Two-on-One: Conceptual Art Smackdown Provides Much-Needed (Comic) Relief for Summer Doldrums

Things have seemed kinda dull around here, haven’t they? We’ve got a mayor’s race under way, historic or potentially historic, with the two leading candidates of the moment being a black lawyer-insider who isn’t running as a “black candidate” and a gay female elected citywide official who isn’t running as a “gay woman candidate” (probably wouldn’t fly anyway), as well as the SWPL white-man candidate who is indeed running as the SWPL white candidate (not gonna fly at all, but we hope stays in the race all the way, if just for contrast).* But despite this interesting mix, the campaign thus far seems flat and uninspiring (which is probably how it should be, so if you’re a mayoral candidate reading this under no circumstances should you, on our account, employ any lofty Obama-toric in your next speech on TIRZs, or go out and get a DWI this weekend).

And the weather: we’re very tired of this weather (perhaps the source of our ennui). This afternoon we noticed that even the trees in our neighborhood—the water-gulping behemoths—seem bedraggled and listless, as if they were too dry and brittle to root down any further for a sip of H20 and would just as soon keel on over and end their misery.

But this, mi amigo, is H-Town, as the Chronicle’s Teen Columnist-Blogurbator so jauntily calls it (and calls it and calls it), so you and I know that some trifling entertainment tailored to capture our full, undivided attention is never too far down the massively cracked, seamed and pot-holed road. Sure enough, the road rose up to greet us today in the form of this blog posting by Chronicle art critic Douglas Britt (which came to our attention via linkage from the eagle-eyed tastemakers at blogHouston—we’re not a regular reader of the newspaper’s arts blog, although we’re open to the possibility of becoming one if days are lengthened to 26 hours.). It seems that Sr. Britt had the gall, the temerity, the sheer cast-iron cojones, to actually criticize—let’s be precise: mildly criticize—one of the scared moo-cows of the local art world, the duo selling themselves as the** Art Guys, who, thanks to corporate largesse and near-worshipful local “critics,” have gone about staging their conceptual-art works, to rarely a discouraging word, for well more than a decade.

We actually read Britt’s preview/review of the art guys’ latest “show” in last Thursday’s newspaper and found it to be a gentile, good-natured dismissal of the art guys’ “big, fat, not-so-gay wedding,” in which the two artistes, who apparently are both married heterosexuals (nothing wrong with that), were to “marry” a “live oak sapling,” as Britt described it, during an outdoor ceremony Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts (we couldn’t make it ’cause we had to stay home and scratch our nuts). Britt believed that this performance was some statement or commentary on, or somehow hooked to, the debate over legalized gay marriage—a belief that one of the art guys both strenuously denied and seemed to kinda confirm (“piggybacking” on the issue) in the critic’s piece. If it was such a statement, it was a strange and muddled one, paralleling, as Britt noted way too far down in his review, the “slippery slope” argument of gay-marriage critics that once you allow men to marry men and women to marry women the next thing you know people will be petitioning to get hitched to dogs, cats, emus, ’74 Buick Electras, live oak saplings, etc. It even crossed our mind that if Britt were right maybe that the art guys were against gay marriage, which would indeed take some cast-iron cojones, to be so contrarian in the not-so-wide world of art. (But they ain’t—against gay marriage, that is).

After the art guys (or guy, we weren’t clear on the logistics) were conjoined to the sapling in holy matrimony, Britt followed up with a blog post affirming his initial judgment (accompanied by some sort of video we didn’t watch--scratchin’ our sack again). That posting drew an “open letter” from art guy Michael Galbraith--with footnotes, real footnotes!***--which Britt put up on his blog. Galbraith, coming on like Huey Newton in a wicker chair in 1969, opened up with a right-on-man quote from artist Bruce Nauman that included a bad word the Chronicle can’t print (it was “poo-smacker,” if we remember right), then again empahtically denied the tree-marriage ceremony had anything to do with gay marriage and drew this strange 2+2=5 analogy:

In your article you referenced an older work of ours, "Bucket Feet," in which we walked around downtown Houston with buckets of water attached to our feet. Now, what if someone believed that the action of impeding our normal capabilities of walking somehow referenced walking disabilities? I suppose they would be free to do so, but we simply walked around with buckets on our feet. And that's that.

And this:

We, The Art Guys (capital "T," by the way) do what we do regardless of what people think or how they think. And for the most part, we do it right in front of people so that they may share and experience and judge for themselves. There are other ways of working. This is what we often do.

(We’ve never judged for our particular self, because it seems we always have this itch to scratch.)

The letter went on at some length in an apparent attempt to place the art guys in some conceptual-art tradition, which we always thought was not the point, but then we’re a product of the Louisiana public school system.

We don’t know who’s right or wrong in this and really don’t care. But we do enjoy a good fight (boxing’s gotten really dull of late, with all those slew-footed Russian heavyweights). We fervently hope these exchanges blossom into a full-blown blood feud, with the art guys designing their next promotion to fully eviscerate Britt (figuratively, of course, but perhaps literally if he’ll cooperate) and Britt using his blog postings to carry out a Winchell-like vendetta against the art guys. We don’t care if they collude. That’s exactly what this town needs--a meaningless yet vitriolic public feud.

Let’s get it on!****

*By the way, we’ve opened bidding on the coveted Slampo’s Place mayoral endorsement, starting at $100. The lucky winner will get unlimited free, laudatory and unquestioning “coverage” in this blog, some of it possibly “fact-based” (some possibly not). Plus, we’ll post funny hand-drawn pictures of the other candidates. Cash only, please, and we ask that the bribe be listed on your disclosure report as a payment to “SuperSexy Donuts” for “snacks for staff.”

**That’s the, lower case.

*** Not like these.

**** -- M. Gaye, 1974

Readymade (No Thought Required)

You gotta love this Slate piece by Jack Shafer on the unanimously reverential treatment our nation’s daily newspapers accorded master marketer Robert Rauschenberg upon his passing this week at age 82. Shafer opened with this damning summation:

The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today's newspapers prove that you're more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section.

Oh, that’s brutal. Wish we’d written it!

Shafer goes on to point out ...

You'd expect that an artist who deliberately courted controversy might rouse a little debate on the event of his death. But none of his provocations move the daily art-crits in that direction—not his White Painting, not his "black painting," not his Automobile Tire Print, not his screenprints, not his Mud Muse, and not his "cardboards." Even the time that he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, erased its every line, and displayed it as Erased de Kooning Drawing wins worshipful treatment from the gang. "[A]n act both of destruction and devotion," reports the New York Times. Evidence of "creative overdrive," proclaims the Los Angeles Times. An example of "the younger generation, turning history into a blank slate," finds the Washington Post.

We never had much truck with Rauschenberg’s art---we prefer pitchers like the one above, which is why we’re running it without credit or permission---but we were always intrigued by the fact that the artist was a pure product of what our friend Banjo calls the Petrochemical Underarm of Southeast Texas. From a 2005 profile in the Beaumont Enterprise, one of the art world’s most authoritative organs:

"We didn't have any museums when Milton was here. That's what we called him then," said Dovie (Horton) Logsdon, a classmate from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur. "But we all had to make the best of what we had. Everyone here was either farming or working with the railroad. We had to create our own culture."

Art was foreign to Rauschenberg when he was growing up in the working-class town.

"The first art I saw that was hung on the wall as art was in California during the Navy," said Rauschenberg.

What he saw at the Los Angeles County Museum was Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" and Lawrence's "Pinkie."

"They looked like the backs of playing cards I had seen. I remember being surprised that a human being actually made them. I thought, well, that's what I do. I doodle and draw and copy the funnies," Rauschenberg said.

From such privations does great art spring. Anyway, our longtime favorite Rauschenberg anecdote, which we’ve read so often we assume it to be of the print-the-legend variety, involves the future world-beater and soon-to-be-former-Milton hitchhiking back to Port Arthur following Navy service in World War II. Donna Rae Wiser picks up the tale in the Enterprise:

To his surprise, his family had moved away, leaving no address.

"Someone told me they thought they might have moved to Lafayette," he said.

He hitched another 120 miles to a coffee shop there. There sat his father, Ernest, who explained simply, over a cup of coffee: He'd been promoted to Lafayette.

Big Heads on the Freeway in the “Liverpool of Southeast Texas”

Houston Chronicle funnyboy Ken Hoffman reports today that sculptor David Adickes’ 36-foot-tall rendering of the Beatles will soon be on display outside Adickes’ studio near Interstate 10 before being hauled to a spot farther west off the freeway for a more permanent situating.

Adickes, of course, is the longtime bane of Inner Loop art snobs who mock and belittle his outsized, cartoonish works.* His pieces are big and angular and (mock-?)heroic, untainted by self-conscious notions of artiness or even tradition, unless you consider (and we do) Jack Kirby’s muscular stylings in the Marvel Comics of the early 1960s an antecedent. They're sort of the sculptural equivalents of comfort food. At least that’s the way we feel---full---when we head up to the ancestral hunting grounds in East Texas and are greeted by Adickes’ giant Sam Houston.

Yet even the non-artsy types among us must wonder exactly what the Beatles have to do with Houston.

Well, for starters there is the pervasive influence the Fab Four had on the hair styles affected by many if not most of the city’s young white and Hispanic males (and even some African Americans with that “fine” hair)** during the years 1964 through, say, about 1979. And, more importantly, there’s the widespread musical influence the Beatles exerted on the young Houstonians who turned out to be some of Our Town’s finest and truest cultural ambassadors. Without the Beatles, these young guitar strummers never would have combed their hair down over the foreheads, learned a half-dozen chords and managed to snare less than lucrative recording contracts to turn out 45s and LPs now highly valued in the secondary market.

But we’ve discovered another and more profound connection, one that was revealed to us in an interview with Ringo Starr that appeared recently in the 40th anniversary edition of Rolling Stone. The Q&A included this exchange, in which the questioner is following up on Ringo’s earlier declaration that coming to the U.S. in ’64 was “the biggest thing for me”---bigger, if we’re reading Ringo right, than the ’67 release of Sgt. Pepper’s, which nearly killed off rock ’n’ roll with its self-conscious notions of artiness and tradition. Ringo, it appears, was among the many young people in post-war Europe who harbored overly romantic notions about the U.S.:

RS: Why was coming to American the biggest thing for you?

Ringo: All the music we were interested in came out of America. Even before the Beatles, I was a huge blues fan---Lightnin’ Hopkins was my hero. He was out of Houston, and I was trying to emigrate to Houston to get a factory job, because I was working in a factory [in Liverpool] …

Ah, think of the turns history might have taken. They can debate all day whether Houston is an Emerging Paradigm of Opprtunity Urbanism or just one big stinkin' hazard to your mortal health, but they can’t take this away: Ringo Starr almost moved here to work in a factory!

Well, that’s what he said.

* We’ve always wondered whether Adickes has considered turning out giant bobbing-head statuary. This might present some mechanical and liability obstacles, but nothing that Adickes couldn’t overcome. After all, this is Houston: We think big!

**Slampo's Place: Always inclusive, yet still against "comprehenisve" immigration reform.

Project Row Houses: Not On Our Holiday Itinerary

We finally contracted the Christmas spirit, at least enough to get us up and about and putting our dollars in circulation. This spending and buying made us happy, and we vowed to let nothing shatter the illusion---not the cloud ceiling that seems to have been hanging just above our eyes for days, or the asshole-to-elbow traffic, or the stark realization that almost everyone we saw in a particular crowded commercial establishment was engaged in conversation on his or her cell phone.

Then we slipped up and read an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. Our Christmas cheer vanished.

The work in question was another in the editorial writers’ attempts to foist cultural enlightenment on readers, this time through the suggestion that this season would be an especially good time for outlanders to visit the Project Row Houses thing-a-ma-bob in the Third Ward. The suggestion was occasioned by the news earlier this month that “Third Ward, and the whole city, got an early Christmas gift” (we’re not the only hack working a tortured Christmas angle) when the Houston City Council approved a $975,000 "zero interest performance-based loan" to the non-profit Project Row Houses for the addition of 16 low-income rental units.

As the editorial explained, quoting a city housing official, a no-interest performance-based loan requires no repayment “if the nonprofits who [sic] get them care for their properties and use them as expected.”

So “gift” certainly is the correct terminology here.

The editorial came hard on the heels of a very approving profile of Project Row Houses in the Sunday New York Times, which called it possibly “the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country" and was generous in its depiction of Rick Lowe, the “lanky, amiable, remarkably youthful-looking 45-year-old artist” who founded the project.

Now we don’t have enough personal knowledge of Project Row Houses to judge whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. We probably should just assume, based on all the laudatory media coverage it’s received over the past decade or so, that Project Row Houses’ melding of “art” and neighborhood revitalization is as wonderful as advertised.

It all comes cloaked in a rhetorical finery that makes it almost impossible to question, anyway, without sounding like a mean-spirited crank.

Except … we know from long experience that when any person or institution gets the uniformly favorable and unquestioning treatment from the media---especially in Houston---he, she or it is nowhere near all that he, she or it is cracked up to be. This is an iron-clad rule, to which there are no exceptions. (We’d cite Enron as Exhibit A, but, hell, that’s ancient history.)

And somehow, in its giddy celebration of Project Row Houses’ big score at City Hall, the Chronicle failed to note a somewhat discouraging word about the project that was buried back in the newspaper a month ago. That was the “news” that Project Row House’s longtime financial director, Lajuanda Malone, had pleaded guilty to felony theft of more than $200,000 from the nonprofit and was tagged, as the paper put it in an uncharacteristically raffish turn of phrase, with “10 years in the state penitentiary” (is there not more than one?).

This was a very odd story. It appeared more than a month after Ms. Malone copped her plea---thus qualifying it not as “news” but as “olds,” as the jesters at blogHouston call such late-breaking items---and it was tamped back in the “Arts” page of the paper’s Sunday Zest section. Furthermore, as they say in law school, it was written not by a real reporter but by the paper’s art critic, in an unusual style that wouldn’t pass muster in a high-school journalism class. The story did offer some juicy bits that were screaming for a fleshing-out:

Prosecutor Lester Blizzard, chief of major fraud division in the District Attorney's office, said the actual amount was closer to $300,000, taken over a period of about five years. Malone was issued a credit card in Project Row Houses' name, Blizzard said.

"She proceeded to run up personal expenses for luxury items, things like vacations and tickets to (San Antonio) Spurs games.

(We notice that Malone is still listed as financial administrator on the Project Row Houses’ Web site, along with a link to her email address.)

We can only assume that this story was previously broken or covered by other media and the Chronicle was playing catch-up and burying the story. Otherwise, there’d be no excuse for it not to be on page one.

“Closer to $300,000” is a major theft and breach of the public trust, particularly for a non-profit that, according to its IRS filings, took in revenue of between $1.07 million and $925,000 annually from 2001 through 2003.

The New York Times reporter did take note of the unfortunate incident, sort of, in this chummy aside:

I said I had read that a woman, a former finance administrator for Project Row Houses, recently pleaded guilty to stealing more than $200,000 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. [A former Project Row Houses resident] paused, then said: “I remember a different woman taking something when she left. We were creating a set of value systems, a community, and sometimes people take from their community anyway. The amazing thing was that Rick never got mad. I would say, ‘It’s so wrong!’ And he just said, ‘Yeah, it happens; that’s part of working with people.’ ”

Now we wonder what happened with that “different woman.” And whether there was any discussion by city council of Lajuanda Malone’s theft and the apparent lack of oversight at Project Row Houses before the terms of this “loan” were approved (surely there was, and we just were not apprised of it).

What really got us about this story was the non-explanation offered by the apparently not-so-amiable Lowe, who told the Chronicle’s compliant art critic:

"It's a legal matter, and I'm not going to discuss it … We have a new executive director and new leadership. (This issue) is behind us. We are moving and rolling and in good shape."

Yeah, man, you’re an artist, a visionary. You can’t be bothered with explaining a serious theft from a non-profit that subsists on the kindness of taxpayers and charitable foundations.

That’s for suckers.