![\"Artist](\"http:\/\/www.deborahcoltongallery.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Plum-Double-Flag.jpg\")
<\/a>These images, though taken in 1983, speak to me of the present and seem to reflect the political climate we’re experiencing so close to home these days. I detect in the images an inherent, almost natural, irreverence and rebelliousness \u2014 the markers of youth and artistry that demonstrate an uninhibited reaction to one’s place in time. Quite obviously, we see an artist throwing tortillas at an American flag. There’s much that can be made by way of commentary here… but take from it what you will.<\/p>\n
A gap in an exhibition left opportunity for an impromptu installation and Plum was up for the challenge. “It was a statement about America,” she says, and it’s still relevant \u2014 it still fits. Susan got a good laugh at looking the photos. “I don’t remember it being that, THAT much fun…”<\/p>\n These documentary photos show some behind-the-scenes action related to a dual-venue presentation, which together created Low Down Showdown<\/i>. The group pop-up exhibition invited an active group of Houston artists to present their works at The Alternative Museum in Tribeca (Showdown<\/i>) as well as in a less-pristine venue across the street from the museum (Low Down<\/i>). In the high-end \/ low-end juxtaposition, curation for the project was a collaborative effort between Houston’s Anne Harithas<\/strong> and the Alternative Museum’s co-founder Geno Rodriguez.\u00a0At the time Susan was not living in Houston, but was posted in Seattle and met the Houston pack in New York City for the pop-up.<\/p>\n Art critic Kay Larsen mentioned Showdown<\/i> in his New York Magazine<\/em> editorial “Uncommon Visions”,\u00a0<\/i>and his text is invaluable as far as research goes. From his writing we gather the following:<\/p>\n The showdown, presumably, is with New York. As musical anthem to the show, California artist\u00a0Terry Allen<\/b>\u00a0provided a twanging cowboy lament \u2014 played throughout the galleries \u2014 about a truckload of art sent out from the big city ‘to chide, cajole, humble and humiliate the Golden Bear.’ The truck overturns, catches fire, ‘and what the critics have cheered is now shattered and queered and their noble reviews have been stewed on the road.’ …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n Rowdiness is a basic condition in this show. It turns up in John Alexander<\/b> and Bert Long’s<\/b> outrageous video satire on the Ku Klux Klan, whose members are shown gleefully sticking knives in watermelons and chewing on the pieces. It turns up again in Mel Casas’s<\/b> banner of bullshit (literally, a painting of a bull’s head and a pile of turds). After such sophisticated bombast, I was drawn to the understated poetry of Nancy O’Connor’s<\/b> photo-murals, which allow black cowboys to tell the story of their lives as outsiders caught up in a great myth. And I was especially taken with the ambivalent exuberance in paintings by Robert Wade<\/b>… \u00a0[in which he] has taken an old trove of Texas photographs, enlarged them, and transferred the images onto sensitized linen. The result is a true photo-realism in which cowgirls at a rodeo, or rattlesnake hunters with blank eyes and big guns, become archetypes of wilderness.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The forthcoming sections of Showdown<\/i> will include a number of artists who’ve become practically synonymous with a southwestern viewpoint \u2014 Luis Jiminez<\/b>, James Surls\u00a0<\/b>\u2014as well as others less familiar but equally caught up in the mythology of desert and mountain… ‘Showdown’<\/i>\u00a0is as unruly as such exhibitions out to be.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For Low Down<\/i>\u00a0Bert Long traveled to NYC with several suitcases of freshly made flour and corn tortillas to complete an installation. They started to foster mold about a week after the show opened. Suzanne and Susan decided to repurpose the decaying tortillas and feed the ducks at the Hudson River, which may have been illegal at the time.<\/p>\n As it goes, the museum’s co-director Geno Rodriguez was in jail the night before the show opened. There’s a good story there, I’m told. Artist Frank Fajardo<\/b> had an installation in the pop-up and Clifton Chanier, <\/b>a beloved Houston musician,\u00a0played at the exhibition’s opening party in the basement of the space, where Tacy Tajun<\/b> also executed a mural of cowboy silhouettes.<\/p>\n “We all were pretty comfortable around each other,’ Susan noted during our conversation. “It was the era,” she says…. “I think there was a connectedness that was lost when so many artists later moved [to Houston].. you could really almost count [everyone] on two hands, maybe four hands…”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>\n
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