Out-Zoning Houston

Buffalo Sean

Perhaps there is a cabal out there who would like to edit our Wild West urban landscape into a cohesive order. It is possible that the acceleration of Houston’s growth demands a stronger hand to guide the city’s coursing veins of concrete and commerce-pumping engines of steel and glass. Wild, unwieldy burgs have been tamed before and tempered into hardened tools of self-organization, and we’re unlikely to be an exception. The Contemporary Arts Museum’s current exhibit No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston may be a talisman of this emerging meme, but a cultural uproar threatens to derail this celebration of the city’s mélange.

As rich and chewy as menudo, as accepting as paella, as deeply flavored as gumbo, the hot guts of the Bayou City have Expressionist roots and unpolished edges. From the origins of Texan culture in German, Mexican and African-American communities Houston has inherited blood, pain, pride and earnest low-brow tendencies. Unlike Dallas, Screwston has no artistic foundation in Modernism, no hard-edged clarity, no easy divinity. Toil, sweat and tears are the currencies of Expressionism and Surrealism—both of which grew in the fertile soil of East Texas, Louisiana and Mexico and migrated to Houston. Our cultural orbits are not as ‘New York-centric’ as the rest of the United States, and the distinct combination of Mexico City’s Humanist influence and Southern outsider Expressionism pushed completion, simplicity and objectivity further from the artistic mood. The Menil Collection’s founding director Walter Hopps called Houston art “Imagist”; he lauded it as a third way between abstract and representational art. For No Zoning curators Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith have gathered 25 years of Houston art, using the economic downturn in museum finances to celebrate the peculiarities of local installation and performance work. Their parsing of the best from the rest is debatable, but the presentation of the exhibit is less beholden to the whims of subjectivity.

Young artists have soundly criticized No Zoning for being lukewarm, sanitized or confused. Their issues stem from both omitting the old standbys of Houston art and not paying attention to newer artists. They wonder why The Flower Man is outside on the front lawn and how Notsuoh, Jim Pirtle’s bizarre barroom creation on Main Street, can be half-heartedly recreated in the gallery space. Nestor Topchy, former denizen of the utopian urban colony Templo, is coolly represented by architectural drawings. Some disparage the complete lack of painting, long a staple of Houston Expressionism. Others were searching for a truly living culture and were disappointed by works stripped of their context.

Some artwork seems irrelevant; Knitta Please has done large amounts of their work in every hip city in the world other than in Houston, and the “collective” is racked by internal molting that has left them a bad reputation among many a young artist. If Knitta has responded to Houston, it must have been a bad reaction. I cannot tell why Lauren Kelley, despite her strong body of work, is included in No Zoning. Her stop-motion animation tales of growing up and navigating our conflicted American social mores has little to do with the specificity implied in the show. The performances of Mary Ellen Carroll and films of Andrea Grover evaporate when there is not a scheduled event; during museum hours visitors are left wanting, staring at an empty stage.

For all the good intentions of No Zoning, its presentation leaves much to be desired. If nothing else the large amount of chatter around it is a positive development, bringing dialogue to the community where there previously was none. One can only hope that it leads to all the intriguing alternative spaces and artists across the city that more accurately portray Houston’s sprawling, metastasizing culture.