HELP, 2010, 36 x 60 x 20 inches, foam board, plaster, latex

The Yes Men take on companies using their own tools.

http://www.houstonpress.com/2010-06-03/culture/corporate-takeover/1

By Kelly Klaasmeyer
published: June 03, 2010

Angry about the state of the world? You can send infinite e-mails to elected representatives, offending organizations and corporations. You can vote. You can picket and protest (but that will probably only get you coverage if you are, bless your heart, a teabagger). But even if you’re doing all these things, trying to make yourself heard can feel as frustrating as cleaning up the BP oil spill with a teaspoon. (More on that later.) So how else can you effect political change?

The “Yes Men” have the answer. Parody. With their deadpan spokesman delivery, pitch-perfect fake Web sites, press releases and PowerPoint presentations, Andy ­Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (whose real names, Jacque Servin and Igor Vamos, sound equally fake) have fooled the likes of the BBC, the World Trade Organization and Reuters. They have passed themselves off as representatives of HUD, Dow Chemical and Halliburton. Their first solo show, “Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men,” is currently on view at DiverseWorks Art Space. The traveling exhibition was curated by Astria Suparak and organized by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University and the Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

The Yes Men sprung to prominence with the now-legendary stunt that conned the BBC and (temporarily) embarrassed and (briefly) caused financial losses to Dow Chemical Corporation. In 2002, The Yes Men created the site www.dowethics.com, closely mimicking the design of the Dow Corporation’s own Web site but offering far more candid and truthful information about the company. In 2004, the BBC was looking for someone to interview about the 20th anniversary of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, in which the release of toxic gases from the company’s plant killed thousands — more than 25,000 to date by some estimates — and injured hundreds of thousands. (Dow purchased Union Carbide in 2001. The site, which is still poisoning residents, has never been cleaned up and Dow has never accepted responsibility for it.) So the BBC came across The Yes Men’s “Dow Ethics” Web site and e-mailed, asking for a representative to speak on air. Jude Finisterra (an alias used by Andy Bichlbaum) obliged. Bichlbaum’s pseudonym combined Jude (Patron saint of lost causes) with the Latin for “end of the earth.”

Finisterra declared that after 20 years, Dow was taking responsibility for the Bhopal disaster and liquidating Union Carbide to pay for the cleanup of the site, as well as care and compensation for Bhopal residents. The BBC was thrilled by the scoop, flashing “BREAKING NEWS” across the bottom of the screen and running the segment twice before Dow contacted them and denied that they were compensating anybody. Their stock dropped for about three hours until the denial.

Seeing further opportunity to call attention to Dow’s dickishness, The Yes Men issued a widely disseminated and quoted “Dow” press release with frank, detailed explanations of the greed and self-­interest underlying the company’s refusal to take responsibility for the disaster.

“Keep It Slick” is full of videos and artifacts from The Yes Men’s activities, including the BBC segment. Exhibitions presenting documentation of performances are always tough, but this one fares pretty well, bolstered by the fact that The Yes Men held an activism training session here in conjunction with the show. A video monitor with a BBC clip opens the exhibition. Underneath it is a desk with a collection of the badges and IDs the duo have faked or finagled to get entry into a host of events. The main gallery contains absurd “products” from past stunts, like the “Survivaball model x7″ and the “manager leisure suit.” The Yes Men’s canny mimicry of business culture is on display in their mock boardroom with running PowerPoint presentations, bad paneling, motivational posters and bottles of Bhopal water.

The “Survivaball model x7″ — The Yes Men know that model numbers make things so much more convincing — is described as  ”a self-contained survival suit that allows the richest people in the world to make it through the worst climate catastrophe. It is a high-­concept, high-tech, fabulously expensive gated community for one.” Complete with detailed schematics, the giant, goofy, inflatable suit was presented at a Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida, where attendees inquired about its comfort and affordability with a straight face.

Now, I have to assume that not everyone who attended that Catastrophic Loss conference was evil, stupid or consumed with craven self-­interest. But The Yes Men have pulled stunts like this on numerous occasions and more often than not, no one raises any objections. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation is familiar with both unmitigated bullshit and patently moronic ideas being presented with a straight face. Sometimes the company is consciously lying, and sometimes some managerial idiot’s idea is implemented through a combination of unquestioning ­fealty, self-interest, fear and apathy. The corporate world has more than its share of Kool-Aid drinkers, and the go-along-to-get-along types who will patiently sit through something they should know is ridiculous. These attitudes can also lead people to do things that in the real world are considered immoral or unethical, but in the corporate bubble are just “good business.” The Yes Men are attempting to shock these people back into reality.

Other Yes Men projects, like the gold spandex suit with butt-cheek controls and a big inflatable dick-like extension containing a video monitor for observing sweatshop workers, are just too silly. I think The Yes Men are at their best when they present a company or a government as it should be, as in the Dow stunt, or as when they masqueraded as HUD officials vowing to rebuild and reopen public housing in New Orleans, complete with health clinics. They also masterfully faked a copy of The New York Times declaring the Iraq War had ended and Condoleezza Rice had apologized for the WMD scare. The subsequent denials were all the more damning.

Considering the current, brought-to-you-by-BP environmental catastrophe, we need The Yes Men and their like more than ever. Where is the contrite Lamar McKay, BP president and chairman, vowing to liquidate the company worldwide to make right the destruction it has caused in the Gulf, and God knows where else? In the meantime, when those tar balls start washing up on Galveston, I’m thinking about scraping up as much of that crap as I can and returning it to its rightful owner, BP, conveniently located at 501 Westlake Park Blvd., Houston, TX 77079-2604. (If you’re feeling chatty, BP’s number is 281-366-2000.)See http://challenge.theyesmen.org/how#start, The Yes Men’s helpful, ­activist how-to site.

More information: http://www.artswriters.org/home.php

Read the press release.

Post-Natal Pile (2007)

(wall text from the installation)

Artists Interpret Brillo

In 1964 one visitor upon seeing Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery questioned “Is this an art gallery or supermarket warehouse?” Since that time the Brillo Boxes have spawned many responses ranging from incredulousness to reverence and museum visitors often remain puzzled as to what the artist’s intentions were. The Andy Warhol Museum addresses some of these questions by presenting contemporary interpretations of the Brillo Boxes. Drawing from artists’ and scholarly perspectives, these installations offer a 21st century perspective and pose a creative counterpoint to the original artwork. For the third installation in the series, the Museum invited artist Kelly Klaasmeyer, a Houston-based artist and art critic to share her perspective on the Brillo Box.

Previous perspectives include an installation piece by artist Amy Wilson, and a joint curated installation by University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences and Center for Bioethics and Health Law, and The Warhol in conjunction with the special exhibition Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. These were supported by the Heinz Endowments Art Experience Initiative.

Post-natal Pile (2007) Detail from Warhol Museum installation

Artist Perspective: Kelly Klaasmeyer

Warhol made the Brillo Box a couple years before I was born. The version of Brillo steel wool pads that Warhol was mimicking was already obsolete by the time I was old enough to scrub pots. So the Brillo Box was always an artwork, never a consumer product for me. But because of Warhol and the Brillo Box, it’s easy for me (and my generation) to see consumer products as art objects. And it’s difficult to imagine the indignation that the Brillo Boxes originally provoked.

Warhol’s Brillo Box has become an icon of 20th century art. It is an irreverent work that has become an object of reverence because of Warhol’s and the object’s place in art history. Museums can be very serious places but artists’ studios rarely are. (Unless the artist is really pretentious, which also usually means their work sucks.) Forget Hollywood notions of divinely inspired, tortured artists; goofing around—playing with materials, ideas and images—is a major part of the artistic process.

This doesn’t mean that artists don’t take their work seriously or that art doesn’t require a lot of time, effort and thought. But we can safely assume that Warhol didn’t stride dramatically into his studio one morning in 1964, raise his fist in the air and declare, “Today, I will create a masterpiece!” It’s strange when an object that grew out of somebody goofing around in their studio is treated with the gravitas of a holy relic. I think that one of the reasons people sometimes find modern and contemporary art off-putting is the reverence surrounding works that are, by their very nature, irreverent.

Postnatal Pile is a response to Warhol’s Brillo Box using the consumer products of motherhood. It wasn’t very long ago that I went to the drugstore to buy a pregnancy test. Forty weeks later, I was at Target, and as I looked down in my shopping cart, I saw that I had become a different person. A mom person with a cart filled with diapers, diaper rash ointment, baby wipes, nursing pads, lanolin nipple cream and super extra giant maxi pads.

Childbirth, babies and nursing are all messy, primal, animal things. But we cling to the idea that there is a difference between us and our pregnant Labrador. A host of consumer products help us maintain that illusion. But to paraphrase the 18th century French politician and epicure, Brillat-Savarin, “Tell me what you buy, and I will tell you who you are.”

Marlene Dumas makes her paintings and leaves the rest to you.

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

published: June 04, 2009

I always thought Osama Bin Laden had strangely kind eyes. At least that’s how he looks in photographs, and that’s how he looks in The Pilgrim (2006), a portrait by Marlene Dumas. Dumas has painted an “evil-doer,” not sympathetically but just as she paints everyone else, without judgment and with an eye for the strangeness inherent in all humans. In Dumas’s world, an image of a squiggling, awkward newborn feels as unsettling as an image of a fanatic. The Bin Laden portrait is part of Dumas’s mid-career retrospective at The Menil Collection, “Measuring Your Own Grave.”

Virtually all of Dumas’s images are painted from photographs, most all of them shot by someone else. She collects them from a variety of sources — porn, newspapers, old class photos, fashion magazines; she has hundreds of them stored in binders. Sampling the human condition like some sociological researcher from another planet, she looks at people objectively, without sentiment, without preconception. Her paintings, particularly the later ones, are loosely done. With thin layers and washes of paint on canvas and watercolor on paper, every painting feels like a risk, a one-shot deal that could go terribly wrong. But her work never seems facilely executed, even when it has the simplest imagery.

Dumas was born in South Africa in 1953 and grew up under apartheid. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town and then, in 1976, left South Africa for Amsterdam, where she studied psychology. And although it’s hokey amateur psychology to explore someone’s childhood in an attempt to understand why they paint the way they do, I’ll wager that living under the apartheid system shaped her approach to her subjects. Widespread and institutionalized oppression taints everyone, even “good” people, and makes it a lot harder to make simplistic good-bad judgments. Dumas’s work acknowledges the complexity of people. Osama bin Laden, with his kind eyes, may be a mass-murder mastermind, but he might also be a loving father.

Because her art is dark, grayed-out and anything but comforting, one might expect it to be created by some wan, introverted misanthrope. But Dumas is blond, laughing, witty and downright bubbly, an attractive, zaftig fiftysomething. But she has the matter-of-fact pragmatism of her Dutch ancestry and her adopted homeland. Talking about a painting of a corpse, she says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, but we all die.” But she smiles and sounds apologetic that she has to deliver this bad news to us.

Dumas is the mother of a daughter, and any mother with a grain of objectivity can relate to the artist’s giant images of infants, The First People (I-IV) (1990). Four canvases hang in a row, each nearly six feet tall. There is nothing saccharine or sentimental here. The newborns are strange, gangly, big-headed and disconcerting. Their fists are clenched, their big-bellied, skinny-legged bodies newly uncurled. Twisted and contorted, they are startled and unsure of how to hold themselves, no longer tightly folded in a fetal position and enveloped by a warm, dark womb.

Unsentimental ambiguity continues in The Painter (1994), an image of Dumas’s daughter as a young child. The figure of a girl is sketched onto a tall vertical canvas, her body loosely modeled, with her torso toned a sickly blue and her hands covered with paint — one the purply-blue color of a bruise, the other a dark, visceral red. Her features are sparingly delineated, with dark eyes, a bit of shadow under the nose and a wavy, horizontal hint of a mouth forming an expression that could be either pouty or demonic. She’s either peeved because she had to stop fingerpainting, or she’s just butchered her family and is coming after you. It could go either way.

Dumas’s paintings based on pornography cause a lot of talk. D-rection (1999) shows a man with a big, erect, purple penis. Fingers (1999) depicts a woman bent over and seen from behind, her hand reaching between her legs to grasp herself. But they are painted the way Dumas paints everything else. The artist’s attitude toward pornography seems to be similar to the view common in her adopted country. The Netherlands is often seen as some giant den of iniquity by travelers who hit the coffee shops or the brothels on Warmoestraat, but the Dutch aren’t any more licentious than anybody else — they’re just pragmatic about it. If people are going to do drugs and pay other people to have sex with them, why not make it as safely regulated as possible? In Dumas’s work, sex is just as much a part of life as death and class photos.

Dumas may not be interested in “morality,” but there is a concern for moral justice that runs through the work. Her painting The Woman of Algiers (2001) is based on a 1960 photograph of an event from the Algerian Civil War, reproduced in a Dutch newspaper in 2001. Two men hold the wrists of a very young nude woman, displaying her to the camera. The Dutch newspaper printed black bars over the breasts and crotch of the young woman, and Dumas has painted them as thick slabs that pin down the otherwise brushy image. We don’t know who the men are who restrain her; only their arms are visible. We do not clearly see the woman, but the artist does not paint her as a pathetic victim. She refuses to stoop to obvious visual polemics. The woman confronts the camera with a neutrality that makes judgment the viewer’s responsibility. Dumas won’t do it for us.

Two artists purge their crap, just in time for holiday shopping

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

published: December 04, 2008

We are in the living/dining room of Museum of the Weird, a 1939 bungalow on 24th Street in the Heights. On the table in front of us is an array of artfully lumpy ceramics made by children or perhaps adults with an eight-year-old’s level of manual dexterity. They are all for sale. So is the giant, red, anatomically correct heart that rests in the open rafters above us, and the enormous papier-mâché wasp nest by artist Celia Eberle, complete with enormous wasp.

Everybody has crap in their house, but two Houston artists, Dolan Smith and Bill Davenport, are crap connoisseurs. Inveterate garage salers, thrift store habitués, Dumpster divers — and card-carrying MFAs — these guys have made an art out of artfully chosen junk. Now that junk, at least the stuff they’re willing to part with, is available to you. Smith is selling the Museum of the Weird and getting rid of most of its contents, while Bill Davenport has just opened up Bill’s (mostly handmade) Junk Store.

“I’ve got some good crap,” acknowledges Museum of the Weird director Smith, “but the ones with blue tape on them, I’m keeping.” That includes a 1950s portrait of a woman that Smith enhanced with a clown smile and bigger hair. For sale, however, is a giant cardboard replica of a 40-ounce malt liquor bottle Smith crafted. It has armholes, and it was his costume for his 40th birthday party, where, he says, “I got so drunk I fell over and I was like a giant turtle flopped on its back.”

In the kitchen, an open shelf is carefully stacked with brightly colored and neatly arranged canned goods. Smith has titled it the Shelf of Delicious Advertisements, and it includes cans of things like pink salmon and artichoke hearts, all with kitschy, funky labels. According to Smith, the piece is 14 years old, and cans explode from time to time. It’s yours if you are foolhardy enough to want it.

Also in the kitchen is the Fantasy Fridge, an elderly side-by-side refrigerator covered with images of nekkid women. On top of the Fantasy Fridge rests a bright-orange box of Wheaties that’s been altered — underneath the phrase “Breakfast of Champions” is a photograph of a guy with five-day stubble, smoking a cigarette. A friend of Smith’s who “isn’t even an artist” made it 17 years ago. (It’s gone now; I bought it for five bucks.) Other shelves in the kitchen hold things like freakish wig heads, a mummified rat in a jar and a medical model of a child.

Smith has been working on the house for almost 15 years. He’s selling it now because he and his wife just bought a lovely (normal) home in the Heights. Smith was fortunate enough to sell his house to art car enthusiasts from Galveston who appreciate the property’s singularly weird sensibility. (The entrance to the driveway is flanked by two giant horns liberated from some billboard by a friend of the artist. They’re for sale as well, but the new owners said they wouldn’t mind keeping them.)

The backyard feels like a compound left behind by some crackpot extinct culture possessing elaborate and wacky rituals. There is the Scar Room, for example. Smith, alias Scar Man, has been to the emergency room more times than probably anyone still alive. His ongoing art project is a collection of his own physical and psychic scars written on chunks of wood. He created the enclosed gazebo/scar room where visitors could write down their own scars on scrap wood and add them to the space. The “scars” are for sale as well.

A pet columbarium was added to the site in 2003, and inaugurated with a massive Halloween party. The Museum of the Weird parties were legendary — you always knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the police would show up before the night was over. They did, and so did the fire department. As a part of the columbarium’s christening, stuffed animals were going to be attached to helium balloons to ascend to heaven. Then some guy wearing nothing but a stuffed-animal as a G-string decided they needed to be soaked in flammable liquid first and ignited as they were released. It was a spectacular sight — until some of them got stuck in the neighbor’s trees and others fell down on people’s cars. I think the guy in the stuffed-animal­ G-string wound up at county in that ­outfit.

It’s dark as we are touring the compound, but Smith has donned a miner’s headlamp to light the way. We check out the columbarium, and Smith points out the jagged glass he added to the fence to keep nearby heroin addicts out. Pet ashes are sealed into concrete niches in the wall. Statuary decorates the area, just like any memorial park. There is a Venus with a duck head grafted on, and “the black angel of death,” a saint holding a child with their heads switched. Smith reads out pet names to me, “Sassy” and “Mr. Winkle.” In the center of the space is a big metal cylinder, possibly an old water heater. It has a propane attachment and a door on it. “Is this where you cremate pets?” I ask.

“I’m not supposed to, but,” says Smith, “if the dogs kill something…” He points out the flat metal disk on top of the cylinder. “That’s where you can set your coffee to keep it hot,” he says. I hope he’ll pass that tip on to the next owners…

The crowded, narrow room feels like a lot of other junk stores in the Heights, but once you start taking a closer look at the merchandise, you realize there is something off. Like Smith, Bill Davenport has his own collection of schoolchildren’s misshapen ceramics. A particularly chunky and awkward black coffee mug catches my eye. It looks like something from a Philip Guston painting. It’s perfect in its clunkiness, and I discover why — Davenport made it himself.

An aficionado of the homespun, Davenport revels in the role of earnest hobbyist. As in the case of the coffee mug, he has used his collections as inspiration for his own work. “A lot of this is sourcematerial, an idea I could steal,” he says. Among other things, Davenport has amassed what is possibly the world’s largest extant collection of macramé owls.

Davenport and his wife, artist Fran­cesca Fuchs, bought a 4,000-square-foot 1930 commercial space on 11th Street, spent 16 months remodeling it and have just moved in with their two sons. There are two storefront spaces downstairs. Davenport turned one into a gallery he dubbed “Optical Project,” and the other is now Bill’s (mostly handmade) Junk Store.

Like Smith, Davenport decided to get rid of stuff because of a move. “I had to move all my junk over from storage, and I thought, ‘Oh no, this can’t go on.’ I had to look at everything as I unpacked it.” As a result, he started thinking that maybe he didn’t need all of it. While Smith is hosting a stranger than usual garage sale, Davenport has officially opened a store; he’s got a sales tax permit and he takes Visa and MasterCard.

A collection of 1970s picnic thermoses line a shelf — they have amazing period supergraphics, swirls and stripes in yellows, browns and oranges. There is a “catalog of bouffant hairstyles,” a 1967 photograph of the ladies of Delta Zeta sorority. How about an “evangelical cinder block” decorated with religious imperatives?

“I have the perfect business model,” says Davenport. “If someone bought all this stuff, I’d have no inventory, but on the other hand, no one wants all this stuff.”

Davenport proudly displays a chunk of scrap lumber; it’s a do-it-yourself electric guitar by former Houston artist Al Hermann. It even has a whammy bar. Then Davenport directs me to the “holy grail of thrift store paintings.” A find he made back before thrift stores were overfished by hipsters, the painting depicts the head of Jesus crying on the horizon line of a beach scene while a guy carries a red, phallic-looking surfboard and a woman cavorts in a bikini. It looks like the Son of God has happened onto the set of Beach Blanket Bingo. Davenport doesn’t really want to sell it, so he priced it at $300 dollars. “I price things depending on how much I like them,” he confesses.

This is the first time Davenport has had a room solely devoted to his junk.

“This is my ideal living environment,” he explains. “It’s undiluted by any practical use. It’s just the crap room; you can just cover every surface with crap and spend your time rearranging it. This is like 17 years of thrift store shopping, but just the stuff that I could bear to part with.”

“Art galleries used to be like a store crammed full of art,” Davenport remarks. “It’s a European-style gallery,” he laughs, gesturing around the room. “That’s what I’m gonna tell people.” He wryly looks at the contents of his store as a kind of “afterlife” for “art that doesn’t reach some pinnacle of museum collectibility,” like his Christmas ornament by well-established painter David Aylsworth.

Just in case you can’t decide what or what not to get, Davenport is selling hand-painted gift cards — “Junk Bonds” — in increments of $10, $23, $25 and $50. The recipient may or may not want to redeem them…And just in case you wanted that lumpy coffee mug, it’s gone. I already bought it for five bucks.

Four Russian artists present three phenomenal installations

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

published: January 24, 2008

AES+F is a Russian art powerhouse comprised of Tatiana Arzamasova, a conceptual architect; Lev Evzovitch, a conceptual architect and filmmaker; Evgeny Svyatsky, a graphic artist; and Vladimir Fridkes, a fashion photographer for the likes of Vogue. The group combines their diverse skills to spectacular effect: Their work is slick, smart and infused with a sense of the macabre. Three phenomenal installations by the collaborative are on view at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in “AES+F,” curated by Olga Sviblova.

The installation Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous (1997) contains large photographs of 14 teenage girls. Seven of them are convicted murderers, and seven are ordinary Moscow high school students. AES+F doesn’t tell you who’s who. The portraits, hung in a freestanding circular gallery, are all taken the same way; they’re head-on, mug shot-like images against a white background. All the girls are similarly clad in long-sleeved T-shirts.

Lacking any identifying labels or context clues, you’re left to scrutinize the girls’ faces like some 19th-­century practitioner of the pseudoscience of physiognomy. Hmm, her eyes seem beady and close-set. She looks devious. Her expression seems surly. But are we accusing an innocent? Ultimately, anybody could be anything.

Text on the wall describes the “unmotivated murders” these girls were convicted of committing. One of them stabbed a friend to death over a two-hour period. AES+F is trying to drive home the idea that even the most unlikely people can simply snap, as they often did in the political, social and economic chaos of Russia in the ’90s. It’s a provocative installation, but — call it a cultural difference — some of these “unmotivated” murders seem more motivated than others. In one case, a 13-year-old girl stabbed her 40-year-old neighbor in the stairwell of their apartment building because “she believed that the sexual advances of her neighbor warranted his murder.” I don’t know if he needed killin’, but to me, some 40-year-old making sexual advances on a 13-year-old doesn’t sound like the poster child for blameless victims.

The photographic series Defile (2000-2007) presents seven life-size images of people clad in avant-garde fashions. You might think it’s just Fridkes exercising his fashion-­photography skills — until you notice the models’ sunken eyes, crudely stitched autopsy scars and rigor mortis. AES+F shot pictures of unidentified corpses at the morgue and then digitally clad them in edgy fashion. The photographs are presented as tall, vertical lightboxes — they look like glowing coffins.

The models’ dead bodies are gaunt, and they’re attenuated in a strangely fashion model-esque way. But they don’t really look like the kind of people who could afford high fashion in life. One man, in a purple silk shirt and cravat, is old and wizened. A woman in a flouncy red skirt and fur jacket has roughly shorn hair — like it was cut by some prison or hospital for lice control rather than style.

In their exhibition catalogue, AES+F talk about “the idea of pairing fashion, with its extreme temporality, with death, with its constancy and inevitability.” It’s a provocative strategy, and showing big pictures of dead people has a creepy allure. Russia’s capital city of Moscow contains the wealthiest people in a largely impoverished country. I lived in Russia in the mid-’90s and remember Moscow’s superrich, in head-to-toe Versace, walking past elderly babushkas trying to sell the knobs off their stoves to make a few rubles. Sometimes those poor old anonymous women would turn up dead in the snow. And sometimes those wealthy New Russians in their designer fashions would turn up dead, shot in contract killings ordered by their business rivals. Something about Defile especially resonates in the context of modern-day Russia.

Last Riot (2007) is the centerpiece of the exhibition. When this apocalyptic three-screen video was shown at the Venice Biennale, it caused a sensation. An updated version (using better high-­definition technology) of Last Riot is making its U.S. debut at the Station.

The three screens of HD video present a surreal, digitally animated panorama of the end of the world. It looks like someone dropped our planet and glued it back together with all the pieces in the wrong places. There are Ferris wheels, chalets, windmills and pagodas on snow-covered mountains next to beaches with tanks and palm trees. Hot pink Asian dragons rest on oil platforms.

Planes and trains slowly and flamelessly crash; rockets are launched into the air. The only remaining combatants are a band of young, attractive people, teens and preteens on a snowy mountaintop. With their impassive faces and casually hip wardrobe, they look like the bored participants of a fashion shoot. But they’re armed with brutal weapons like bats, swords and the occasional golf club. There’s no bloodshed, only slow-motion, stylized blows and thrusts that never seem to injure or draw blood.

Lizards scramble over sand, birds soar, and horny white mice hurry to reproduce as man snuffs himself out. AES+F use a lot of Wagner in the sound track. The favorite composer of the Third Reich is hard to beat for ominous drama.

Last Riot is a tour de force, a dark and intensely contemporary vision. We live in a time when average teenagers routinely engage in virtual bloody conflict in their virtual worlds. Our cultures are rapidly changing, spreading and intermingling, and our environment is undergoing drastic climate change. But is Last Riot a warning shot or a premonition?

For the American viewer, looking at AES+F’s work is like having a conversation with some brilliant but cynical old Russian dissident. He’s seen it all, and he is, not unkindly, laughing at your youth and naiveté. You’re foaming at the mouth about George Bush, and he’s reminding you about Stalin.

The MFAH shows Robert Chaney and family’s contemporary Asian art collection

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

published: September 13, 2007

When Robert Chaney and family purchase a work of art, it’s no impulse buy. It’s a carefully considered, business-based decision. In a 12-year period, the Houston wildcatter, oilman and venture capitalist, along with his wife Jereann and 11-year old daughter Holland, have systematically amassed what Museum of Fine Arts, Houston director Peter Marzio terms “one of this country’s foremost surveys of contemporary art.” Selections from the Asian portion of the Chaney Family Collection make up “RED HOT: Asian Art from the Chaney Family Collection” at the MFAH.

“RED HOT” is the MFAH’s first overview of contemporary Asian art — and it’s drawn from a private collection rather than chosen by trained curators. The curating process has been privatized. I suppose you get more bang for the museum buck this way because, as one Houston arts professional points out, showing a private collection is “phenomenally cheaper” than a self-organized show. But collectors are not curators. What criteria do they use to select their work?

Collectors have none of the obligations and responsibilities a museum has to educate and inform — they can buy whatever the hell they want. But problems arise when a private collector’s tastes become the only version of contemporary art from a little-seen region. We’ve dealt with this before at the MFAH. In “African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection,” the tastes of one Swiss collector became our window into contemporary African art. Now the Chaneys’ choices are providing the MFAH’s vision of contemporary art on the Asian continent.

Asia, specifically China, is “red hot” with business opportunities, and it is also “red hot” with art opportunities that have garnered a lot of press. In 2004, BusinessWeek ran a story called “Why Collectors Are Crazy for Chinese Art” that included tips on art buying. The Chaney family started collecting art from Asia — China, in particular — because Robert Chaney believes there is a correlation between great art and a great economy. His entrepreneurial and investing background is the dominant influence in his approach to buying art. The family extensively explained their collecting strategies in an interview with MFAH curator Alison de Lima Green in the “RED HOT” exhibition catalogue.

Chaney says his system of evaluating art includes a “left-brain” phase of “conducting historical research and analyzing past trends in art, trying to discern how and why they happened. I analyze macroeconomic and social trends…(We) identify what we believe to be the most lucrative areas for acquiring masterpieces [italics mine]…In my mind, successfully collecting cutting-edge art is most about finding the next new movement and trends. If you look at the last hundred and fifty years of modern art, you’ll see that the majority of great artworks were made by artists who rode the wave of a new movement. They seized the ‘low hanging fruit’…”

“Given our status as among the most active collectors of new contemporary art in America, having acquired more than a hundred and seventy new works during the past year, we enjoy a significant deal flow,” said Chaney. This means that people hit them up to buy art all the freaking time. They move potential prospects into a system of ranking folders. Chaney says, “The core of this system is the ‘forced ranking’ process I learned from studying Warren Buffet’s investment approach for over twenty years.”

Chaney’s may be a very strategic approach, but aesthetic considerations seem like a pretty low priority. Admittedly, my broke ass knows very little about investing. But as an art writer and an MFA degree holder, I do know contemporary art trends are bullshit. Artists don’t think in trends — at least, good ones don’t. They make work out of what interests them; those who strategically try to ride a “trend” or “movement” generally suck. They are jumping on the bandwagon instead of having something of their own to say. Dealers often try to tout “trends” as a sales tactic. I think a zeitgeist sometimes exists, but it isn’t usually identified as a trend until after the fact.

While trying to ride the trends that the market is constructing may bear out financially in the short term and in some cases the long term, the work usually also has to have some intrinsic level of quality. Defining “quality” in art is always a sticky and subjective thing. I want to believe that in the end, quality translates to market value. But we all know the role hype plays.

Which brings us to ranking works against other works. Chaney is applying a business approach and business-speak to art, something a lot of art people will find horrifying. But I’ll cut him some slack here because I think it is probably just a more anal and systematic way of sifting through images. Most museumgoers probably do something similar when they go through an exhibition and pick out their favorites.

If Chaney’s approach to collecting art is that of a business investor, the events surrounding the exhibition have also been extremely businesslike. A talk the Saturday after the show opened presented three of Chaney’s Asian art dealers (Tim Blum of Blum & Poe, Ludovic Bois of Chinese Contemporary and Max Protetch of Max Protetch Gallery) and Korean artist Do-Hoh Suh (whose work is, incidentally, the standout of the “RED HOT” show). The first speaker, Bois, expressed his amazement at the fact that he, a dealer, was actually asked to speak at the museum. “They would never do this in Europe,” he said.

The moneychangers were definitely in the temple. But it is disingenuous to pretend that art is not a commodity that is bought and sold. And in places like China, the dealers are doing the most on-the-ground scouting. The three dealers spoke with varying degrees of sincerity about why they did what they did and how they came to be involved with contemporary art from Asia. It was interesting, but I couldn’t help feeling I was at some dog-and-pony show for a new IPO. ASIAN ART!!! BUY NOW!!! OPPORTUNITIES ARE LIMITED!!! Additionally, having the dealers you buy your work from come in and tell everyone what a hot market Asia is seems kinda sleazy.

As with the Pigozzi exhibition of contemporary African art, other art venues have gotten on the bandwagon — or were pushed. This time it was the commercial galleries. Word on the street is that Chaney called around asking galleries to join in, using his leverage with the ones he buys art from. But with a market this allegedly hot, I doubt any thumbs had to be broken. By my count, there were at least eight commercial galleries exhibiting work from Asia simultaneously with “RED HOT.” Chaney directly connected several galleries with sources for Chinese work. And the MFAH also organized a bus tour of participating galleries for out-of-town dealers.

Now it’s a very cool thing to have an influx of new art and artists in the city, but the problem is that some of the galleries ultimately functioned as off-site gift shops for the show, retailing similar or smaller versions of the Chinese pop works on view at the MFAH. At McClain, for $8,000 you could buy Made in China, a small version of Sui Jianguo’s Jurassic Age (2006), an enormous red Godzilla caged in front of the MFAH. The domestic-size Godzilla at McClain was No. 784 out of an edition of 1,000. I wonder who owns the other 999? Zhou Chunya’s Green Dog (2006), listed as number five out of eight in the “RED HOT” catalog, was available at McClain for the amazing low price of $120,000. At New Gallery, you could get the gold version of a polychromed fiberglass Luo Brothers’ sculpture of a chubby boy holding two fish and striding across the tops of Coke cans. It was one of an edition of eight and retailing for $35,200.

Those sales of similar works no doubt helped up the value of the works the Chaneys already own. Of course, the real bonus to the family is the MFAH exhibition itself. Simply having a major museum exhibition and catalog of your collection raises its value incalculably. The MFAH gets to present work from a burgeoning region without having to spend resources doing curatorial work on the ground — and curry favor with other collectors who might donate money and work to the museum. So far it’s win, win for the Chaneys and the MFAH, but what about the viewer? Next week look for a review of “RED HOT” — the good, the bad and the stuff that ought to be recalled.