The enduring mystery of a hometown anti-hero
Bill Arning was trying to explain the artist Mark Flood.
Somebody had to because Flood wasn’t talking, at least not to the Chronicle, before the opening of his first museum survey, “Mark Flood: Gratest Hits.”
“Gratest” is not a typo. Think verb, like shredding cheese.
Arning, the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, pointed to the towering painting that introduces visitors to the show. It reads, in all caps:
“Everything Here Is By Mark Flood Famous Successful International Insert Hometown Hero Narrative Mark Flood Doesn’t Like Explaining He Lets The Audience Figure It Out Mark Flood Is Somebody Who Did Something Somewhere Formerly Nowhere Mark Flood Lives In Houston.”
“This was a big negotiation,” Arning said of the artist’s statement. “We don’t have his birth
date or his original birth name.” (For the record, he was born in 1957. More on his name later.)
Museums don’t assume everyone coming through their doors has heard of the artist whose work is on display. Arning would have preferred to provide more context for the wild and wooly show, which is bisected by a huge, zigzaggy wall made of large paintings bolted together. A green tinsel curtain beckons you backstage, a kind of “Welcome to Tinseltown” gesture.
Behind it lies a pile of several thousand small paintings lettered “LIKE.” That’s a piece called “5,000 Likes.” It’s interactive. Flood wants you to move them next to your favorite things in the show, a physical version of Facebook’s appreciation culture.
This is one of the reasons critics and other artists love Flood: He’s an astute and biting observer of pop culture.
Arning has been determined since he arrived in Houston six years ago to mount a show by the reluctant Flood, who became “Famous Successful International” after about 25 years of being just another Houston artist who worked at a museum for a living.
Unlike most of the artists working at museums now, who have come through art-school graduate programs, Flood doesn’t have any degrees. He was an assistant at the Menil Collection for about 15 years, and before that he worked for Texaco.
In the beginning, all of Flood’s work was intentionally, punkishly ugly. (Now only some of it is.) One of the best-known pieces is a crude, collaged, black-and-white spraypainting on cardboard from 1989 with the words “Eat Human Flesh” and a picture of a now-forgotten teen celebrity. It poked fun at news stories about demonic teenagers who tortured cats and such.
Arning said Flood gave the painting to a friend, and Houston authorities seized it after they saw it in a window. So Flood made about 20 more and put them up all over Montrose.
Flood’s life and art changed after he read Dave Hickey’s influential book “The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty.” About the same time, the legendary iconoclast Walter Hopps, Flood’s boss at the Menil, suggested he paint something people would want to put on their walls.
Flood started cranking out large, seductively pretty paintings with patterns lifted from lace. In the beginning, he used the textiles to create figures, as in 2006’s 20-foot-tall “The Warrior.” Now his signature is a lacy border, often with a central field of watery waves. Flood produces the waves with a contraption made of multiple paint brushes.
The lace paintings were a “liberation strategy … that was also meant to be just a little bit self-critiquing and dumb,” Arning said.
Collectors couldn’t resist them. Today, galleries in Berlin, London and New York represent Flood. In 2014 and 2015, about the least paid for a Flood painting at auction was $11,000 (for an “Eat Human Flesh”). Several lace paintings went for more than $100,000.
Flood isn’t the only cynic who has benefited from the perverse logic of a whacked-out global art market, although Arning said he was one of the first.
Arning said it took him years to persuade Flood to do a museum show, so he gave the artist free rein to make it happen. Thus, that big, tongue-in-cheek “wall text” painting by the front door.
“He’s a moralist, in a way that can almost be annoying. He says everything that gets in the way of the artist-to-viewer relationship is anathema to him. One of which is museums,” Arning said. “He has things he will and won’t do. I said, ‘The one thing I can’t get you out of is being the hometown hero.’ ”
‘Confusion and awe’
Arning did not expect Flood to show up for Friday night’s opening because Flood never shows up for his openings.
Instead, two guys who usually impersonate him at gallery openings were scheduled to appear inside a cage.
This seemed to amuse Arning greatly.
“So this idea of having his doppelgangers in a cage, where they can be poked, is about how he feels having this much of himself on view,” Arning said. Flood had promised to be there for a public tour Saturday, Arning added, “but you know he’s going to throw a twist, and I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet.”
Flood’s Houston friends say the artist is sincere, and they respect him for it.
“There’s a certain confusion and awe about everything he’s done,” said Aaron Parazette, a longtime friend who teaches painting at the University of Houston. He admires Flood’s intelligence.
“He is quite compelling when you meet him,” Parazette said. He also thinks Flood’s ability to be a “reluctant participant in his own festival” is a fascinating anomaly. “His success is not an example to anyone. It’s not reproducible.”
Nick Koenigsknecht of Peres Projects, Flood’s Berlin Gallery, came to Houston for a patron’s dinner before the show opened. He admires Flood as “somebody who has really done it his own way,” he said. “And working with him is like going down a rabbit hole — the knowledge, depth and experience he brings.”
Texas Gallery owner Fredericka Hunter, who has watched Flood for years, calls him brilliant. She laughs thinking about how often he’s changed his name. She knew him as Jon Peters when he worked at the Menil and Perry Webb when he led the punk band Culturcide. (At the museum, in the Culturcide cubbyhole where you can play the band’s illegal record, “Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America,” his name appears as John Peters on a document.)
“Some people still call him Perry … or Jon, his given name,” Hunter said. Lately, he’s been threatening to switch to Mark Freud or Fraud “or something funny and pun-ish,” she said. “I bet it makes you laugh like it does us.”
Support for fellow artists
The Houston art community doesn’t just love Flood because he’s funny.
He’s used his “juice,” as Parazette calls it, to support a number of younger Houston artists, mounting shows of their work in New York and Miami at his own expense — even taking out full-page ads in Artforum.
“He has been influential in ways that go beyond the scope of his own work since he had ‘a salon’ back in the days,” Hunter said. “He was a very important force in the ’90s generation for that fact alone, and it has only gotten better and more interesting.”
Two early Flood protégés, Jeremy DePrez and Will Boone, are now internationally known. El Franco Lee II, a more recent beneficiary, doesn’t expect to quit teaching any time soon but said Flood has shown him how to be fearless with subject matter, such as his figurative paintings about African-American culture.
Flood also supports a bevy of studio assistants who are well-paid and have a good time. He is all about hanging out.
“He loves the way his career began, where he and a bunch of friends would get in a space, put on a show, their band would play and they would give their work away at the end of the night,” Arning said. “A ton of people in Houston have these Mark Flood paintings that are now worth more than their houses because they went to these early shows.”
I asked Arning what about Flood’s work might still resonate in 100 years.
“If I was in a collecting museum and I wanted to buy them, I would by the ‘Another’ paintings or the very simple text ones, like ‘Drink Blood,’ ” he said.
It’s hard to know what Flood considers serious art, but his text-work signatures include canvases that read “Another Painting.” Seven of them in DayGlo orange and blue hang on the walls of the museum show’s best room, a black-light lounge with leather furniture and a small TV screen that plays a loop of the promotional videos Flood makes for his shows.
Arning, ever the jaunty, good-natured showman, blithely posed as we finished our tour for a photo in front of a painting that reads “Whore Museums.”
Arning said Flood has a love-hate relationship with “people talking about him.” He said the artist declined to be interviewed or photographed for this story because, in his hometown, he didn’t want his “last bit of anonymity to be blown.”
Maybe Flood should change his name to J.J. Watt.