Surreal Houston

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Houston on the whole feels incredibly surreal.

Thanks to the lack of zoning, the city has become a sprawling mishmash of an urban area with no rhyme or reason (WARNING: May be offensive) to its layout.

Some of the prettiest spots around here sit next to ugly strip malls, municipal buildings are surrounded by warehouses, parks appear within sight of oil refineries, and skyscrapers grow isolated on the horizon like weeds.

My hotel suite has a pretty good view of it all.

Don’t even get me started on the traffic.

I guess it’s appropriate that this surreal city would host some of the most surreal art in the United States.

Orange Show

I started at a remarkably bizarre folk art installation called the Orange Show.

It’s located on a street of otherwise unremarkable small houses in the southeast part of the city.

It sticks out painfully, a collection of white stucco buildings covered in tiles with metal sculptures on the roofs.

The entire thing was built by one man, Jeff McKissack, as an attempt to get people to eat more oranges.

A community art foundation now runs the place.





The Orange Show practically defines visionary folk art.

The building walls all have mosaics containing quotes extolling the health benefits of oranges.

Stairways hidden in corners go to the roofs, which are covered in metal sculptures made from pipes, wagon wheels, and bicycle seats.

An arena hides in the back containing a steam engine like contraption.

McKissack apparently planned to hold presentations on oranges here.

A tile wishing well hides in a back corner.

Every turn reveals a new bizarre surprise.





One building is set up as something of an orange museum.

The walls hold plaques with famous quotes supposedly proclaiming the goodness of the orange.

A mannequin in a Santa suit is happy because he eats oranges every day.

A happy looking clown got that way by drinking orange juice.

A plastic orange tree sits in a corner.

I wish I knew what the giant frog figurine is supposed to represent.





Three panels hidden in a corridor describe the life of Jeff McKissack.

He worked as a metalworker and drove a delivery truck for an orange distributor during the Depression, and then spent two decades working for the post office.

Like the best visionary artists, he genuinely believed in his admittedly quixotic vision.

Oranges were the health fruit that would save humanity, and spreading their gospel became McKissack’s mission.

He built the entire place himself; using scrap and trash he salvaged along the side of the road during his mail deliveries.

McKissack was convinced his masterpiece would be a sensation and hundreds of thousands of people would visit yearly.

They never came 😞





The Orange show was amazing to visit, a perfectly realized unique vision of self-expression.

For anyone who likes visionary or folk art, it’s a must see.

Burners have an extra incentive; the foundation that now owns the place also organizes Houston’s famous art car parades.

Beer Can House

Next, I saw Houston’s other piece of unique folk art, the Beer Can House.

It’s also located in a neighborhood of otherwise ordinary homes, this time on the west side of the city.

I found it a little disappointing.

I expected a house made OF beer cans, much like the bottle house in Rhyolite (see It Can Never Happen Here…And Already Has).

Instead, it’s a normal house that the owner covered in flattened beer cans, with labels still attached.

Basically, they turned their beer habit into free siding.

The rims became hanging curtains, which cover the front of the house.

The driveway has hundreds of embedded bottle caps.

Sadly, the gift shop does not sell beer, since that would require an alcohol license.

Rothko Chapel

My next art work was much more serious.

Houston surprisingly holds one of Mark Rothko’s most important late works, the Rothko Chapel.

John deMenil commissioned the famous color field painter to create a non-denominational chapel in Houston in 1964.

The result was an octagon shaped brick building located in a small park behind a reflecting pool.

It contains a single large room with huge Rothko paintings on each wall.

They are all incredibly dark, black mixed with purple and maroon.

The artist has stated the purpose of these paintings is to induce a state of meditation in viewers.

Personally, I got depressed instead.





The reflecting pool outside contains a sculpture from famous minimalist Barnett Newman.

It’s a column that rises from a single point within the pool to a broken top.

It’s supposed to be a memorial to Martin Luther King (see Birthplace of a Legend), but the sculpture is so minimal and abstract I couldn’t tell that looking at it.





Considering its purpose, the area around the chapel perfectly illustrates the madness of Houston’s urban landscape.

This sacred space sits exactly two blocks from a small scale printing house, and three from a major strip of gas stations and convenience stores.

Thankfully, the trees around the park block most of the jarring sights and noise.

Menil Foundation

After the chapel, I saw another important collection of surrealism in Houston, the Menil Foundation.

John deMenil emigrated from France to Houston in 1948 to work in the oil business.

He did quite well at it, and became wealthy.

He spent a good portion of his fortune collecting art.

Like the Belchers in Charlotte (see Adventures in Banktown), he opened the foundation to display his collection to the public.





The collection is large enough that it’s spread through multiple buildings.

Finding them all was a pain.

The main building is a masterpiece of minimalist architecture by Renzo Piano: a long single story building with floor to ceiling windows and a white roof.

The main path from the parking lot crosses an unusual sculpture, which people may not even notice.

A black metal gutter embedded in the lawn traces out abstract shapes; Isolated Mass/Circumflex #2 by Michael Heizer.





Like the Belcher Museum, the largest collection here was Surrealism, which the deMenils bought heavily.

Surrealism grew out of Freud’s theories of the unconscious.

Artists tried to create works that reflected unconscious processes, irrationality, and dream states.

Salvador Dali (see The City of Sunshine) is the most recognized member, although he was ultimately kicked out for being TOO famous.

The collection has a large number of paintings by names both recognizable and obscure.

Rene Magritte, who used optical illusions for surrealist effects, has multiple canvases.

As expected, nearly everything looks bizarre.





One amazing room holds a large collection of African and Polynesian art arranged like a funhouse.

Craft objects overlap each other on the walls, sculptures hang from the ceiling, and everything looks disorganized and irrational.

The write up states that this room replicates rooms that surrealist artists often had in their studios.

They believed that non-European art could inspire otherwise inaccessible ideas.

The bizarre arrangements also attempted to spark new ways of thinking.





A small room held abstract art from the 1920s, which I really like.

It included Composition with Yellow, Red and Blue by Piet Mondrian; Baum-Physiognomie by Paul Klee; and Peinture Murale by Fernand Leger.

The amount was way too small, an appetizer rather than a meal.





That led to a much larger set of rooms holding contemporary works.

The centerpiece was a large room holding six Mark Rothko canvases, alternates to those in the chapel.

All had the same enormous scale and depressing color scheme.

The rest of the work varied all over the place, like contemporary art itself.

Seated Woman by George Segal is a life-size statue made of plaster sitting on a real wooden chair.

Requiem by Yves Klein is a board covered in small pebbles and bits of sponge, all painted blue.

The section also featured Be I by Barret Newman, which he made by putting a single piece of tape on a canvas, painting the entire thing a uniform red, and then removing the tape to create a vertical stripe.





While I liked much of the art, I found the labels in this section really disappointing.

They referenced so much art theory my head hurt.

In my opinion, if I need to read a scholarly treatise to understand an artwork’s message, something has gone wrong.





The last gallery held a temporary show by minimalist sculptor Walter de Maria.

It practically defines the type of art I dislike, objects so soaked in art theory that their meaning completely disappears.

The gallery held three restored antique cars from the 1960s, all with striking red and white color schemes.

Every car had an iron beam, with a different shape for each car, passing through the front windshield to the back.

What is that supposed to represent?

Even after reading the handout, which talked about “subverting the dominant form of the automobile in historic memory”, I still have no idea.





A second building held a large number of canvases by an Abstract Expressionist heavily influenced by surrealism, Cy Twombly.

He covers large canvases with swirling and scribbled lines, all in a single color.

The intent is to create an emotional effect in the viewer through the patterns.

Personally, I thought they all looked like something a kid would scribble on a chalkboard, which may be the point.





A third building held a gallery with sculptures by Dan Flavin.

A minimalist I previously saw at Chinati (see Minimalist Art on Maximum Scale), he worked exclusively with neon tube lights.

The first room held a long gallery with neon tubes of different colors arranged vertically on the walls.

The sculpture meditates on how colors affect the viewer.

The deMenil’s commissioned it specifically for the space; it’s one of the last works Flavin completed before his death.

That room led to smaller ones with white tubes arranged in different patterns.

One of these looked like an Art Deco skyscraper in miniature, called the Monument to V. Tatlin.

Vladimer Tatlin founded the art movement Constructivism in Russia in the early 1920s, which heavily influenced Flavin’s ideas.

The Galleria

After the museum, I experienced surreal Houston culture of a different sort.

Like Buckhead in Atlanta (see History, for a City that Doesn’t Like Any), the wealthy in Houston (and Texas in general) have raised conspicuous consumption to an art form.

True to their Texas roots, Houston’s real estate moguls can’t imagine doing anything on a moderate scale, including malls.

Houston is home to the Galleria, the largest mall in Texas and the ninth largest in the country.

I went, because skipping it would mean missing an influential piece of the city’s urban fabric.





In many ways, the mall perfectly reflects the city that contains it.

It has a huge range of stores, ranging from gaudy luxury to surprisingly affordable.

The building spreads through a complex of towers, including two different hotels and three office buildings.

Like the city, the mall started small and then expanded repeatedly.

Every new piece was stuck wherever it could fit; creating a vast confusing maze that was a nightmare to navigate.

Traffic on the surrounding streets was some of the heaviest I’ve encountered yet.

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Photos

Orange show
A small sample of the bizarre environment of the Orange Show

Wall mosiacs
Mosiacs like this appear throughout the complex

Happy clown
The clown whose happy because he drinks orange juice

Wishing well
The orange show has no limit of suprises, such as this

Rooftops
Metal art covers the roofs of the Orange Show

Beer Can House
Houston's other site of folk art

Beer can siding
Old cans turned into siding at the Beer Can House

Rothko Chapel
The serene exterior of the Rothko Chapel

Reflecting pool
Reflecting pool at the Rothko Chapel, with sculpture Broken Column at the far end

Menil Collection
The main building, designed by Renzo Piano