Bought many postcards from museum shops lately? I thought not. There was a time that travel required them, as keepsakes and to let folks at home know you’re not only in Houston but at the Menil, not just in Chicago but enthralling yourself with Seurat.
Given the recession, there’s also less reason to buy nonessentials on a whim, which pretty much deals a death blow to the rest of the stock. Exit cash cow, enter space waster.
The problem used to be acute at the Henry Art Gallery, where two different vendors brought in to run the gift shop went belly up. Last year, the Henry stopped pretending it had a gift shop. There were books on a small cart near the admissions desk, and that was it. The room behind the cart was dark.
It’s dark no longer. Painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed turning it into an artist project space, and the Henry said yes.
Offenbacher:
The Henry museum shop has been in deep hibernation since last year, an inaccessible space of institutional dreaming, a snoring lacuna in the museum’s lobby–but not for much longer. Beginning the last week in August this project will turn up the temperature, transforming the shop into a hot house, a catalyst, an incubator for Northwest artists. Exhibitions will fall like dominoes: a cascading cavalcade of adventurous, collaborative, celebratory artistic energy. How do artists work together? What can an art exhibition do? What is an audience? Who are you? What can we learn from each other? I hope you’ll join us.
It didn’t open in August, although the original date is still on the Henry’s Web site. It opened in October and was worth the wait. Offenbacher assembles artist teams by picking their names out of his hat. First up are Joseph Park and Jennifer Zwick with a sad-sack video installation.
Gift shop shelves are empty, which adds to the dishevelment. All the action’s in a corner in the dark, where the artists’ images are projected onto their cut-outs on a makeshift stage. They spin on a pair of Lazy Susans, kick box, dance and stand with silver tinsel at their feet and sing.
Friviloity is hard to pull off in an art context, leading so easily into self-indulgence, but Park and Zwick are adorable.
Next, Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata open Nov. 14 with their version of a Northwest Coast Indian potlatch, The Gift Exchange.
The play is structured as a newspaper, with stories jumping inside. (Unlike a newspaper, they jump back out to the front again.) I can’t imagine how anybody who didn’t work there could make sense of it. 
Benjamin’s essay – one of the most beautiful in the history of art writing – remains essential for its ideas, cloaked as they are in the political realities of his time and place: Fascism as an immediate threat, Communism as a Utopian possibility. 
The light dissolves intention, starting at the legs and paralyzing upward. 
