Katie Wants to Take You to…H-Town

Ok, I’ve been remiss in my bogging duties, I know it. And what’s worse, it’s been about two months since I visited Dallas and Houston, so I’m starting to forget everything I saw there. But I promise I’ll do my best with this post. Hang in there.

The day I went to Houston was the same day that one of the many hurricanes this season hit the Texas coastline, so it was raining cats and dogs. Not fun weather to drive in, but definitely ok weather for hanging out in a museum all day. My first stop was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Huge, absolutely huge. And it had this really weird floorplan because I think it was technically two buildings that had been linked by an underground tunnel (transformed into a Turrell piece, of course). Anyway, I wandered through pretty much all of the museum in about three or four hours, I think. There were some good shows going on, too. One was “In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet” which had some really great landscapes (uh…yeah, Katie, we got that from the title), some of which even involved sheep. I like sheep. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that my papers on art for classes don’t sound this ridiculous…Read my thesis if you don’t believe me (hint, hint, family members). So while I’m wandering around this exhibit that is a mixture of photographs and landscapes from about the same time period, mid-1800s to late-1800s, I overhear a conversation between a grandmother and her grandson, where she explains to him that there are painted landscapes because people didn’t have photography back in the day. I’m not the type to step in when someone is clearly making a mistake in the education of their children, but I was wondering how she thought the little display of a mid-nineteenth-century camera beside an easel and paints fit in with the whole exhibit. Odd, very odd. Check out the dates on those exhibition stickers, lady.

I was a little disappointed by how few paintings and sculptures the museum had from the modern to contemporary time period. They had about five or six rooms of modern art, and pretty much just the one for contemporary. Granted, they had a really fun Oldenburg in the contemporary section (ok, aren’t they all fun?), some nice Rothkos, etc, but I needed more! Especially since my two Texas museum trips clarified for me that it is not really modern art that is my first love, but contemporary. I had no idea! Seriously, during one of the Greenhill symposiums at UT, a PhD student in modern art made an ill-advised comment at the end of his presentation about how contemporary art didn’t make any sense to him and seemed superficial or something like that, and I was thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t have announced that thought to the entire art history faculty and students, but I agree.” But now, NOW, I think that I’d much rather look at a Rothko or a Jasper Johns than a Picasso. And, really, it wasn’t that big of a leap for me, since Duchamp was obviously my favorite artist, and he had a huge influence on art from the late 1950s and on to the present. Ok, back to the story…

I explored everything in the first building, ate lunch, and then walked along the little Turrell tunnel installation to the other building, which seemed to be where they kept their non-Western art and temporary exhibits. One of the exhibits on display, “End Game: British Contemporary Art from the Chaney Family Collection,” was truly morbid. Other (better) bloggers have written about the dangers of censorship, but I have to say that watching a dad hold his child up so he could see a Model Village of the Damned was a little disturbing. I mean, yes, this model included figures not unlike the little toy soldiers that boys often play with, but some of these were missing body parts, hanging in trees, covered in something that looked like blood, tiny toy vultures poking at their carcasses. There were heads on stakes. You get the idea. I had a hard time believing that I would have wanted my little, sweet, innocent nephew to see art based on such horrific, although human, situations. The show also had several Damien Hirsts, including a canvas covered in housefly bodies, a bull’s heart with a dagger through it, and a medicine cabinet.

The second part of my day in Houston involved a trip over to the Menil Collection compound. This is in a really pretty part of Houston, but don’t ask me to get specific, because Houston is a quite large city (fourth in the U.S.), and I basically only knew how to get where I was going and back out again. The Menil Collection is made up of several different buildings spread out over a small area. There is a main building, containing most of the collection, then there is the Rothko Chapel, a Cy Twombly gallery, a Flavin installation, and a Byzantine fresco chapel. I had visited the Menil Collection one other time with my icons class, so I had seen the main building, the Flavin installation, and the Byzantine chapel (of course). This time I skipped Flavin and the icons and went to the main building, the Twombly gallery, and the Rothko Chapel. The Menil might be one of my favorite museum-type-things that I’ve ever been to. It’s right up there with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and MoMA. It’s small, so you can easily spend time actually looking at things rather than feeling like you have to hurry to see everything. And it’s mainly from the modern period on up, which suits my tastes. They have an amazing Surrealist collection, more Magrittes than they know what to do with, I think. When I visited with my class, we were taken back into their storage spaces, which had walls that were just littered with fabulous paintings. It was almost shocking to look at. I mean, you hear about how much art is kept in basements or warehouses because museums simply don’t have the space to show it all, but it is just truly remarkable to see it all grouped together in one place. Really overwhelming. And that’s why you should want to work in a museum—the access!

I think my favorite part of the Houston trip was the Cy Twombly gallery. Honestly, I was a little disappointed with the Rothko Chapel. I mean, Rothko is certainly not one of my favorites, but I do like his work. I guess I just wasn’t expecting what I got. It was so dark and all of the paintings were a variation on black, really. The Twombly space felt more like a place of contemplation to me, perhaps because I got stuck in there by myself during a downpour. The hurricane weather really kicked in while I was inside, and I seriously was the only person in there, the museum employee having his own little space outside of the main gallery. So I walked around the entire space, looking at huge paintings in every room, and then finally ending up in this one, long room, with a painting that took up the entire wall. It was amazing. I just sat there, looked at great art, and listened to the rain beat down on the ceiling.

And so my trip to H-Town closed, leaving me to head out of town during rush hour with almost no gas left. Seriously, I thought I was going to get stuck on the highway, surrounded by cars, with no way of getting home. I’m really glad I don’t have to make a commute from there everyday.