The Arthropologist

The arts' Olympic marathon: A FotoFest adventure

Laura Letinsky, "Ice Cream Dish, Tulip," 2002, from "Hardly More than Ever"
Richard Mosse, "Pool at Uday's Palace, Jebel Makhoul Mountains, Iraq," from theseries "Breach, 2009"
Joey Lehman Morris, "George Mallory's Cradle (Waxing Gibbous)," 2007
Matthew Brandt, "Wilma Lake CA 1," 2008, from the series, "Lakes and Reservoirs,2008"
Leslie Hall, "How We Go Out Version 2," 2007, from the FotoFest 2010 Biennialexhibition, "Medianation: Performing for the Screen"

I know, you are training for the MS 150 or some other athletic feat of stamina. Good for you. I have my own marathon going on.

I call it, "Have map, will FotoFest."

Chances are, I have yours too, I've swiped a few along the path. I keep one in the car, one in my purse, one by my desk, and several scattered about the house. If I have been late for a meeting, forgive me, an irresistible red or yellow pole beckoned.

I am just a hopeless FotoFest fan.

What's a dance/theater, or as we say in the biz, "time-base" writer doing hanging around several thousand photographs you wonder? Well, every now and then, my eyes need to look at things that stand still. Or one better, something in motion that has been made to stand still by a click of a camera. All that said, there are performative themes scattered throughout the marvel that is FotoFest.

Iowa lust

"Medianation: Performing for the Screen," curated by Gilbert Vicario, spreads out over the Art League, Isabella Court and New World Museum. Leslie Hall's wacky work made me want to move to Ames, Iowa, to devote myself to gem sweaters, perhaps don some gold stretch pants too. Watch her wildness here. I first saw Kalup Linzy's hilarious send up of the art world video at MASS MoCA, but it's great to see a larger body of his work. No wonder he's been named one of the Nifty 50 by the New York Times T-Magazine.

Sometimes the performance happens all by itself as in Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher's "Cliff Hanger" at McClain Gallery. It's no surprise the team made Artadia's 15 finalist list.

The California refugee in me made "Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California," curated by a team from the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, all the more potent. Joey Lehman Morris' work is full of promise, skepticism and puzzlement, much like California. A photo of a car in a cage/gate makes me wonder, is the car being held captive? Another photo shows two empty park benches facing each other. If you were sitting in either one you would miss the view.

"There's a visual irritant in your work," I tell Morris. "Exactly," he smiles mischievously. Morris' sculpture background also manifests in the object quality of his work. People almost tripped over the gold-framed tribute to explorer George Mallory, which sits on the floor. "They never found Mallory's camera, " Morris adds. "So this is like a gift."

A little breast milk art

Matthew Brandt, another SoCal artist, takes putting the subject into the photograph a step further. His curious portraits are dipped in the subject's fluids, vomit, breast milk, tears or mucus. A photo of Wilma Lake, soaked in Wilma Lake water exemplified the idea of bringing the essence of something right on the page.

"It took a lot of soakings to get a photo I liked," says Brandt, a self-described photography history geek.

I found a bunch of dance lovers gathered around Nicole Belle's work. It's got performance all over it. "I was influenced by the archives of performance art, more than the actual performance," says Belle. I understood exactly what she was talking about at "Leaps into the Void Documents of Nouveau Realist Performance" at The Menil Collection. The photo of Yves Klein flying through the air just has to surpass the actual event.

Leave a good hour or more to sift through the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's "Ruptures and Continuities: Photography made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection," especially the Directorial Mode and Constructed Environments section. Could photographers be frustrated theater directors?

Reality's a hard look

FotoFest is not without some difficult viewing. The images of "The Road To Nowhere," curated by Natasha Egan, concerned an eroding America. I was taken by Eirik Johnson's somber images of the shifting landscape of the great Northwest. Brian Ulrich's abandoned stores looked all too familiar. In "Whatever Was Splendid: New American Photographs", curated by Aaron Schuman, Richard Mosse's photos of the military hanging out in Uday Hussein's Palace in Iraq created a sharp juxtaposition, mixing weapons and empty swimming pools.

You can't entirely understand FotoFest without spending time in the Meeting Place, the pulsing heart of the operation. Read theWall Street Journal's A Place for Snap Judgments and yet another WSJ capsule review here. Photographers (520 of them to be exact) from all over the world descend to the Doubletree Hotel in four-day sessions to meet with curators. A session can bring a photographer's work in front of 16 museum directors and curators, more if you count the roving reviewers.

To stand amid the flurry of artists carrying their black-boxed portfolios is nothing short of incredible. The excitement is not just in the reviewing room either, informal showings happen all the time, in the off and in-between hours. It's like a beehive of photo energy. Paired with Ricardo Viera, director of Lehigh University Art Galleries, I had a chance to experience the review process firsthand.

I was most taken with Chris Harrison's noble portraits of young men and his straightforward photos of World War I monuments, unfancy and honest.

The thrilling finish

"Discoveries of the Meeting Place," selected by 10 curators from the last Meeting Place, took me to an imagined world. Liz Hickok's jello urbanscapes cast an eerie spell, while Judy Haberl's sculptural ice purses possess a fragile, just-here-for-an-instant quality.

It's been great to share a tiny bit of all that has passed through my optic nerve over these past few weeks. Know that there is more much. I've been slowed down by returning to exhibits that I need to see again or show to friends. The resident gallerina at Peel has a "You again" bubble over her head every time I pop in to see Laura Letinsky's "Hardly More than Ever." With every visit, these painterly images reveal more.

I recommend the blitz technique. Spend a few hours seeing work until your brain starts thinking in pictures. Make your eyes cameras. Dig deep into FotoFest, it's huge and it's right here in Houston. Bless pioneers Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, the patron saints of this art form, for growing this international festival in our beloved city.

You still have time to run over to Winter Street Studios for a curatorial tour from 6-9 tonight to see "The Road to Nowhere." Next Thursday, on April 22, the tour is at New World Museum for "Medianation: Performing for the Screen."

There's more than 100 participating spaces. As you can imagine, I have more to see and only 10 days left to do it, so I have to go now. At the MFAH, screenings of films An American Journey and Fire in the East: A Portrait of Robert Frank start any minute. I'll have to talk to you later.

Where's my map?

See Leslie Hall in action:

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Movie Review

Jude Law battles white supremacy in real-life crime thriller The Order

Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

Jude Law in The Order.

White supremacy has long been a stand-in for evil in movies, with the correlation easy to make given the strong ties to Nazi Germany. Whether a film puts forth white supremacists as its main characters or supporting ones, their usefulness in a story is as people who are easy to hate and that deserve to be held to some sort of justice.

While that idea holds true in the new film, The Order, the nature of the group featured is somewhat muddled. The central figure is FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), who essentially sets up a one-man task force in the Pacific Northwest to track a group known as The Order. Husk is convinced that the group, which is an offshoot of a larger white supremacist organization, is behind a series of bank robberies to fund anti-government schemes.

Husk recruits local police officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) to help follow the group, which is led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult). The two, joined occasionally by FBI agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), do their best to keep up with The Order’s increasingly bold crimes, which morphs from “just” bank robbery to murder.

Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Zach Baylin, the film is at its best when it delves into the personalities of its characters. Husk’s monomaniacal nature is great for his job, but not so much for his family life. Bowen has a solid bond with his wife and kids, but his greenness in law enforcement leads to some questionable decision-making. Mathews, like many cult leaders, is a charismatic person with very misguided tendencies.

The filmmakers set up the plot (which is based on a real-life story) well, but the details get a little loose as the film goes along. While The Order has a hatred of Jews, a plot against radio personality Alan Berg (Marc Maron) doesn’t make much sense in the context of the film. The geography of the group’s operations is also confusing; they’re located in Washington, but they range out as far as Colorado and California to commit their crimes.

Still, the inherent appeal of good-vs-evil keeps the plot mechanics going, and the side stories of the main characters give them a depth that makes up for other faults. The filmmakers also make sure to demonstrate how the scourge of white supremacy has never been limited to one particular era, and continues to infect American society to this day.

Law commits fully to the lead role, giving a performance with a convincing American accent that is far from the suave British parts which have dominated his filmography. Hoult proves equally believable, giving his character a nuance that somehow makes him more detestable. Sheridan adds another interesting role to a career that would be enviable for any other young actor.

While The Order doesn’t rise to the level of an awards contender, its story is still relatively compelling with antagonists that, unfortunately, never go out of style. A great cast playing characters with engaging lives keeps the film watchable even when it goes into some odd detours.

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The Order is now playing in theaters.

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