The Tree of Strife
When the Art Guys, Houston’s zany performance art duo, staged a faux wedding to a live oak in 2009, they thought they were raising questions about man and nature. But before long, The Art Guys Marry a Plant had become a flashpoint for the fight over gay marriage, inspiring vitriolic outbursts, pitting friend against friend, and causing at least one dramatic emotional breakdown. Was this the provocative artists’ greatest public failure? Or was it the most successful work of art they’d ever created?
Photo by Everett Taasevigen
HurricaneTami says: Wow, did I have an entirely different take from the first paragraph of this article. I thought the Art Guys were marrying a tree, not to make a political statement about marriage equality (which I fully support)but were making a statement about trees. The City of Houston,and it’s developers have displayed very little interest in preserving our trees. One blatant example would be the new HEB at Dunlavy and Alabama. With the cooperation of the city and Trees for Houston, HEB was allowed to cut down many old growth Oaks and Magnolias to build another grocery store we did not need. Before I read the entire article, I thought the Art Guys were showing their committment to trees, not mocking marriage equality. What a perfect example of how art is open to one’s own interpretation. People have a right to like it, hate it, or be indifferent, but not to vilify the artists or their spouse, even if it is a tree. Art Guys keep doing what you do best. I’ll keep calling the City of Houston Forestry Dept. when I see one of our beautiful trees being cut down. Yes, I am that crazy lady who makes the workers put down their chain saws until the city’s arborist shows up. Maybe next time, I’ll accuse them of murdering my tree spouse. (March 26th, 2012 at 4:39pm)
At the beginning of what was to be an unsparing summer in more ways than one, two middle-aged men prepared for their June wedding. The year was 2009. Months earlier, they had sent out invitations, and they’d scheduled a wedding announcement in the newspaper. Now they put on tuxedos and walked down the aisle in front of friends and family inside the sculpture garden of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with works by Alexander Calder and Henri Matisse looking on.
What a casual observer might think was out of the ordinary—that these two men were marrying each other—was, in fact, not what was out of the ordinary. That became obvious when the grooms started pulling a squeaky-wheeled wagon behind them, upon which bobbed a potted live oak sapling. They parked themselves before a florid-faced minister, recited vows to honor and protect the tree, and then married it, putting a ring on one of its taller branches. Afterward, the crowd decamped across the street to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where everyone ate wedding cake—except, of course, the tree.
If you happened to be familiar with Houston’s art scene, this event might not have seemed so strange. The faux wedding, in fact, was just another presentation by the Art Guys, two popular performance artists who have been pulling off such acts in the city for almost thirty years. Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing are what some might call social sculptors; they aim, as one recent catalog put it, to make “visible the usually unconsidered patterns of behavior, thought, and life in general.” This vision is infused with irony and humor: art pieces conceived by the two have famously required them to wear suits with corporate logos at public appearances for an entire year, walk ten miles around downtown Houston with buckets of water on their feet, and cover a dumpster with gold paint. They have performed as exotic dancers at a ladies’ strip joint, worked 24 hours at a Stop-N-Go, and erected fourteen-foot statues of themselves in front of a used-car lot. The Art Guys, in other words, are known as court jesters, Shakespearean fools, or, as the New York Times explained in 1995, “part Dada, part David Letterman . . . a cross between John Cage and the Smothers Brothers.”
So The Art Guys Marry a Plant—as this wedding performance was titled—was just their latest zany effort. What the two artists had not carefully considered, however, was their timing. The piece, they stated, was intended to raise questions about man’s relationship to nature. But it was debuting exactly one year after same-sex marriage had been legalized, to much fanfare, in California—only to be promptly repealed by voters five months later. As other states considered the fallout and as Barack Obama rode into office in 2009 on promises that included repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, a heated conversation about gay rights had begun to grip the country. Houston, a city with the sixth-largest gay community in the nation, was not immune. And suddenly, what had started as a serious goof, or a project that was goofily serious, became something far more akin to an art world version of a WWE SmackDown.
First came a sour review by the Houston Chronicle’s art critic, who wrote that the Art Guys and their tree were making light of “the country’s hottest civil rights issue.” The Art Guys responded that he had it all wrong: they’d always been in favor of gay marriage. Pretty soon, the response to the response, and all the responses that followed, had ginned up a state of hysteria that managed to ensnare the city’s only daily newspaper, every major art museum, and just about everyone in the art scene—pitting friend against friend, accelerating at least one very public emotional breakdown, and, in December, inspiring one attempted arboricide. No matter how often and how passionately the Art Guys insisted that their intent had been to address marriage in the broadest, most ancient, and most metaphorical way, no one listened, and no one cared. The two had lit the fuse to a hidden time bomb in a city that prides itself on its tolerance, and the subsequent explosion produced painful questions about the validity of identity politics and the very meaning of art. Was The Art Guys Marry a Plant the city’s best piece of public art? Or its worst? Right now, Houston’s art community is too war-torn and wounded to answer.
We are not the first people to marry a plant,” Galbreth told me without a trace of humor when I visited the sprawling metal building in Acres Homes that serves as the Art Guys’ studio last December. Inside, the cavernous space is like a cross between Pee-wee’s Playhouse and an airplane hangar, with gleaming power tools making way for some of the artists’ works. A gigantic skull rendered with burnt matchsticks hangs on a wall; a black banister inlaid with artificial eyes lines the staircase. The overall atmosphere is of the best boys’ hideout ever.
But the Art Guys aren’t boys anymore. Galbreth, 56, is a tall, loose-limbed man with a shock of graying hair and bushy, hardworking eyebrows. Owing to his modest upbringing in Tennessee, he has something of a courtly, aw-shucks manner, but, maybe owing to his years as a successful artist, he tends to speak with an almost majestic intensity. This means that, depending on the circumstances, Galbreth can resemble a cheerful bag boy at the grocery store or a Pentecostal minister who has just spied the devil in a back pew. Massing, 53, who grew up near Buffalo, New York, is more reserved; his sun-weathered good looks and reticent cool have, more than a few times, inspired comparisons to James Dean.
The Art Guys might not be the most famous artists in Houston, but they are indisputably local fixtures. They met and began working together in 1983, when both attended the University of Houston and fell under the spell of sculptor James Surls, an earth-father figure with a long black ponytail who was then on his way to becoming internationally known. Soon the Art Guys were earning a reputation themselves; they weren’t just talented, they were also young, good-looking, funny, happy to donate work to charity, and had a flair for self-promotion that would have impressed Warhol. (“The Art Guys engage the media because we know media engages the culture,” Massing told me.) As they grew in popularity, so too did their commissions; after two decades, the two have graduated to big-time public works, like the candy-colored illuminated suitcases at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and they were included in Neiman Marcus’s 2006 Christmas Book, for their $40,000 seven-foot skyscraper made of no. 2 pencils. Their catalogs have been printed by the prestige publisher Abrams, and the two have been written about—sometimes at their behest—by major art and cultural scribes such as Dave Hickey. And except for a skirmish last year when they accused filmmaker Morgan Spurlock of ripping off their logo suits idea, the Art Guys have managed to maintain their reputation as good guys.
Of course, that’s aside from the uproar over the tree. The idea to marry a plant began several years ago, when Massing and Galbreth were in their forties. Both were married, with a child, and Galbreth had had a frightening health scare, so mortality was on their minds. They launched a project called The Art Guys Lie in State—they did just that, at city hall—and another one called Forever Yours, an as-yet-to-be-completed work in which they hope to sell their remains for $1 million. But in 2007 Galbreth happened to read about a scientific field called panpsychism—the notion that consciousness might not be limited to humans and animals but also exist in rocks and trees. He began thinking about a piece on commitment to the natural world.
Working in typical fashion, the Art Guys began to ask themselves zillions of questions, like, If a rock is conscious, what might it feel? And just what might be the obligation of human beings to rocks, if they feel? And what about plants? From there, they started thinking about what it would mean to “marry another entity”—like, say, a plant, or then, a tree. They did countless Internet searches and discovered that a University of Texas accounting student of Nepalese descent had married a betel nut (in her tradition, the ritual protected her from becoming a widow) and that ancient Hindu sects married trees (“Tulsi and pipal trees are the most common bridegrooms,” stated one website). They researched the history of marriage and studied Texas law. They wondered just how they could marry a tree and whether the tree would care. “These questions are fun. These questions are interesting,” Galbreth told me.
The idea of two men marrying a plant also appealed to Toby Kamps, the senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Kamps is an imposing man with willful, jet-black hair and a gloss of East Coast art world polish. As a newcomer to town in 2007, he’d been amazed by the ways Houston artists engaged with their city beyond its museums and galleries—he was a fan of local outsider art like the Orange Show—and he wanted to do an exhibition that celebrated the fact. He and an associate, Meredith Goldsmith, came up with a show to be called “No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston,” and when the Art Guys mentioned their tree marriage idea, he knew he wanted them in the show. The opening was scheduled for May 2009.
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later