The Old Jail Art Center
Bill Davenport
February 4th – May 20th 2012
Cell Series featured artist: Bill Davenport
Installation view of "Bill's Junk", Houston, Texas © 2011
Bill Davenport was born in Greenfield, MA and received a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Sculpture from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. In the late 1980s he moved to Houston and participated in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Core Artist in Residency program from 1990-1992. He has had numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the US and abroad including: Arthouse Prize Exhibition, Austin, TX; Forever Rafter, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; The Searchers, White Box, NY, NY; Spectaculess, Homeroom Gallery, Munich, Germany; Drive Friendly at Ibid Gallery, London, England—just to name a few.
Copyright Bill Davenport © 2011
December 2011 - January 2012
PK: When I view some of your past three-dimensional work, amusement parks come to mind. To be more specific, elements of parks-the faux rocks, wood, characters, boats, etc. and how we experience them. Is this something you are consciously attempting to reference?
BD: When I was in high school, I had a part-time job making sets for the Lazy Susan Dinner Theater in Lorton, Virginia. We were doing "The King and I," and used acres of aluminum foil to create the gilded interior of the King of Siam's palace. It was incredibly cheesy, but when the lights went down and the singing and dancing began, it worked! I think it was then that I realized that the most powerful part of any art piece is in its effect- and that something need not be real, or even convincing, to be effective.
As a matter of fact, unconvincing illusions are often the best- the suspension of disbelief common in theater works for art, too. People love to play along, and they really enjoy a deft bit of trickery. In many situations, people actually prefer fakery- artfully distressed walls, stonewashed jeans, haunted houses, and representational paintings being just a few examples.
PK: I agree, but do you think a problem may arise when the viewer misses intent? In other words, they may read the "unconvincing illusion" by an artist as lack of skill or a poorly conceived idea. After that, the viewer may completely dismiss the work or concept.
BD: Sometimes people who like their art polished are put o‑ by the rough edges of my work, but in general people are very tolerant of wild exaggeration, sloppiness or funkiness when it's humorous. Look at cartoon characters!
PK: I recently had a conversation with someone concerning my observation that many Texas artists (past and present) use humor in their work, even when they reference a serious subject matter. Do you think that is just part of the Texas vernacular?
BD: I think the heightened presence of humor in Texas art is entirely a matter of the market, rather than Texas being a particularly funny place. Being inherently irreverent, funny art never rakes in the big bucks; galleries with high rents and overheads can't afford to show it and stay in business, so you don't see so much of it, although it's surely being made. Here in Texas, artists and galleries have less to lose; we can take a chance and have fun. It's one of the few things we can do better here than in tighter, more high-stakes art centers, and part of the reason I like it here.
PK: While recognizing this, your work seems to take that a step further by creating unconventional art "commodities," or work that is more about an experience. Would you agree with this?
BD: In Bill's Junk, in addition to working with physical art objects, I'm fiddling with the social conventions surrounding them as well, which makes you more aware of parts of the art experience you don't usually think about. I'm not fiddling with them very much; the show is, at bottom, still a room full of art objects on display for possible sale, like any gallery show, but with two important changes: Instead of waiting for the show to be over, you can buy things immediately, a familiar convention from most retail stores, but unusual for art galleries, and even more unusual for museums. Instead of thousands of dollars, the objects are all under $500. Both the immediate sales and the comparatively low prices are unconventional for art marketing, but familiar from other stores.
PK: For those unfamiliar, can you briefly describe how Bill's Junk came about and what objects it contains?
BD: In 2008, my wife and I moved into a 1930 commercial building we rebuilt as a house and studio at 1125 E 11th St. in Houston. My new studio included two storefronts on busy 11th St., between Andy's 24-hour Tex-Mex and Stardust Antiques. I had a lot of hardware and lumber left over from the renovation, so I piled it all into the front of my studio and out onto the sidewalk, and opened the door on Saturdays to sell it off.
When you move, you realize just how much extra junk you have accumulated. I had been collecting interesting objects and artworks from thrift stores and yard sales for nearly twenty years, and I needed to clear out some stuff, so I added that to the piles of old doors, locks, and lumber. People came by, then more people! The Houston Chronicle did a story about my unusual "store."
Deep in my heart, I guess I've always dreamed of being a junk dealer; I worked hard to make my store an edgy, marvelous treasure hunt, the epitome of my ideal of the greatest junk store ever. I had not acknowledged to myself that what I was doing was art; I thought of it as just selling o‑ extra junk and having fun, so I was taken aback when Toby Kamps, then Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, asked me if I could install the store in the museum as part of his "No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston" show in 2009. Imagine you're an artist, and an important curator comes to your studio and asks you to be in a big show at his museum, but instead of your work, he wants your junk!
I sold off most of the "regular" junk years ago. Nowadays, I can see Bill's Junk as an art project that happens to be a store, but I still just try to keep it full of really "great stuff," defined as stuff that I would be excited to find in a junk store. I like unique, handmade things: paintings, pots, models, and sculpture, some by people who think of themselves as professional artists, and some who don't, along with a smattering of interesting rocks and roots, bolts, scraps, hardware, used books, and whatever else is handy.
PK: Your concept for the OJAC Cell Series (while typing the question I subconsciously wrote "Sell" Series) entails bringing the store concept into the context of an 1800s historic jail structure. How do you envision the two working together conceptually?
BD: At first I thought of installing fake bars, shackles and hardware, playing o‑ the historic use of the building, but I guessed you might be tired of out-of-town artists mining that obvious (and very appealing) idiom. Then I thought of installing a store that had hundreds of old-fashioned keys, fake and otherwise (jail+keys, get it?) but didn't think it would hold visitors' interest as well as a store with more variety. So I decided to add knives and guns and liquor bottles, to make a gun-knife-locksmith- liquor store, but that seemed too dark, and might be interpreted as moralistic, or just wicked, and might not be funny anymore. So I decided to add gore: severed hands, heads and body parts, blood everywhere; eyeballs on the counter, etc. would make it funnier. THAT would be a great show, if I had a year to work on it, but I didn't. So I reined in my schemes, and began talking sense: "Bill," I said, "you don't know their space, or how much stuff you'll need to fill it. You don't know the audience. There are already plenty of unknowns-go for what you know." So I did.
Conceptually, my store is repurposing your museum, just as your museum is repurposing the old jail. My shop is a little like a souvenir store; I'll make sure to have some Old Jail related items in stock. One of the nice things about a junk store is its flexibility and impurity. I can have jail keys, knives, guns, severed hands and eyeballs (and I will), and I can have a lot of other stuff, too. People can make the site-specific connections where they occur, but won't miss them when they don't. Art can be disappointing, but junk always exceeds expectations.
PK: It is my understanding that the art/junk will be for sale during the exhibition-a kind of "reductive" process?
BD: Like the art in most shows, the objects on display in Bill's Junk are for sale, but with a difference: rather than following the art gallery convention in which works are left on display until they are delivered to their buyers, the junk store will follow the convention of other "real life" stores, where buyers will take their purchases with them immediately. Yes, everything is really for sale. As things are bought and taken away, new things come out to take their places. This constant turnover and the way it keeps me thinking and working is one of the best things about operating this way. The other is the personal interaction; artists don't usually get to see their audiences, like performers do. If I can sell someone something that amuses, amazes, provokes or enlightens them, it's doubly gratifying to do it in person.