thinking of you

In the Tunnel

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:40:00 +0000

Screen shot from the Toho film King Kong Escapes, 1967. Lt. Jiro Nomura holds a drawing of a Tunnel dug by King Kong on his remote island home of Mondo. He is showing the drawing to Lt. Susan Watson (Kong's future object of desire) on a submarine in the South Pacific as evidence of Kong's existence.

The image is on screen for 2 seconds and in those 2 seconds that I saw it, I knew I had to do drawings like that.

This is an installation in the Window Box at Box 13 ArtSpace in Houston. 11 feet high x about 23 feet wide. Paint on sheetrock. Tunnel, 2010.

Above is a drawing by the Artist Hector Alonzo Benavides. I saw this drawing last year at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas, in the exhibit Texas Gothic. When I first saw it on the gallery wall, I was shocked to see someone had drawn what I thought was the same tunnel I had been drawing. Then I recognized it as Hector's by the amazing, obsessive pen work. You cannot see in this photo detail of the drawing behind glass, but the image is drawn in ball point pen and each one of the gazilion lines is distinct and clear. I recognize the structure of this tunnel as the one that I saw in the Kong movie and the one that I drew repeatedly.

I'm glad I met Hector before he passed away in 1999. I thought a lot about him while I was doing some large drawings with white india ink on gouache. This is a detail from Tunnel (Return) 33" x 44" (2012) that is at MFA Gallery in Dallas in a show that ends this Sunday, March 4.

There is a video installation in the show titled Abyss.

I first started thinking about drawing tunnels while I was thinking about the abyss and the idea of mise en abyme, a formal trick where an image contains an image of itself and creates a a sequence that repeats infinitely. Like facing two mirrors toward one another.

I messed around with infinity and fell into the abyss, the long tunnel created by the reflections of the reflections

Another show that is about to end is Right to Assemble at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. It is a show of collaborative work by artists with studios at BOX 13. I am collaborating with Kathy Kelley on two pieces and Tudor Mitroi on two pieces.

One of the pieces I did with Kathy (image on left), is about 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide. Kathy makes things out of used tires and inner tubes (and other detritus of our civilization). On this piece, I sheetrocked the backside and painted a tunnel with 3 monitors with waterfall video. Kathy's form made me think of a waterfall and the location of the show, San Marcos is significantly located on important sources of water both above and below the ground. The show ends next weekend, March 9, 2012.

Now I am using cameras and stuff to make images and videos for a show in the Project Room at PG Contemporary in Houston, April 21-May 12, 2012.

Moby Links

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:26:00 +0000

How to Read Moby Dick

Kevin Daniel's Project Ishmael

Justin Quinn

Guy Ben-Ner

Moby Dick Part 1 & 2

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

cut up and erased

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:29:00 +0000

This is a piece I did for an experimental writing workshop called ¡Copy Paste! with John Pluecker.
For an exercise in erasure, we were supposed to bring some books to use in an intervention. I brought Sexual Hygiene, Amateur Astronomy (both antiques) and Walden. When it came time to cut up and/or erase them, I found that I was too attached to them to do it.
I dug through my bag and found this brochure from an exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art, The Anxiety of Photography. The essay was written by Andrea Mellard. but now it is writ by A dreaM. I liked the show and the brochure both.
If you like it, JP is doing a workshop at Skydive in Houston on October 29: How to Cut and Paste Your Way to Artistic Freedom.

click to enlarge

gallery talk

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:05:00 +0000

Curators Talk and Gallery Tour of Simulacra

(work by Ted Kincaid, Laura Lark, Shawn Smith curated by Michael Henderson)

Saturday, October 15, at 11 am

Gaddis Geeslin Gallery at SHSU

1028 21st Street

Huntsville, TX 77340

I am far, far from Huntsville, but (thanks to Steve Jobs) I will make a virtual appearance via FaceTime, and students in my Museum and Gallery Practices class will be talking about the artists. My colleague Annie Strader will be directing the tour and holding up my face on her ipad so I can see what is going on and talk about the show.

Flashback to the 90's?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:44:00 +0000

Antennas is the first video I made after I moved from NYC to Texas in 1993.
It was a reaction to the landscape.
I shot it on black and white super 8 and had it transferred to video. The opening titles are my attempt to get ants to spell out the word "antennas" by writing it in sugar on paper and placing it on their mound. They were a lot slower than I expected, so while the expensive super 8 film was rolling, I became impatient and set the paper on fire. (I have sped that sequence up in this version).
The antennas were shot around Dallas and Fort Worth and the surrounding area while I was driving from class to class as an adjunct art professor at various universities and junior colleges. The soundtrack was made by sampling the am radio one night. It turns out to be an odd kind of time capsule of 1993.

Simulacra

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 02:22:00 +0000

I've curated this show of work by Laura Lark, Ted Kincaid, and Shawn Smith in the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery at SHSU. My intention was to put together a show of work that had a basis in photography, but transformed the photographic image into an "art object".

Ted Kincaid

Shawn Smith and Laura Lark

Laura Lark is showing drawings of women appropriated from a fashion magazine article that offers instruction on the application of make-up. The works are eleven feet tall and drawn with pantone marker on tyvek. The installation of five of them on one wall effectively creates a "valley of the dolls" in the gallery. She is also showing a three dimensional tableau of Neely O'Hara's bedroom from The Valley of the Dolls. It looks great illuminated against the black walls in the new media room and the sound track from Lark's video Aura fills the gallery with a pleasantly nostalgic soundtrack that makes one of the gallery sitters feel like she is "in a soap opera." (The video uses stop motion to show one of Lark's drawings being made dot by dot, and is set to a Henry Mancini score.)

Laura Lark

Shawn Smith takes images of animals from the internet and creates three dimensional objects made of wooden cubes. They make you feel like you are looking at a blurry photograph in three dimensions. There is a nice interplay between his pixillated technique and Larks pointillistic drawings.

Shawn Smitth, CMYK vs RGB (not the title)

Laura Lark, Shawn Smith

Ted Kincaid's prints are also created pixel by pixel. They have the quality of looking as if they were created by some antique photographic process using wet plates and glass negatives, but are in fact, created on a computer. Like everything else in the show, they are fictions. Images taken from images and mixed into the thin air and spun back into pictures. Pictures that create a reality that exists only within them.

Ted Kincaid

The show is October 3-27, 2011 in Huntsville, Texas at the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery.

Laura Lark talks tomorrow, October 5 at 11am in the art auditorium.

Shawn Smith talks later, December 7, 2011 at 11am in the same place.

Marking the Equinox

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:32:00 +0000

This marks the end of a summer that scorched Texas. It was the first time I didn't love summer and looked forward to it's end. The equinox at 5 am tomorrow morning marks the beginning of fall and the northern hemisphere begins to tilt away from the sun.

The videos in Indian Marker are meant to be played on two stacked monitors and mark a location as a site where nature and wildness are revered and celebrated.

Philosophy, Part I. 2002

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 04:11:00 +0000

Philosophy, Part I from Michael Henderson on Vimeo.

Tunnel

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:11:00 +0000

Michael Henderson Tunnel, 2010, Window Box, BOX 13

What We're Up To - members exhibition at BOX 13 ArtSpace through December 16. All of the galleries are filled with work by resident/member artists of BOX 13. Above, my wall painting in the Wiindow Box.

As I Recall . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 04:48:00 +0000

North River Arrivals and Departures

Michael Henderson Manhattan Diary, 1987

I took the train from Dallas to New York a few times. I would check my trunk at Union Station in Dallas and ride in a seat to Chicago where I would change trains and get a slumberette. The slumberette was a tiny room on the train with a bed a sink a toilet and a chair all made of stainless steel and engineered to fold up into the wall and disappear so the room was filled completely by either the chair, the bed, or the toilet and sink. By day, it wasn’t much bigger than a chair by the window, at night you could get in bed with your face against the window, sleep to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails and wake up in New York, feeling pretty good.

The first time I took the trip I stayed in New York for 6 years. It was 1986 and the city was plagued by AIDS. A lot of the people I met when I first got to New York would be dead before I even realized they were sick. It was not a great environment for me to come out as a gay man in. The gay community was filled with fear and death and the rest of the world seemed to be full of fear and hatred. Not everyone, of course, but some of my best friends tried to talk me out of it. They thought it was a bad idea, like it was a choice I was making and they tried to convince me how foolish it was, how it would ruin my life.

I spent a lot of time alone the first couple of years I was in New York. Without much money, I used to entertain myself with long walks through the city and reading the New York Times in my little loft on Canal Street. I loved the way the newspaper looked. There were no color images in it in then. On Sundays, along with the weather maps, on Sundays they would print a chart called “Sky Watch” that depicted the locations of the stars. I used these as subject matter in drawings I did to mark time. I would save the maps and charts and draw them over and over. And then I started drawing pictures of articles in the paper.

Michael Henderson
From the New York Times, 1988 (detail)

I met Joe toward the end of that stay. It seems like it was not too long after I came out. I was walking home one night and we passed each other on the sidewalk then we both turned around and came back to meet one another. He was the first guy I would call my boyfriend. We both had bikes and rode all over the city. Joe was a location scout in the film industry and showed me a lot places in New York I hadn’t seen. He told me about Williamsburg and gave me several tours of the neighborhood.

I found out Joe had AIDS after we had been together for a few days. He cried when he told me. I panicked and simultaneously came down with a horrible cold and knew I had caught the virus. That turned out not to be the case. The big struggle for me was deciding whether or not I wanted to be in a relationship with someone who was going to be sick. Whether or not I would let myself fall in love with someone who was going to die. I did. Joe and I had a wonderful summer. He made me feel comfortable in the gay community, brought me out and showed me around. And then, on Labor Day at Wigstock, Joe dumped me.

Instead of dying on me, he left me while he was still healthy. I was unprepared for that. He showed me a lot of things before he left me, though. Wigstock being only one of them. That fall, I moved to Williamsburg and got a bigger, cheaper, nicer loft. I stayed friends with Joe but didn’t see him much after that. After a couple of years, I left New York to return to Texas and live in a house that had belonged to my grandparents.

A year later I took the train back to New York to teach for a semester at Princeton. I called Joe and wanted to see him, but he said no, he didn’t want me to see him. He was staying with someone who was caring for him. I told him I really wanted to see him and he said he would come to visit me, but it never happened.

That June was the 25^th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. I stayed in New York for the celebration and marched up 5^th avenue with ACT UP in the “alternative” parade that went past St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The official parade was rerouted up Broadway to avoid the church. I remember the sea of people, stretching down the avenue both directions as far as I could see, and the signs of protest and the many many people carrying giant pictures of the ones they loved who were gone, who we would never see again.

Michael Henderson
Still from A March in June, 1994

There used to be a section in the New York Times called North River Arrivals and Departures. It listed the passenger ships docking on the Hudson with times and destinations. Apparently, the Hudson was called the North River in colonial times. I liked to read those old articles. I like the anachronism of the whole thing and I like the way they looked.

the black sea

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:35:00 +0000

This is a painting I did in 1989, at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska. At the time, while everyone was looking for someone to blame for the disaster, I couldn't help but think that we were all responsible to some degree. Of course, the accident could have been prevented if safety precautions had been followed and the ship had been structurally impenetrable. But we don't live in a perfect world. We all wanted to buy the oil that was in that tanker so we could travel from here to there. We were all a big part of the reason there was a giant tanker of oil floating in the sea in the first place.

Now that the Gulf of Mexico is filling up with oil and an enormous plume of oil is about to be swirled into the gulf stream, dispersed into the Atlantic Ocean and eventually spread around the world, I thought of this painting.

The whole think makes me so sick, I almost don't ever want to get in a car or an airplane again.

This painting was shown in 1990 at the Anchorage Art Center in a show called Beyond the Spill.

Map V

Oil on Gessoed Paper

72" x 60"

1989

brushes with fame

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:03:00 +0000

I just returned from a field trip with students in my Museum Gallery Practices class to Fort Worth and Dallas museums. My friend and colleague, Leanne Gilbertson, joined me with her Warhol class. On Saturday, after spending two days with students, we slipped away to visit my friend Charles Dee Mitchell who lives in an Architecturally Significant Modern Home.

Dee has a new blog, Potato Weather, and is trying to recruit followers. Leanne is a guest blogger for Art:21. So, in conversation with Dee and Leanne about blogs, I mentioned that I had a blog but that I hadn't posted anything in over year. The conversation inspired me.

I'm back to the blog. Thinking of you.

In Fort Worth with the students this weekend we saw Warhol: the last decade at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. At the beginning of exhibition, there is a wall of photographs of Andy and the people he was around. I moved to New York in 1986 to be in the Whitney Independent Study Program. I stayed in NY until the mid 90's. Warhol died in 1987 while I was working at the bookstore at the Whitney Museum. The day he died, I was sitting in the ticket booth selling admission tickets. ABC news came in to film the announcement of his death in front of a coke bottle painting. A month or so before, I had come to work and in the office there was a stack of Interview magazines that Andy Warhol had autographed. My boss said that Andy had come by and autographed these for the bookstore staff and that I could have one. I declined. "I don't need that," I said. "Andy Warhol will sign anything."

I hope I grew smarter during the following years in New York while I worked for museums and galleries and wall street banks, hanging moving and taking care of art.

Seeing the wall of photos and the works in the exhibition brought back a flood of memories from my time in New York.
One of the photos at the Warhol show was of a young Jeffrey Deitch. It made me recall that I had hung a Man Ray coat hanger sculpture in Deitch's apartment in the Trump Tower. I remembered that another time when I was working for Jeffrey, I had met Basquiat's father. In the Warhol show, there were a lot of paintings that were collaborations with Warhol and Basquiat. I remembered that I had built stretchers and stretched some of Basquiat's paintings that had been painted on unstretched canvas. The flood of memories from this period continued.

Not only have I turned down Warhol's autograph, I have
had sushi with Basquiat
been in an elevator with Keith Haring
seen Liza Minelli in her pajamas
talked to Cindy Sherman in her street clothes
received studio visits from Barbara Kruger
talked to David Salle's mother on the phone about his show
looked at art with Meryl Streep
peed with Matt Dillon
felt a tingly attraction while talking to Francesco Clemente
been kissed by Larry Kramer
had a chat with Robert Gober
given Jean Beaudrillard advice on where to buy a camera
been chased by Willam Wegman's weimaraners and told by him that "they never chase anyone"

and I met a lot of people who died during the AIDS epidemic who probably would have rather lived to become famous.

Heather Boaz "Drawing in Time" at the Green Box

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:21:00 +0000

Documentation of the exhibition of videos by Heather Boaz at the Green Box, upstairs at BOX13 ArtSpace in Houston, Texas, October-November 2008.

Ingestion

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:21:00 +0000

video from the sculpture collaboration with Kathy Kelley.
(see Hunger below)

Hunger

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:12:00 +0000

a collaboration between Kathy Kelley (sculpture) and myself (video) for the exhibition "Cohesive Discord" at Houston Art Alliance's Space 125 Gallery.
(the sound comes from some pesky squirrels in another video by elaine bradford, david waddell and teresa o'connor.)

dedication

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Henderson) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:40:00 +0000

from bonehead to rainbird