A Note on Impractical Spaces

I wrote about Impractical Spaces: Houston when I first saw a copy a month ago. Now I’ve read it and thought a little bit about it. For such a physically small book, it is crammed with information. In fact, it is crammed with data. I decided I would try to look at it from the point of view of some of its data. One thing that editor Pete Gershon does is gives a start date and end date for each of the spaces he discusses. I decided to plug that information into a spreadsheet (cause that’s what I do) and see if it told me anything. One thing I realized that could be easily displayed is the founding of spaces by decades. Decades are very arbitrary, and in some ways it might be more interesting to note when a bunch of spaces were all founded at around the same time—what does that tell us, if anything, about that moment in Houston art history. But here are the start dates of all the spaces clumped together by decades.

Decade-wise, the 1980s and the 2010s were crowded with new spaces. Another thing I notice is clusters of when new spaces began, like the late 70s-early 80s.

There are several ways to order this data—by duration of the space, by end date, by statistical analysis, etc. And there is a lot of other data in the book that I didn’t include in this chart—location would be of interest, especially when overlaid with other mapped data about Houston (demography, wealth, proximity to other kinds of spaces, etc.)

Another thing that interested me was how different spaces grew out of other spaces. This chart reflects a little bit of that:

For example, people who had been part of Lawndale spawned a whole host of other spaces. Or, in the case of Box 13, it was formed by refugees evicted from Commerce Street Artists Warehouse which was formed by people kicked out of Lawndale. Impractical Spaces is full of information like this, but gathering it all up is not trivial. But it would be worth seeing for all the spaces. How artist 1 from space 1 moved out to help form space 2.

Thos are the two charts I made out of the data, but many more could be made. But I want to leave with two photographs.

This is me standing in Inversion, the artwork that Havel & Ruck made in 2005 when the Art League (by far the longest lasting art space in Impractical Spaces) tore down its old houses and erected the building that now stands on that lot. I was wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and was riding my bike to the Art Car Parade that year with a friend of mine. She, Robin Altholz, was the photographer.

I also want to honor the man who put this all together. This is a photo of Pete Gershon taken at an Orange Show Exhibit a few months ago.

At this point, I am not sure how anyone can get a copy of the book. But there will be an official book release event on March 30 at the Orange Show. The series editor/publisher, art-blogger Paddy Johnson, will be there.