A Group Show to End All Group Shows: “HOT BOD” at Basket Books & Art, Houston

The most recent golden age for summer group shows was 2015-2017. During the heat of these years, galleries tested new artists, invited someone from their stable to curate, and threw together gussied-up selections of backroom treasures. To align with the seasonal outflux of Texas’ collector class, these exhibitions normally ran throughout the whole summer. Consequently, the season was a time to regroup, catch up, and rest; there were few mid-July openings or August afternoon artist talks. Leading up to 2020, as venues hosted more events and began jostling for visitors’ attention, this summer malaise began to lose its laziness. And post-COVID, now that travel and exhibition schedules have been thrown off, we’re all making up for lost time, and to most people the in-person viewing of art isn’t as important as it once was (meaning solo shows can happen and be experienced virtually, or otherwise), the long-term hang-it-and-leave-it summer group show feels like a thing of the past. 

HOT BOD at Basket Books & Art in Houston isn’t quite a summer show of yore, but it has perhaps the most big-summer-group-show energy of any I’ve seen in a long while. The conceit of the exhibition is a mail art interpretation of the surrealist Exquisite Corpse game; in addition to personal inclinations and chance, the U.S. Postal System — in all of its faults and triumphs — has become a player. Basket’s proprietors mailed out 100 possible corpses, which, if all were completed and returned, would mean the show would feature 100 works made by 300 artists, making it a hulking, mostly self-selected group show to end all group shows. 

Visiting the exhibition in mid-August, it is apparent that somewhere, somehow, something has fallen through the cracks: 40 Exquisite Corpses were hung on the wall, while another handful were waiting in the wings to be popped into their clip-on frames. There were empty frames on the wall, too — eagerly awaiting future postage deliveries (that will hopefully arrive before the show closes on September 1) — but there were nowhere near 100 frames, empty or otherwise. 

A show like this is satisfying particularly because of its imperfections and unpredictability. It is art happening in the world — hand-done, stamped, addressed, collected by a postal carrier, run through a sorting machine, put into a bag, and walked (or driven) to its interim destination, only to be eagerly (or confusedly — you have to think some of these artists sent their partially-done doodles to their friends with no prior warning) ripped open and expanded upon, before being chucked back into a drop box. Medium so often dictates message, which here manifests with many of the works coming off as inside joke-y doodles shared amongst friends. 

As expected, some of the works fall flat — this isn’t a criticism of the show or the concept or the artists so much as it is a factor of the game of telephone. Even friends sometimes don’t gel; in these pieces, the individual thirds of the images become solos that never quite meld back into a song — interesting in their concept, and to imagine where they might’ve gone, but dissonant if taken together. Other pieces are either surprisingly coherent, or so dissonant that they satisfyingly clash with themselves.

When I asked Edwin Smalling, Basket’s co-owner who instigated the show, if the participants were or weren’t supposed to peek at how the artist before them had treated their third of the composition, he said he avoided prescribing rules. For an exhibition and concept like this, that lack of formal, agreed-upon parameters opens the door to even more questions: did the cosmos align, allowing some pieces to seamlessly work, or are the artists who made those just cheaters who took the (not so) easy way out of matching each others’ styles? Did anyone put way too much pre-production planning into their piece? What is the point of playing Exquisite Corpse if the randomness (and guiding lines drawn for you by the previous participant) is omitted?

Even if the artists did have rules, it is obvious they would’ve broken them. Smalling originally sent out 12 x 9-inch sheets of paper, but a few pieces came back either smaller or bigger. One delightfully hangs out of the bottom of its frame, interrupting the meticulously spaced uniformity of the installation. Of course artists either lost the original paper and replaced it with another mis-sized piece or expanded their real estate. Frankly, I would be surprised if all of the artworks that were returned came back as expected. 

As the facilitator of the show, the Postal System is both a purveyor of joy and tragedy. While some works that should’ve been included will likely sit in purgatory on an artist’s desk or in the glovebox of their car — where can you even find a post office drop box anymore?! — it wouldn’t be surprising if others that were actually completed and sent are lost to the annals of time. Whether torn up by sorting machines, stuck in an endless facility loop, or a victim of delayed delivery (I could see Basket displaying late-arriving pieces into the fall, long after the exhibition is over), some works that could’ve been the best in show will likely never surface. If seen through a surrealist lens, this isn’t so much a sadness as it is a chance operation: 100 possible artworks enter the system and are gradually eaten (or forgotten, or never completed) along the way, with no consideration of quality or substance. In this year, the 100th anniversary of the surrealist movement, what could be more appropriate than that? 

 

HOT BOD is on view at Basket Books & Art in Houston through September 1. New works are being added to the exhibition as they are received. To see a list of artists included in the show, please go here.