Sketch Artist 
Art
Long Shot
Bert Long comes to Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum by way of the Fifth Ward, the Marines, haute cuisine—and the Prix de Rome.
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Long also began selling enough work to move out of the Fifth Ward and into his modest Shepherd home—heated with a wood-burning stove—and studio. But his career really took off with his inclusion in the 1984 “Fresh Paint” exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; no sooner had Long’s participation been announced than New York dealer Allan Stone, visiting down the road at James Surls’s studio in Splendora, showed up in Shepherd and offered Long his first New York show. In 1987 Long was further anointed with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and two years ago he was named Artist of the Year by the Houston Art League. He entered an even more rarefied realm with the Prix de Rome, joining Earl Staley as the only Houston artists to receive the award.
Despite Long’s methodical conquest of the art establishment, his work has retained much of an outsider’s edge. Mona Lisa, 15 Minutes, 15 Minutes, 15 Minutes…from the CAM is a framed print of the Mona Lisa, coated with a cracked gel to give it a fake-antique appearance and illuminated with two red lights. Drawing his title from Andy Warhol’s prophecy about the nature of fame in a mass-media culture, Long suggests that “timeless” works of art have become the products of high culture’s own celebrity-making process; Leonardo’s enigmatic lady may be the world’s best-known painting, but there are dozens of Renaissance portraits every bit as technically polished and psychologically complex as the Mona Lisa. “The red lights,” Long adds, “are about how the art world has prostituted her.”
Long doesn’t limit himself to art-world politics. Gift is a lingerie box Long recovered from a Rome street, its cellophane cover framed with a painted ribbon. Inside the box, Long has painted a nuclear mushroom cloud, but in toxic brown rather than fireball hues, a sort of universal pall that serves to evoke both pollution and war. “This is what we’re leaving our kids,” says Long, who has been doing pieces on environmental issues since the early eighties.
Race, by contrast, is an issue that Long has neither particularly emphasized nor avoided in his art; when he does deal with it, the irony can be piercing. Guess Who Is [Coming to Dinner] is an aluminum-and-cardboard tray framing a small portrait of a servile-looking black butler. “There are Italian food stores where if you order a dessert they’ll bring it to you on a silver tray,” Long explains. “To me that immediately brought up images of servitude.”
Long spends far less time dwelling on the politics of exclusion, however, than trying to draw people into his work. For years he has glued mirrors and bits of mirror to his paintings, literally bringing the viewer into the image. He demystifies the process of creation by frequently incorporating the detritus of the studio into his work, sometimes sticking tubes of paint into the integral plaster frames that have become a Long trademark (“I started doing that when I couldn’t afford to have my work framed,” Long recalls).
The ice sculptures, which evolved from centerpieces Long once carved for banquets, are the most direct reflection of his populist approach to art. “The ice pieces involve people in the creation of a work of art,” he says. “Every time I do one, thousands of people show up, people who might never go into a museum otherwise.” Since executing his first ice work in Galveston in 1980, Long has done about twenty of the sprawling pieces, which are more abstract than his paintings and often suggest the exotic shrines of some polar culture. While even many of Long’s friends dismiss the ice carving as a mere publicity stunt, Long seems to regard the three-hundred-pound blocks of ice, which he attacks with chain saws and chisels, as the ultimate medium for his high-energy style. “I love the ice,” he says. “You show up at the site, they deliver the ice, and you’ve got to solve all your problems right now. The next day I can hardly move.”
Long is making a particular effort to publicize his CAM show in the Fifth Ward. “Our biggest problem in the black community is the lack of role models other than sports figures,” he says. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an artist until I was twenty-one years old. I had never even seen a book on Van Gogh. Now I’m trying to show that blacks can have goals beyond mere economic achievement.” Interestingly, Long believes that he succeeded because of, not in spite of, that oft-cited bane of the black underclass: the absent father. “I grew up not knowing any limitations, because I didn’t have the constraints of having a daddy to tell me what I could or couldn’t do with life. My father might actually have been a deterrent to my doing something different.”
Long’s greatest success may be his own family, which has thrived in unconventional circumstances. He and Connie have been married for 27 years; their younger son is a Navy jet pilot, and their daughter works in the library at the University of Houston. The elder son plays in a religious rock group, and his daddy often advises him to loosen up. “I’m trying to persuade him to go and hang out in New York for a while,” Long says. “We’re not a family where I say, ‘You’ve got to get a job.’”
That restive spirit is prompting Long to abandon Houston at the height of his success; before his show has even closed, he and Connie will have taken up residence in the Spanish village of Berzocana, where they visited on a brief sabbatical from the American Academy. Long, who believes that the absence of a history is a particular lacuna in the black experience, admits he has gotten hooked on the past: “I can no longer imagine walking down the street and not looking up and seeing twelfth- and thirteenth-century buildings.”
The Spanish influence is already evident in the most visually sophisticated piece in the CAM show. Homage to Picasso is a potpourri of references to the Spanish master; a T-shaped handle from a child’s scooter recalls Picasso’s use of a bicycle seat for a bull’s head, while the vibrant patterning and a pasted news clipping—an art review that begins “Bert Long’s work is seriously ugly”—recall elements of Picasso’s Cubist phases. This work is seriously sublime, with a seam-less construction that indicates Long is beginning to focus the undeniable energy he brings to making art, that he is ready to synthesize rather than merely haphazardly quote his many stylistic sources.
Long’s ongoing evolution as an artist shouldn’t be surprising, considering his late start; in terms of experience he’s the equivalent of a typical 35-year-old artist just entering maturity. And this CAM show—Long’s first one-man exhibit in a Houston museum—suggests that the most remarkable aspect of his extraordinary career is that his considerable talent is only beginning to emerge.
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