Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/820206
34 If you asked for our vote for a worthy Texas Lifetime Achievement Artist honoree or the best subject of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's next solo … we wouldn't have to think too hard. For years, H. J. Bott (Harvey, to many) has been the most brilliant yet under-appreciated artist in Houston's pantheon — at least when it comes to recognition by museums and nonprofits. That's despite octogenarian Bott's impressive roster of shows, dating back to his first exhibition at the age of 14. The last time we wrote about him in-depth, Bott was one of the 62 artists featured in Texas Artists Today (Marquand Books, 2010). At that time, he was nearing 100 painting and sculpture solos, 26 Robott performances, 39 in situ installations, and 800-plus group exhibitions. A practicing artist for seven decades, Bott has devoted 45 of those years to an idiosyncratic yet unwavering and fascinating geometric obsession: a pervading principle known as Displacement of Volume — DoV in Bott speak. In layman's terms, DoV posits a mathematic/geometric point of view yielding a memorable shape resembling an elongated ovoid married to a rectangle, with a circle snipped out. Bott has employed DoV's distinctive configuration to canvas, sculpture (from intricate wire weaving to soft stuffed-fabric works redolent of Yayoi Kusama), and environments, the latter celebrated in a cover for Art Lies magazine (Winter 2000-2001) based upon a glow- in-the-dark string-and-light chamber constructed at Project Row Houses. Even the artist's interactive '80s series of remote-controlled Robotts — they walked, talked (voiced by Houston art notables), and starred in a Dadaist opera — were a manifestation of DoV. Their short, squatty shapes evidenced a 3-D version of Bott's geometric world order. Back in the day, the Robotts embarked on an 11-museum tour in the group show "The Robot Exhibit: History, Fantasy, and Reality," organized by the American Craft Museum (now Manhattan's Museum of Arts and Design). The show touched down at the CAMH in 1985 — the last time the artist's work has been shown at any Houston museum to our knowledge. All of this earned Bott individual and group exhibitions in New Orleans, New York, and Chicago, as well as in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, yet he remained woefully under-known in his own hometown. Somehow, incredibly, the artist was overlooked during the heady mid-1980s era of Houston's "Fresh Paint" exhibition and movement — perhaps because his work was conceptual, cerebral, and geometric, rather than the pervading expressionism that ruled the BOTT WAY OR THE HIGHWAY THE STRANGE BUT TRUE PRINCIPLES OF ARTIST H. J. BOTT CATHERINE D. ANSPON Reports. PHOTO SUERAYA SHAHEEN, © TEXAS ARTISTS TODAY H. J. Bott at home with his painting and sculpture, Houston, 2009 (continued on page 79)