CSAW Revisited

After the opening of Mark Flood: A Guide for Nude Investors last night, someone posted the following video on Twitter.

I don’t know who took the video. I got it off the YouTube channel of petersigma. I don’t know who petersigma is or what his or her real name is, or if he made this video.

It’s old—I think it might even be a little older than the “1989ish” description. The video starts on the outside of Commerce Street Artist Warehouse—we see the beat up loading dock and a door open, A woman stands in the door. This is Deborah Moore. The cameraman follows her inside. She calls out to Rick. Rick Lowe? I guess that’s possible. He was a resident there at the time.

We see an older woman in a long skirt who looks a little out of place in this beat up grunge palace. She might be Deborah Grotfeldt, but I’m not sure. The cameraman introduces himself to Moore. I think he introduced himself as Mark Pirtle. She shows him some artwork by Jim Pirtle, Wes Hicks and herself. She says that some of the art they are looking at is from the Purgatory Show of terrible art.

I interviewed Deborah Moore back in 2016 about CSAW and she told me about their Purgatory show. Here is what she said:

Deborah Moore: You have to put the Purgatory show on there. It was the brainchild of Malcom McDonald and I one August. It was so fucking hot.

Robert Boyd: Malcom McDonald was...

Deborah Moore: He was a unique character at Commerce Street. He was the only person banned from the building for life not once, but twice. A distinct honor that he still carries. In between his banishment, it was August, hotter than Hades, and we said, you know, we should have a Purgatory show of art too bad to be hung even in Hell. It was easy to find work. We could just go into the studios. There were no locks on anything. In the back of Virgil Grotfeldt's studio, we found these highly detailed portraits of fish smoking cigarettes. It won the grand prize. [laughs] They were really old paintings of his in a totally different style. So we went through every studio and found rather a lot of drek. We found some real stinkers. But we wanted more. So every time we'd go to an art opening, I would go up to people and say, "We want to see if we can include some of your work in the Purgatory show." If they were at all established, mature artists, they would say, "Oh my god, have I got some work for you! Please come--take it! Take it! Take all of it!" Other times, we'd say, "You know, I would love to get some of your work for the Purgatory show." And I had several people say, "I don't have any bad art." Uh oh. White flag! You should let us come by for a studio visit--you might make it into the show! No laughter.

Robert Boyd: No one's going to voluntarily... Unless they have a good sense of humor about themselves.

Deborah Moore: Almost everybody had a good sense of humor about it, thought it was a great idea. After I started asking, you know, I'd go to work at my day job and come home in the evening, and here's all these things that were lined up, dropped off. Some of the names were scratched off. Others had no signature. I took a lot of liberties. We would say, "Attributed to so-and-so." "Falsely attributed to so-and-so." Then we went to the dumpster at the Glassell School, and we got a lot of great shit there. One of them looked kind of like maybe a Gael Stack-inspired piece, and so I called in "Still Life Spirit With Bean Farts" attributed to Gael Stack. And Frank Carol actually wanted to buy it. He's a collector. [laughs] "Frank, I don't think that's really a Gael Stack." "It looks like one to me!" I said, that's why I attributed it that way, but Frank, I really don't think you want to put that in your collection and say that it's a Gael Stack painting. "Still Life Spirit and Bean Farts", and he fell for it. But it was hilarious.

Robert Boyd: What year was this?

Deborah Moore: We did two of them actually. I think the first one was in August of '86. And then we did another one a couple of years later.

Robert Boyd: August of ‘86.

Deborah Moore: 1986. It started in 85--a lot of people thought it started in 86. The second one... There was a mannequin head that Tracy Richards got some playdough-type stuff and made noodle hair on it, and noodle eyes, and noodle lips, and painted it cyan and green. It ended up being called "Hiram by Moonlight". [laughs] I just love that name. So the Purgatory show was up and I got a call from Michael Paranteau. He said the director of the Guggenheim is in town and he wanted to walk through Commerce Street. I said, oh, that would be fantastic because the Purgatory show was up. Michael didn't really know what I was talking about. Later around 5 or 6 that evening, here they all come. All these people--Debbie Grotfeldt, the director, and they took in the Purgatory show. There was like 100 pieces in the second one. He read every single title. Like Chris Jones' painting -- I titled it -- we didn't have titles for most of them, Malcolm and I had to make up titles--"What My Parents Paid Thirty Thousand Dollars For Me to Learn How to Do in Art School" And it was just a horrible painting! He walked through the whole show. I couldn't believe how much time he took. As he was leaving, I asked him, "So, what did you think?" And he said, "It just goes to show--when you put this much bad art together in one room, it starts to look good." [laughter]

She jokes about her own paintings, identifying them as “bad art”, but they fit the spirit of the times. One can see perhaps the influence or familial relationship to David Salle or Mimmo Paladino, two 80s art stars.

She shows some more artwork to the cameraman, including a banal western desertscape that she said would ba attributed to Earl Staley, which I’m sure he appreciated. Another scultpural object was to be attributed to Michael Tracy.

Then she shows off a few Perry Webb (i.e., Mark Flood) pieces, including a piece of Welcome Back Kotter garbage, presumably from a thrift store or dumpstar somewhere, and a piece that collages the members of Wham! and some prostitutes into one seamless image.

Moore points out Webb’s studio, which is closed, and describes the art he makes as “Outstanding. It’s just slapping society in the face.” A spot on early evaluation of his work, I would say.

Deborah and the cameraman walk past the Virgil Grotfeldt painting that she references in the interview—two fishes smoking. When I interviewed her, I had no idea what the painting looked like. It is apparently large than my imagination made it out to be, and really well painted, going by the quick glimpse we get in the video. She references the first Purgatory show when talking about it, making me thing that this video is from some date after that exhibit. Sometime between 1986 and 1989, then.

We see a James Bettison piece. Moore declares, “We’ve got bad art by a lot of really good artists.”

The scene shifts to the inside of Perry Webb’s studio, and we see him silkscreening a painting. The sound drops out occasionally for some reason. The camera moves around looking at the paintings hanging on Webb’s walls: lots of work paintings instructing the viewers to do bad things: “FEEL WORTHLESS”, “COMMIT SUICIDE”, “SMOKE CRACK”, and “EAT HUMAN FLESH”. Also shown are paintings that appear to be painted over already existing thiftstore art. These may have been some of the work he showed at such early exhibits as Recent Paintings at the Instituto Stato di Cultura and Imperatives at GVG Gallery.

The cameraman moves into a large room where paintings are being laid out for exhibition. Three people are in the room—I think they are Virgil and Deborah Grotfeldt and Jim Pirtle. But someone correct me if I’m wrong. (It turns out I am wrong! According to Jackson Livingston in the comment, they are Pirtles’s parents, John and Ann.) We follow Pirtle to his studio where he show the cameraman his lamp collection. It’s fascinating being in Pirtle’s space because even 30-odd years ago, the clutter esthetic of NOTSUOH is completely visible in this early Pirtle hovel. Pirtle is weirdly proud of his oddball collection of thrift store lamps.

It was fantastic to see video of Flood and Pirtle fom 30+ years ago. Both are handsome and likable young dudes. And from these humble beginnings, they would both leave a mark on Houston and its art world. And in the past decade, we have seen Malcom McDonald, Virgil Grotfeldt and Deborah Grotfeldt pass on. A lot can happen in 33 years.

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