When I was a youngin living in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood—I moved there in 1996 and it was home base for the better part of 2 decades—the Art Guys were a major part of the general atmosphere of the community. The Montrose is (was?) both the Gayborhood and the arts district—if you can have a “district” in a city with no zoning. There are galleries everywhere, the Menil, the Rothko Chapel, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Glassell School, the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAMH), the Rice Cinema (independent film festivals), the River Oaks Theater (Rocky Horror), all smooshed together within a few square miles of each other. Art and artists running all over the place, wheat pasting art everywhere, performance art, etc.
The Art Guys duo, Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth, were the leaders of the art pack, always up to something. There was the 10 mile walk they did through downtown with buckets of water on their feet. The Absolut Vodka billboard over the freeway that they painted with 3 (or more!) coats of paint every day for 9 months. The time they put giant googly eyes on the side of the CAMH.
They hung out at some of the places I did, like the coffee shop NotSuOh. Jack and Michael were key in cultivating a sensibility in the Montrose and downtown art scene that both took art seriously, even as a way of life, and thumbed its nose at the art world. Lots of comparisons have been made, by people fancier than me, between the Art Guys work and that of the Fluxus movement and Marchel Duchamp and Dadaism in general. But mostly, they made art fun.
The Art Guys had a massive influence on the flavor of art in Houston, and on me, a hanger-on to the periphery of that world. I absorbed their aesthetic and ethos into my own thinking about both the importance of making art and the pure ridiculous fun of it. So, when Jack Massing was kind enough to do an interview for the Tiny Histories podcast, I was genuinely honored (and frankly kinda nervous—he’s a big deal, man!).
As you’ll hear in the episode, Jack was in the office at his studio for our interview. When I asked him what he was going to tell a story about, he just looked around the room, picked something off his desk, and started telling me about it. And anyway…you should just listen to the episode to find out what happened next.