A bit of perspective on political art
Houston museums staging shows by two who’ve weathered controversies
Art that pushes the limits of acceptability can be an important measure of a tolerant democracy. Scandals over several recent high-profile artworks ignited furious debates about cultural sensitivities, freedom of expression and censorship.
Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket,” based on photographs of the 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, caused an uproar at the Whitney Biennial in March.
May brought a debacle in Minneapolis, when the Walker Art Center said it had bought Sam Durant’s monumental interactive “Scaffold,” a piece that offended the Dakota Sioux community.
Two summer exhibitions in Houston provide some perspective by casting a spotlight on artists who riled tempers decades before debates could be amplified and “fake-i-fied” across the world on Twitter and Facebook: Andres Serrano’s
“Torture” at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s “A Better Yesterday,” featuring Jack Early.
Serrano gained infamy — and a signature piece — with an image of a plastic crucifix floating in a glass of urine. After it was favorably reviewed by critics in 1987, “Piss Christ” provided a lightning rod in 1989 for politicians who wanted to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which had supported Serrano’s work.
Though the art community defended Serrano against the outside attack, three years later it was unforgiving toward the young, gay and white duo known as Pruitt-Early.
Rob Pruitt and Jack Early were high on the smash hits of their first two shows at a small alternative gallery when the all-important Leo Castelli Gallery called. The first show looked at the culture of teenage American boys. The second did the same with girls. Looking for another cliché to bust, they created a show for Castelli they thought celebrated black culture, juxtaposing store-bought posters of civil rights heroes with posters of pop-culture figures.
Critics panned the show, and the phone stopped ringing. Perhaps even worse, people Pruitt and Early thought were friends began crossing streets to avoid them.
The artists, who had also been lovers, broke up and largely disappeared.
Pruitt eventually came back as a bad boy of the art world, but redemption was harder and slower for Early. He thought he’d never make art again and painted houses to pay his rent.
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston director Bill Arning saw PruittEarly’s 1992 show and its aftermath. He remembers “Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue” as a “leveling” of black culture.
“They looked at everything from black culture that white kids were buying at malls. They just filled this gallery. It was like, Louis Farrakhan next to New Edition,” he said. “This was the first period of that kind of politics, and they got roasted. Now it looks very tame and very smart.”
London’s Tate Gallery revived “Red, Black, Green” in 2009, without a fuss.
Early appreciated the gesture, but it didn’t help him. His next break didn’t come until 2014.
Early’s journey back inspired Arning to create the current three-part show “A Better Yesterday.” One gallery gives Early his first solo museum exhibition.
Psychotherapists are always telling people that yesterday is fixed, “and all you can change is your attitude,” Arning explained. But artists can re-spin their histories by using it as raw material for new work. Jack Early’s ear candy
The surprising thing about Early’s recent work is its surface tone of bold, sunshiney cheer.
The artist narrates his story engagingly in the Americana-infused centerpiece, the audio-sculpture “Jack Early’s Life Story in Just Under 20 Minutes.”
Against a jazzy-jaunty background of clarinets, banjo and percussion, Early explains how he grew up gay, visually sensitive and obsessive-compulsive in a white upper-class family in Rocky Mount, N.C.; how he and Pruitt quit art school, moved to New York and quickly inserted themselves into the scene, scoring jobs with Warhol; how they became overnight stars.
“Our first show had a line of people wrapped all around the block,” Early says.
The catastrophe that led him where he is today shows up only for a few seconds in the recording: “Pruitt-Early started like this (with a musical phrase that builds up with anticipatory fireworks) … and ended like this (a fizzle phrase) … And like that, Pruitt-Early was over.” Then comes a brief, but pregnant, pause.
Maybe he’s just one of those charmed souls destined for notoriety no matter what. Early started making objects again because when luck gave him another chance, he wrote a hit song.
Music was Early’s salvation when he went into artistic exile.
“I should have been really sad, but I just started humming these little melodies that made me happy,” he said. “I started recording them, and all of a sudden, I had a working CD.”
It sounds almost inconceivable, but when he gave a copy of his song “It Don’t Rain in Beverly Hills” to the duo Dean and Brita, they recorded it. On a commission from the Andy Warhol Foundation, they were making record soundtracks for Warhol films. They used their version of Early’s song for Warhol’s film “Edie,” also including it on their album “13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” Then they performed it across the world and sold it to the hit TV show “Beverly Hills 90210.”
“It was like my ‘Guernica,’ ” Early said. “Can you imagine having a song on the radio?”
A friend encouraged him to reclaim the song and filmed Early performing it in a small 2011 film, “What to Do With a Drunken Sailor.” After a stealth debut on a 3-by-3foot wall in a tiny alternative art space in New York in 2013, the film made waves in a 7,000-squarefoot display at Art Basel Miami, one of the world’s largest and buzziest art fairs.
All but one piece in Early’s show at the CAMH was made for the Miami outing. Its large paintings, inspired by midcentury magazine ads, chinoiserie wallpaper of toy soldiers and sugary breakfast cereals, brought some older gay men to tears.
“That’s when it really dawned on me what had happened,” Early said. He knew he would feel good, seeing his paintings up, so gleefully celebrating his youth. He hadn’t realized how many others would relate.
That experience renewed his faith in art, and people.
“I’m still trying to make my own way,” he said. “You hope you’re doing something good for people.”
He’s not yet making a living again from art, but he’s philosophical about it all.
“Things might happen in life, and you might think you’ve lost everything, but something else will come along if you keep the faith,” he said. Controversy often sells
Serrano’s show “Torture” surprises with its beauty.
His huge, staged images of extreme interrogations clearly have antecedents in high art, lit as soulfully as Rembrandt paintings. One of the most obvious features the collapsed body of a shirtless man in a “bloodied” headscarf, mimicking Jacques-Louis David’s late-18th-century “The Death of Marat.”
Although the camera is his chosen tool, Serrano studied painting and sculpture. The scale is important, he said. “The notion of the photograph fades, and you think of them as works of art, even as paintings.”
Serrano said he’s never viewed himself as a shock artist. “I don’t even see myself as a controversial artist, although I know I am,” he said. “The ‘Piss Christ’ and many things are seen in that vein. But my intent was always to be true to myself, to photograph the pictures in my head, or the ones I thought of or saw, and wanted to re-create as art rather than as photographs.”
Not that he hasn’t embraced controversy and benefited from it. His career has been wildly successful; far from being shelved, a print of “Piss Christ” sold at auction in 2014 for $185,000.
The seed for “Torture” was sown years ago when the New York Times commissioned Serrano to re-create scenes that could have happened at Abu Ghraib, for a story about the investigation into American military interrogations. He didn’t pursue it further until a European group invited him to use a dilapidated French munitions factory. To Serrano, that looked like the kind of place someone might be dragged and tortured.
He also toured Germany’s Nazi-era concentration camp sites and former East German interrogation rooms for the project, intrigued by how they have become tourist attractions.
“The real dilemma with my work is that I can approach controversial subjects, but the way I execute the pieces, you can’t really complain about the aesthetics,” Serrano said. “There’s that push and pull — the beauty versus the idea that maybe this is something unpleasant.”
The “Torture” show includes a “Piss Christ” print and a big portrait of Donald Trump that Serrano shot long ago. He hopes it all sparks discussion.
“Even with ‘Piss Christ,’ it’s a beautiful image,” he said. “The dilemma is somewhere else. Your reaction to it is based not on what you see but on what you imagine.”
He said the hoopla over that image made him realize a long time ago that he needed to be strong. “I just keep doing it,” he said. “That’s the best way for an artist to defend himself or herself.” Provocative protest
If Early could reverse time, would he stage “Red, Black, Green” again? He didn’t answer directly.
“It’s very dangerous to censor the arts,” he said. “We had no intention of overreaching or offending. The backlash came as a total surprise to us. Does that make me wary of things I do today? I hope not.”
He believes, along with many others, that Schutz had a right to make her painting “Open Casket.”
No one complained about Henry Taylor’s nearby painting “The Times Thay Ain’t a Changing, Fast Enough!!,” which depicts the recent killing of Philando Castile in his car by a police officer. Protesters felt the subject matter was OK for Taylor, who is black, but not OK for Schutz, who is white.
Regardless of her skin color, Schutz’s own experience is “valid and important,” Early said, noting that Till’s mother wanted the world to see what had been done to her son.
In multiple news articles, Schutz responded with grace, saying she understood the outrage and insisting that her painting was meant to be an engagement with loss. She said it would not be sold, so she wouldn’t benefit financially from the scandal.
The provocation didn’t hurt the biennial. And even before all that noise erupted, chief curator Scott Rothkopf suggested in a promotional video that art needs to raise questions.
“There are moments when some of the political and social moments of the day rise more forcefully into art,” he said.
The Whitney declined to remove Schutz’s painting as some protesters demanded, instead acknowledging the complaints in a wall label.
Not all institutions welcome such controversy. Walker Art Center director Olga Visa expressed regret over not anticipating trouble with Durant’s “Scaffold.”
One of several works bought for a $33 million sculpture park renovation, the 50-foot-tall piece could have been mistaken for an odd playground attraction, with steps that invited kids to scramble up to a platform.
But it mimicked a gallows — the wrong message for several reasons. Its steps symbolized seven capital punishments, including a particularly sensitive event in local history, the 1862 hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux men. The community also feared what “Scaffold” might encourage because American Indians have the highest teenage-suicide rate in the nation.
Durant, an ardent political activist, explained in a statement that he made “Scaffold” in 2012 as “a learning space” for people like himself — “white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists.”
He apologized for not reaching out to the Dakota community when he learned that the Walker would take the piece, which was to have been unveiled in June.
He and the museum surrendered the piece to the Dakota, allowing them to dismantle and burn it.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston director Gary Tinterow has watched this year’s art debates with more than casual interest. The MFAH’s big “Ron Mueck” show includes a sculpture of a young black man with a stab wound in his chest that some people could have found objectionable. And a Jenny Holzer piece in the museum’s lobby flashes provocative political and philosophical statements.
“We’re proud of that work, and I’m mesmerized by it. It makes me think about my life and my priorities and how to be a good person,” Tinterow said, noting that the museum is full of art that is political in some way, to some people.
The MFAH does not program shows as a response to external political events, as some other museums do, but Tinterow likes it when they’re timely, and he reviews programs through that lens.
“It’s important that we had an exhibition focusing on Cuban revolutionary art and that we’re focusing on Mexico right now,” he said. “We hope it will drive reflection and new insights.”
But he sides with artists and others when it comes to freedom of expression: Censorship is not acceptable.