blog. Normally, I would blow off such a request, but I really do like this site. There's all kindsa crap on it, from written reviews and artist vids to an artist registry and forum. It's nicely designed (but what the fuck would I know about design? I'm about as qualified to talk about the quality of design as I am to talk about the characteristics of fine wine. Do I like it? Does is taste better than a tumbler full of Boone's Farm? Let's just say that my scope is relatively limited.)

One thing that I really love on this site are the man-on-the-streets video art reviews. There's one by James Kalm on the Luc Tuymans show at David Zwirner that is just great. It's like, "Hey, I just hopped off my bike and here I am at this gallery, and here's what some critics have said, and here's a bunch of out-of-focus and wobbly footage of paintings and people at the opening!" I really do like that. I think all art coverage should be like this.

Also, if you do go to this video, pay attention to one of the opening attendees--a seriously bottled blonde wearing a dress that clasps at the neck and exposes all of her back down past the waist. Some serious butt crackage goin' on there.

If you're like me and spend far more time surfing the net than is recommended for the health, I think you'll find something here to amuse you for so many hours you will forget that you could be doing your own work.

Billy Sullivan @ Texas Gallery

2008-01-23T13:07:00.000-06:00

I'll admit that I'm a bit too biased to be looking at art like this. Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Alex Katz, Billy Sullivan. I mean, who really cares about artists who portray their friends while they lounge around the living room or on the patio furniture? I guess I do. This collection of acrylic and oil pastels on paper is pretty cool. From the near-psychedelic pig to the rather creepy-lewd portrayal of a couple of fellows with too much swarthy body hair and gay man mustaches squiggled in. It's nice stuff. And the Joel Shapiro work in the main gallery isn't bad, either. But who can get excited about that when you've got a portrait of somebody (man? woman?) with a weird helmet of black hair?

2008, year of the crank

2008-01-02T11:27:00.001-06:00

There. I've done it. I've removed myself from both MySpace and Facebook. I've decided that I'm just too old and crotchety to be involved in things that are hip and network-y. Even blogging is starting to make me feel like a pederast.

I realize that doing this may well rob me of an opportunity to find out about a cool band, hook up with a gallery that will certainly transform my lackluster career into that of an international superstar, or meet the hipster of my dreams. No matter; what's done is done.

I assume that most people who know me know where to reach me. If Karen Kilimnik, John Waters, Gloria Steinem, the Coen brothers, David Bowie, Christian Bale, Jane Campion, Jon Stewart and/or Stephen Colbert, Judy Davis, Will Ferrell, Reese Witherspoon, Harry Shearer, or that little fat kid from Bad Santa go wondering about where I've gone and want to find me, I'd appreciate it if one of you would direct them to the 'contact' section of my website.

Happy New Year!

i think she died of boredom, lenny

2008-01-02T10:31:00.000-06:00

i've been pretty depressed lately. it could be the holidays.

but i'm probably just depressed because i haven't worked in such a long time. i had to have carpal tunnel surgery on my right arm on the 20th, and i've just been sitting around. at first i thought it would be no big deal, so i got up and started doing a bunch of things, but then i fell down and landed the way one does when one breaks a fall--palms forward, and i fucked it all up. then i waited a while, and decided that it would be ok to do stuff with my fingers, but then i really strained my hand, so i just gave up and devoted myself to a solid 12 hours of TV a day. ah, the law & order marathon...yes, at any time of the day, in some part of the world, there is a law & order rerun being televised. i find myself saying things like, 'well, let's run down his LUDS and see who he's been calling in the last 48 hours' or 'let's check with the ME; i think she said that it's a subdural hematoma, and that the entrance wounds were caused by a 6 inch serrated blade.' i think i've said that before. forgive me for recycling schtick.

you would think that'd be a gold mine for some kind of art project, but my instincts tell me no, it's just a gold mine for dead brain cells.

i've also become an expert at the infomercial: would you like to hear about the virtues of the 'bender ball' or 'mighty putty'? i've got the lo-down on all of 'em. it's a damned good thing that i'm too lazy to get up off the couch and get my credit card. and even though i have absolutely no problem with my weight, i'm now thinking that i should start taking the alli fat blocker, eat frozen lean cuisine meals, drink special k diet water, and get a case of slim-fast.

i'm also pretty sure that my life has no glamour, since it's nothing like a bailey's irish cream or amaretto di saronno commercial. those people look like they're having such fun! and i want to hang out with that black british spokesman for tanqueray, tony sinclair. (this is how bored i am: i googled tony sinclair because i kept thinking, 'am i supposed to know who he is?' and found out that he's a fictional socialite created by the company ad folk) everybody in those ads is laughing with his or her head thrown back as if he or she is having the time or his or her life! my life looks nothing like that, dammit. i want to drink some island rum and find myself on the streets of manhattan wearing a business suit and flip-flops. bacardi, take me away.

as you can see, my arm's finally healed up enough so that i can type with both hands, even though i look like i have a big teddy bear paw. i think that from now on, i'm going to do public service announcements for artists: 'kids, you may think that all of that intricate detail and those nervous lines made with excessive force are cute and original, but you'll pay later! stick with expressionism! or maybe a lazy-man's pollock (you don't want to be bending down as much as jackson did--a real recipe for back strain). come to think of it, just hire somebody else--someone with a strong constitution--to do the work for you. save that arm!

this message has been brought to you by the disgruntled and regretful artists coalition.

Pointed, Poignant Sightings

2007-11-08T18:46:00.000-06:00

OK, I know this is petty, but I was on the 610 loop today, and I saw a minivan-vertisement for Hooters, and there was a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon plastered onto the back. I'm still freaking out about it. Sorry. Had to get it off my, um, groan, chest.

There's Only Thing Wrong With These Excursions

2007-11-05T14:18:00.000-06:00

I flew into L.A. this past weekend, got to rent a swwweeeet convertible Mustang, visited with my friend Maya. Then I drove up PCH to Ojai (fictional home of TV's Six Million Dollar Man) to drop in on a show at Nathan Larramendy Gallery. I'm in the show, and since I'll do just about anything to get out of town, I decided that would be a good excuse to go. Well, let me assure anyone who wants to drop in on a group show just to hang out that, unless you're into standing around awkwardly, you're making a huge mistake. What was I thinking? Not that the people who showed at the opening weren't pleasant; I'm seriously considering moving in with Steve and Celeste, parents of Allison, the new gallery intern. But, since I wasn't into standing in front of my own work as if on a lecture circuit, I spent most of the time either a) whining on the phone to Maya, pleading with her to let me come back and stay with her; or b) sit behind the desk counter trying to stay out of peoples' ways.

Let me make this plain: this is not to cast any aspersions on Nathan Larramendy and/or his gallery. It's actually a great space, and Senor Larramendy is a prince. After the opening I was invited up to Casa Larramendy, an amazing ranch in the Ojai mountains, where Brad served us a delicious meal and I got to meet/hang out with Brian Storts, curator/director of Queen's Nails Annex in San Francisco (and his cool lovely wife Rachelle). I don't run into many people with such crazy, intense energy as Brian; subsequently, it's not very often that I get all excited talking about art.

But there I was, all havin' a time talking, looking up at the stars in the crisp, black Ojai night. The next day, I took a different route, down through the mountains, hair blowing in the wind from my rented Mustang, listening to Engelbert Humperdinck at full blast...

It was all perfect, except for one thing. That damned art opening. It made me recall another recent trip, that to Marfa. That was a great trip, too, except for one thing. The art. Gotta remember to cut that stuff out of an otherwise good trip...

Oh, Me and My Trenchant Keyboard

2007-11-05T12:52:00.000-06:00

The other night I ran into my friend Paula Newton, who's the education coordinator at the Contemporary Arts Museum here in Houston, told me that she and a few other folks at the CAM had read my rather caustic review of the Kelly Nipper show, and that they were all cracking up. Then she mentioned that Toby Kamps, the new curator at the CAM and the curator of the Nipper show, had read it as well. She didn't mention that he was laughing, too. And darnit, I forgot to ask.

As the neurotic, insecure, but still latently ambitious ass that I am, I had the impulse to run up to Kamps when I saw him and say, "I'm so sorry! I'm so very sorry!", but I refrained from doing so, as I wasn't really all that sorry. Oh, perhaps I'm a bit sorry that he read it. I always go around thinking that nobody reads this thing, and then I'm always unpleasantly surprised by someone who walks up and snarls, "So...you thought my installation of bat guano was shit? Well, fuck you!"

And there is that latent nice girl in me who sort of believes that if you don't have anything nice to say, you should simply keep it to yourself. But then where would that leave me? What would I say? I hate just about everything!

Ah, well. I'm doomed to be the kid at the back of the class flipping paper footballs and making snide remarks, only to regret my actions in Principal Dresler's office.

Well, normally when stuff like this happens--like when I find out I've offended someone, or if my mother reads my blog and gets upset, I go back and delete the post. Sometimes I even delete my whole blog. Look at how far I've come! I can snigger in public with only a smidgeon of remorse! Now all I have to do is worry that I've offended a curator and wonder if I should stop polishing my "SuperBestSuccessfulArtistInHouston--Maybe Even the World!" trophy...

A Bunch of Stuff That Irritates the Shit Out of Me

2007-11-01T19:37:00.000-05:00

I was going to write about a bunch of stuff that irritates the shit out of me, but then my computer got really fucked up and i almost lost everything that I'd been working on for 2 weeks, and, frankly, the ordeal took all the starch out of me and the whole idea of writing about A Bunch of Stuff That Irritates the Shit Out of Me seemed kind of petty.

Hopefully all of my rancour will be saved for the next art exhibition I see. One can only hope.

Never Underestimate the Timelessness of a Waters

2007-10-07T19:36:00.000-05:00

Poster by John Waters
I went to Marfa, TX, this weekend, for the annual art-fest.

With the exception of a rainstorm on Saturday, unfortunately dampening the annual bar-b-q that takes place in the center of town, the weather was amazing. None of this godawful Houston humidity. I realized, while driving, that the weather in Houston of late has felt a lot like being smothered in a damp, musty Army blanket.

I think I permanently damaged my poor lil' truck, Bandit, but the drive was so cool. I sped along thinking, "Rocks!", "Hills!", and "Omigawd, driving 115 miles an hour is so great!"

I took the above photo while driving because I was really amused by whatever it said on the back of this motor home. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it is now, but I know it was something like "Player Hater II". I swear to God.

Marfa itself is beautiful, serene. And I was soooo lucky, since I got to stay at my friend's house and didn't have to worry about flopping on an air mattress (which probably would have been ok--my friends Bill Willis and Alexia Bonomi pitched a tent on top of a barber shop on San Antonio St., and they looked like they were having the time of their lives), or scrambling for a nonexistent motel room.

And it's always fun scoping out the locals--especially these kids painting horse models. The little girl was very informative about their project, something about Dia de los Muertos, and asked me if I wanted to take their picture. I half expected her to charge me after the shutter clicked.

And who could pass up this lovely bit of graffiti? Especially one so tasteless as "I'm not drunk, I have cerebral palsy"?

But I don't know about all that...that...art. Sure, the whole Judd/Chinati thing. I love a good several series of silvery cubes as much as the next guy. But when they open up all of these other casitas to show Donald Judd's early paintings hung alongside the furniture he designed, well, I'm a little less than inspired. The paintings are pretty, well, derivative (as much early work can be). And when I wandered through the house and looked at the various furnishings, I thought, Well, that semi-upholstered chair over there is nice. I wonder if he did that? I wonder if he did that modified table over there?

Turned out that no, Donald Judd didn't design any of those things that looked like something you might actually want to sit on. But that thing over there like something out of an Abu Ghraib prison but with a fluffy mattress resting on top? There's your Judd.

Next year, I think they should exhibit Judd's underpants. Of course, considering that Donald Judd's whole life was minimalism, he probably didn't wear any. But, naturally, somebody would decide to display that. And then if some clueless yokel wandered in and said Hey! Where's the beef? The art world smug could just snigger at that person's lack of training.

That's what led me to think that, unsurprisingly enough, the seams on the Marfa art scene were clearly being strained. And those seams are on a pair of size 3 fuschia polyester pants, sported by a size 24 woman, and boy, you can see every cellulite-ridden ripple.

It's just too much, and too little of it is spectacular, with the exception of the Giganto-Judds. And out in the middle of nowhere like that, I want spectacular. Don't get me wrong: there really is a lot of art out there that isn't bad, but it just doesn't seem like anything one should be running into in the middle of, well, nowhere, to see. Huge concrete blocks occupying the middle of a field for no good reason? Yes. Regular ol' shit you'd see in some hung in some commercial gallery on? Nah.

There were, of course, quite a few things that stuck out. I was in the Camp Marfa show at Fort Russell, so I'm not going to talk about the actual exhibition. But I was really amazed at the Fort itself. Aparently, German POWs were held there during World War II, and the prisoners busied themselves by painting the murals on the walls.

One thing that blew me away was a pair of galleries on Highland St. One had Warhol's camo Last Supper, as well as these other huge pieces. It was great. Completely unexpected--walking in from the heat in a tiny town and running into something you'd see in the Menil. And the space was nice, too. And no, I don't remember what it was.

Unfortunately, in the space next door, owned by the same person, was this mess by Maria Zerres, a show called "Nine-Eleven":

I don't know if this artist was trying to do some kind of recreation of Guernica or what, but I really hated this stuff. It was such a disappointment to go from all of those huge wonderful Andys to all of those huge horrible--oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? Leave as quickly as possible.

Having gotten that bit of crotchety complaining out of the way, I guess I should talk about some of the other stuff I saw. Some good; some, well, eh.
I like a lot of Erika Blumenfeld's work, which was nicely displayed in some gallery next to Ballroom Marfa. I wouldn't think I'd be a sucker for a bunch of time-lapsed photos, but they are incredibly beautiful and painterly, and the works clearly demonstrate the artist's passion for her subject matter--western light. I think that, after several showings in Marfa, Blumenfeld has moved there and continues to document sunrises and sunsets in an unusual manner. If the thought of a Marfa sunset makes you want to puke, it's only because I've improperly described the work. Go to the website.

I also liked the work of Peter Voshefski, below. His series of wooden "books", all with whimsically depressing titles and partial text, were witty and very well-crafted.

I also liked quite a few of his paintings, which reminded me a bit of Nina Bovasso's earlier works with his use of color and whimsicality, but in a more modest scale.

Christine Olejniczak's exhibition Gun Blasts and Glass Bullets, curated by Jeff Elrod,at The Marfa Book Co. was a bit of a disappointment for me. I was introduced to the artist outside the book store before I saw the show, and I was pretty enthused, since she told me about the glass bullets she had made, and how she was 'packing glass'.

I was a little underwhelmed when I got in there, though. Each of the glass bullets she had made was girded, mid-casing, by black metal, a few inches from the wall, as if in flight. But here, again with the fucking minimalism! The bullets themselves were very pretty, but the way that they were displayed took away from their effectiveness as objects. And, being displayed against a wall painted off-white, it was hard to make them out.

Perhaps that subtlety was Olejniczak's point, but it wasn't working for me. I wanted more. More, I tell you---more, more! There's an episode of Law and Order where the assistant D.A., to make a point about gun violence in America (those of you who don't know me should know that I have the TV on in my studio a lot of the time, and since I don't really want to watch the shows, I play shows that I don't have to look at, like stuff on Comedy Central and reruns of Law and Order. Due to these programs being run ad nauseum, I often find myself saying stupid shit like, Well, if you want to find out who he's been talking to, you should check his LUDS or, That subdural hematoma looks about two hours old), pours boxes and boxes of bullets out on the table in the courtroom. It was a beautiful pile, indeed. I don't know if it would have even been possible for the artist to make that many glass bullets, but I would have loved to see thousands of them piled in the gallery.

Olejniczak's pencil drawings on raw wood panels, seeming abstracts of literal blasts of impact (god, that's awkward) also came off as a bit under-realized. There was one drawing that I really liked in the show, and I think I liked it the best because it was the most gestural and abstract.

At Ballroom Marfa was a show called Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, organized by Bob Nickas. I can't decide whether it should have been called, The Revolution has Been Televised, and You Missed it When You Got Up For That Pepsi, or, more simply and concisely, Huh?

Nearly everything was a disappointment here, especially the black sand in the front gallery and the white sand in the back, each functioning as a carpet for the various scuptures. One of my friends mentioned that the installation. especially in the back gallery. looked like something you'd see at Blue Star. No offense to Blue Star, of course. It's just that an exhibition with Carol Bove, Haim Steinbach, and a parade of other art stars should be a tad more substantial.

But what disappointments most of those art-rockers proved to be. I remember a time, long ago, when a Wayne Gonzales painting really interested me. No mas.

This swimming pool ladder sculpture by Joan Wallace was nice, and the only piece I liked in the show-- although, of course, it looks like crap the way it was photographed.

Out in back was this stuff. Kind of fun, but reminding me a bit of an old lady's back yard full of hummingbird feeders.

At the bottom of the flyer for the show, it reads: Ballroom Marfa is a dynamic, contemporary cultural art space that provides a lively intellectual environment where varied perspectives and issues are explored through visual arts, film, music, and performance.

I guess I missed that part. There was a show in their space next door, exhibiting all of their past posters, where people could pull their own silkscreen poster prints. That looked like fun. Maybe even dynamic.

Off the beaten path at 2d gallery, I felt my usual rage against Minimalism completely subside. This is a really great space, the owner has great taste, and the art is displayed really well.

Here, Gloria Graham has taken funeral kerchiefs, made light lines upon them, and turns them into subtle, Agnes Martin-like works.
href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_d2lmeN5F53U/RwmCStnlFOI/AAAAAAAAAVU/HMIT6YjCP6c/s1600-h/lasculpture.jpg">

I also loved these works by David McDonald, although my crappy photography doesn't do it justice at all. It looks great on the gallery website, and I suggest you go there.

Due to a back injury aggravated by 10 hours of driving, I missed a lot of stuff that I would have liked to see. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I felt shitty, had to go back to the hacienda to rest, and missed the opportunity to see Mark Flood's show, as he was a resident at Chinati. Shame on me. What a drag it is getting old.

More Sugar Coating, Please

2007-09-29T07:29:00.000-05:00

I went to the opening of the Kirsten Hassenfeld Dans la Lune exhibition at the Rice University Art Gallery the other day. I think that much of the experience can be summed up by the following: I was standing around in the gallery, yakking with my friend Patrick Peters, who had his nine (ten? who can tell with these alien beings called offspring?) year old, Anna, and two year old Sophie in tow. Patrick pointed to one of the enormous white lanterns suspended in the space and said, "Look, Anna: everything here is made of paper."

Anna scrunched up her nose, looked very close at the piece and said, "That's not paper. It's styrofoam."

She was referring, of course, to the fome-cor from which the piece was constructed. Patrick and I said, "Good point."

A few minutes later, Anna said, "I think Sophie poo'd her pants."

Now, I saw one of Hassenfeld's pieces at the second Greater New Yorkshow at P.S. 1 a while back. It was this pretty, ornate thing, covered with curlicues and scrolls, and it looked much like a wedding cake suspended from the ceiling, and it was probably about 3' high and a foot and a half or so wide. The detail and the obvious amount of labor put into this project was certainly impressive, but it moved me not. Seeing other pieces of her work, constructed of paper, with diamond-like facets, all in frosty white, I would think, "OK. I think I get it. It's real girly, and I generally like that...but what's the fucking point?"

I guess with the other works I've seen, the labor itself is enough to hold a certain amount of interest. And it does play on all the girlish obsessions: wedding cakes, diamond engagement rings, syrupy sweet furnishings laden with ornate scrolls.

But I think the size really bugs me here. There doesn't seem to be any really good reason for it. And the feel of the installation mimicked, in some ways, the
Eminent Domain exhibition by the designer team White Webb that was recently shown at Rice Gallery. When things that ornate are tiny, they become precious. I am amazed by the intricacies of the miniature, by the craft. Whenever I go to the Art Institute of Chicago and visit the Thorne Miniature Collection, I'm transported. It's obvious that I'm not the only one--judging by the glass in front of each of the tiny, period-accurate rooms, a jillion snot-nosed kids have left their appreciative boogers and fingerprints as evidence of their fascination.

But it's my belief that you can't just blow something up--as Hassenfeld and White Webb have done (and I grant you that the White Webb installation was not designed for the same effect--it just has that Whoops! I just fell down the rabbit hole! thing going)--and expect the same magical effect. I think that the only way that an artist can maintain that level of awe on a large scale is to put the same amount of intricate detail that he or she would put into the laboriously crafted smaller pieces, and overwhelm the viewer. Tara Donovan's insane installations pull it off. And Stephen Hendee's work a few years back at the Rice Gallery, while constructed solely of tape and fome-cor, really created an experience. Dans La Lune doesn't do that. I'm thinking that if I go back at night and the lanterns are lit, the piece will convey what it doesn't in daylight.

But I'm uncomfortable with large scaled work that doesn't hold up upon close inspection. And I'm uncomfortable with large scaled works that seemingly have no reason for being that big. Of course, there's always that magical 'rabbit hole' effect, where we can swing our arms and skip and believe we're at a tea party with ribbons streaming from our starched linen frocks, but when we near the magic lanterns and discover that, indeed, they're only styrofoam, it seems the bubble has burst. And we're left standing with a toddler who's just messed her pants.

Attn: Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.

2007-09-28T23:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I have many various and sundry and prickly and irritated things to say about the art and art events I've been privy to lately; however, I thought I'd apprise you all, my faithful Whinybabylanders, of recent doings. What kind of fake art journalist would I be if I didn't?

First, since Mark Flood and I will be opening at Devin Borden/Hiram Butler Gallery on Saturday, October 13 (Flood is in the main gallery), I decided that it would be a good thing to have my website updated a little bit. (Thank you, James Seaborn and Jason Herbst).

Second, and I don't know if anyone read of this or remembers it, but a while back I was asked to help find some art to show on the walls at the new location of
Jenni's Noodle House. I thought to myself, "Oh, this'll be easy. This will be a good opportunity for some under-exposed artist." So I sent out a huge call, and in two weeks, I got a ton of responses, but they were really the wrong kind of responses. I don't know how my emails trickled down to every painter of children and kittens and every photographer of lilies in bloom, but I found myself inundated. I eventually found the work of painter Sandra Skipwith, whose work I like a lot, and we finally put it up.

But my main question was: "What the fuck? Why can't I find some ambitious slacker to make cool graphic work and hang it proudly in the noodle house?" Oh, in my day, when we used to walk to art school through the snow, living on dried lint in our dimly-lit garrets, we would've been proud to hang our work in a heavily trafficked establishment! What is wrong with kids these days?

So, disgusted, I decided to put my own work in there. Dammit, if you want anything done right...

Well, we just installed a suite of six drawings in the noodle house today, and I like them a lot. So if you're out, ravenous for udon noodles, and near the corner of Shepherd and Alabama, check 'em out. They're fabulous! Another triumph!

Booster Shot

2007-09-25T09:26:00.000-05:00

My alarm goes off at 5:30 every morning. God knows why; there’s no place I need to be. Much of the time, I lie there, floating in and out of sleep, the informative sounds of NPR wafting through my semi-consciousness. Sometimes, I don’t actually get out of bed until 8 a.m.

This morning at 5:30, however, upon hearing the words “art”, “Vinson and Elkins Law Firm”, “Mayor Bill White”, "Houston" and “world class art world”, I popped out of bed, even though, as usual, my back and ass really hurt.

Listen, I love the blog format. Why? Because I’m not accountable to anyone. Fuck the factual verification department. Whatever I think I hear in some foggy haze is solid enough for me. And dammit, it’s good enough for the Whinybabyland reader.

Anyway, I’m lying there listening to Mayor Bill White say something about the Houston Arts Alliance and our “world class art world”, and I’m thinking: “Houston. World Class Art World.” Isn’t that an oxymoron?

OK, before I start bashing, I want to say that I love the Houston Arts Alliance. I once, like many, many Houston artists, received a grant from them, showed in their 125 gallery, and I’m forever in their debt. But a few years ago, don’t ask me when because time is a big fuzzy blur for me, I remember that some dickhead trotted his ass down to the state capitol and helped change the requirements for what one could constitute as fundable art here in Harris County. It became harder to get those grants. Artists applying for the grants suddenly had to spin a bunch of bullshit in their applications so that jurors would see that their art would tie in with big business. Even more than they had to before. It's called the "heads on beds" factor, meaning that if Houston artists wanted to get their paint-spattered little hands on public money, they would have to prove, basically, that their art would somehow promote tourism in our fair city. I was pretty thick, but then it was explained to me. Hotel rooms. Tourists' heads on fluffy mint-laden pillows. Heads on beds.

The whole notion makes me wanna puke, and I'm not blaming this on any non-profit organization that's trying to dole out money. The Houston Arts Alliance wants to give money to Houston artists. It's just that a bunch of asswipes who wouldn't know a Basquiat from something their dog shat out are in charge of saying who gets what.

Of course, artists who apply for the grant still get the money, but, like I said, they have to spin a bigger web of bullshit. Oh, my art deserves funding because it's good for the community! My art deserves funding because it's going to show people what a glorious city Houston really is! My art deserves funding because it's beneficial for the children!

I actually think that Houston is kinda glorious, in its own way. Driving back from the dog groomer at 7 a.m., I saw the Downtown skyline bathed in a pinkish, hazy glow--perhaps a result of early morning dew, potential oncoming tropical storms, and car exhaust. It was beautiful.

And I like living here. I can do my work without having to live in a dumpster. There are plenty of advantages to being a working artist here, and there are a lot of really great artists living here. But it chaps my ass to no end to listen--even though it was only partial listening--to some jerk politician talk about what a glorious, shining bastion of art we have. It made me think of the "Houston Proud" booster campaign that went on a few years ago. I'm Houston Proud! Say it loud!

With the exception of a few shows and a few art spaces, the Houston art world is a bit like Loehmann's. Oh, it's great quality, and at a great price, but let's face it, it's not hot off the runway. And it also irritates me when politicians talk like that because, on the whole, what they see as Houston's gleaming art world is not really Houston art at all.

Just a few years ago--and again, don't quote me or check on this as accurate--Houston actually got a budget for public art. A few times I was asked (and God, don't ask me why--I think it was that I was the only artist in town who was for certain not going to apply for this) to sit on juried and advisory panels for public art. The first time, we interviewed applicants who were pitching proposals for a Midtown space. There were about 6 finalists, some from Houston and some from around the country, and the job--and I don't think it's actually been put into motion yet--went to the Art Guys. I don't really have any problem with the Art Guys getting the gig--they put together a dynamic presentation and have a lot of public art experience.

But therein lies the rub. None of the other Houston artists had much experience in public art, and why would they? There was never a budget for it before, and, unless an artist was doing the kind of stuff that the Art Guys had been doing for the past twenty years, there was hardly a way to show that, despite their various levels of competence, they could handle a big funded job. The Catch-22 of public art.

Like I said, the Art Guys have been doing this stuff for ages. And their first projects were performative and done on a shoestring, but after several years their gigs went legit. Harrell Fletcher also started doing random public art on a shoestring. No one would give him money, so he basically made up projects on his own, installed them surreptitiously, documented the projects, and went back to the funders and said, "See? I do have experience!"

I also sat in on a panel to meet and discuss the work of an L.A. artist whose proposal had been chosen for downtown. And no, I don't remember his damned name. I'm sure he'll do a fine job. The shots I saw of the other cities he'd worked his magic on looked fab. But this guy has been at the public art game for years. Everything was slick and operated by advanced technology and led screens and blinking lights. How the fuck would a Houston artist begin to compete with such a pro? And why should the dudes with the money gamble on somebody who's been dicking around with cardboard or clay when they've got Ironman over there guaranteeing results?

Of course, there are well-funded opportunities for Houston artists. There are the airports, libraries, public works buildings. But it still grossed me out to hear the mayor, as well as a representative from a huge law firm, laud the art community here when the odds are they wouldn't know the art community here if they saw it.

Oh, my rage against the Man. My rage against the Machine. So very dated. So very tired. It's just that I don't want art that brings in tourism. I don't want art that's good for the children. And I'm getting sick of seeing art that operates on a platform of community service. Go ahead, make some fucking art. Make some good fucking art. And then, at the end of the day, if you feel like it, go out and do something selfless, something purely altruistic. But for God's sake, don't call it art.

You'd be frightened, too.

2007-09-21T07:38:00.000-05:00

I just recently started to go to art events and openings again, and they're just as much glorious fun as I remembered them. Amy Sillman's paintings (Suitors and Strangers) at the Blaffer look good. A lot different than the stuff I generally associate with her work. Big, bold strokes, in contrast to her usual style. I used to like her work in the same way I like cute, precocious little children--Oh, Tammy! And is that spot over in the corner where all the villagers go to market to get the food that will make them strong? Not that they weren't good paintings; I always really liked them. But they were very playful, the product of an isolated, idiosyncratic individual. Now they kinda remind me of late Manet or DeKooning in their loose manner. I like these, too. The colors are amazing. And, as with the earlier work, one gets the sense that this is an artist who, as Sillman mentioned in a panel discussion at Rice years ago, is engaged in deep play. Little Amy's growing up.

Also went to Maya Schindler, Will Henry, and Hilary Wilder's openings at Devin Borden/Hiram Butler Gallery . I'd love to comment on the shows here, but unlike some art writers here in Houston, I have problems writing about exhibitions where I show my own work. Call it conflict of interest. Call it sheer terror that Hiram will come after me with his horde of bees. Whatever. Everything there looked fabulous. Another triumph!

But speaking of triumphs, I actually went to an opening of CAM Houston Perspectives 158: Kelly Nipper (Curated by Toby Kamps) last night. Oh, sordid events had kept me away for so long. You know how it is when something shitty happens and every time you go out you're convinced that people are looking at you, talking about you, and just plain hating your guts, when, in fact, no one was ever looking at you, talking about you, or bothering to hate your guts. Damn. It makes you feel so special when you imagine that you're universally vilified; how does one go about feeling unique when one finds out that people are really just thinking about reruns of Scrubs?

I don't know about that show, though. When I listened to Nipper talk (by the way, I really like that name! nippernippernipper!), I realized that, while some of the images hung in the gallery were kind of nice, there would have been absolutely no way of knowing any of the reasons for why the work is what it is, or why it has any significant meaning, without reading a tome the size of the Yellow Pages. I'm dumb. I need my art to say what it has to say right there, right in front of me. It's not that I don't find Nipper's scientific research and theories interesting; it's just that if she weren't there to talk about it, I'd just think I was looking at a few printed images. There is a trio of white-framed images on the south wall that are very beautiful from a distance. When you get up close, though, they're all grainy. So no beauty, no craft, no apparent significance. I was a bit dumbfounded.

There was a video of an apple that Nipper mentioned had been, in previous exhibitions, quite largely projected. For some reason, they chose not to do this at the CAM, and I wondered why. Would size have given it more impact? I dunno.

Kamps and Nipper did an ongoing dialogue during the gallery talk, which, of course, was quite illuminating. Kamps mentioned a few times that his interpretation of the work was more pedestrian, that he chose to focus on the "sexy" elements, while she emphasized the science and research. I, like Kamps, tend to read things in a humanistic manner, and if I'd become interested in Nipper's work, I probably would have focused on the sensuality of the movements of the body that she describes. However, neither the sexy nor the scientific seem to be apparent in this show. Like I said, I'm too dumb for most of this shit.

One thing that struck me while going through the gallery--and this thought has struck me quite a few times before--is how impossibly ugly that space is. Really bad feng shui.

Finally, though, I was freaked out by the video projected in the one darkened room, An Arrangement for the Architect and a Darkroom Timer. Nipper put two strangers, a young man and woman, in very close proximity to one another (one person noted that another person had noted that the fact that the two were strangers was bullshit. The second-hand possible mis-quote goes as follows: "Strangers? Those two have been fucking for years!") And they didn't really seem like strangers. If they didn't know one another prior to the video, then surely they must have seen each other at some grubby pot party at a fellow grad-art-school party.

But anyway, that wasn't my problem with the video, which bathed the figures in red light to simulate a darkroom, and was punctuated periodically by a loud darkroom timer. Nipper says that observing these two, their body language, the way in which the woman tended to shrink in the presence of the man, was a prolonged examination of human nature. We don't normally, she said, get in each other's 'spaces' like that. Well, that's interesting enough to think about. North Americans are especially known for their hefty 'space' requirements. We wouldn't be a nation of Hummers if we weren't.

However, this video thoroughly creeped me out for one reason, and a petty one at that. Nipper says that the woman was rather cowed by the man after a period of time. But if you look at the man, how can you blame her from shrinking away? I haven't been so grossed out by a guy since Sean Penn's portrayal of Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking. What woman wouldn't be cowed by this menacing, greasy stringbean?

And am I so totally out of the loop? Has the mullet made a return to contemporary fashion? I recently wrote about mullets here on WhinyBabyLand, but I perhaps erroneously assumed that the 'do was, thankfully, a thing of the past. Am I wrong? Has the mullet made a return to the world of the contemporary coif? Tell me it isn't so. Looking at contemporary art and fashion just makes me realize how much of a luddite I truly am. It just makes me want to stay at home, hunker down on the couch, and eat a can of frosting. Not healthy at all for body or mind. The art, not the frosting. Or is it the other way around. I'm so confused.