by Jock Ireland
Link to the discussion video: https://sculptureforum.net/2024/12/12/thomas-houseago-night-sea-journey/
I was able to go back by myself to the recent Houseago show at Levy, Gorvy and Dayan the day after I’d
visited it with The Sculpture Forum crew. I wanted to watch the film about Houseago that was being
screened at the gallery, the film we didn’t have time to watch as a group. The film was pretty
good—intelligent, witty, not at all boring. It really changed my take on the sculpture and paintings in the
show—though I still can’t say I’ve come to any kind of verdict about Houseago’s work.
The big message from the film is: Thomas Houseago is alive. He’s not the victim of Roland Barthes’s
“Death of the Author,” that 1968 essay that began to define postmodernism. Maybe we’re all to some
extent postmodernists now—but Houseago’s work is very different from, say, the work of David Salle, a
more conventional postmodernist, who showed new paintings at Skarstedt around the time of the
Houseago show.
Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here” was performed at BAM soon after the Houseago show. Here’s Apollinaire
Scherr on Jones’s work:
“In 1994, at the peak of the AIDS crisis, the formidable dance critic Arlene Croce hammered out for the
New Yorker why she wouldn’t be reviewing or even viewing, Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here”. Many essays for
and against her position ensued. The basic issue was how close art should come to life and still remain
art. Croce insisted: not very close. Most everyone else, beyond the “art for art’s sake” stalwarts, thought
it could come as close as it wanted. The majority had the future on its side.”
After seeing the film about Houseago, all my worries, my confusion about art and life, about who might
be exploiting whom with the show—all that stuff stopped bothering me.
Houseago’s paintings were easier for me to accept: the Inferno/Paradiso narrative of the paintings
didn’t get in the way: I could accept it/trust it as just part of the extreme extravagance of the paintings,
of the whole show.
It’s Nutcracker season now. What Lydia says about magic in the Houseago forum makes me think of
Balanchine’s Nutcracker—and Mark Morris’s “The Hard Nut”—and the child in/behind Houseago’s
work—not in a creepy literal way—just about the way children and magic get into art.
I visited MoMA after the Houseago show. On my way to the Schutte show, I stopped by Picasso’s
“Demoiselles”—and I at least imagined a faint connection to Houseago’s work. I don’t think the
connection is deep, but that I felt something might say something about this “moment” of ours. It’s a
bewildering moment, at least for me.
Comments for discussion are welcome.
Sculpture Forum 
A turn to primitavism in the guise of the delving into the unconscious is just too shallow a tactic. It’s “look at how serious I am, how manly I am (crude imagery and working), and yet how sensitive I am”, all at the same time, but it doesn’t all add up, at least for me. Dare I say the backstory is creating an image (like an actor) instead of letting the work stand (or fall) on it’s own.
Anyway, it surely ain’t postmodern work!
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the houseago film was a promotional film produced by his gallery, so its slant and that context is significant.
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You’re right: that’s for sure–but it’s a very good promotional film–so good I think it’s fair to say it’s more than just a promotional film. And I think it’s significant that this kind of promotion (of an individual artist) is happening now as postmodernism is fading (maybe).
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