Archives for November 2009

Akio Takamori’s figures are nearly always lost in thought, caught in that moment when the body pauses and the mind drifts freely across its mental sky. Born and raised in Japan, he pays his country of origin the honor of taking it lightly. Bold and loose, his figures include Japanese spirit babies with oversize heads, priests, warriors, peasants and royalty with the folds of their gowns flapping and more recently, figures drawn from the larger world.

While still in Japan he apprenticed with a master folk potter producing utilitarian ware. After coming to the U.S. in the mid-1970s, he fell under the influence of Montana ceramist Rudy Autio, whose vessels made from intertwined figures of women and horses repeat themselves.

Takamori’s do not. Bluntly made with deft, loose color washes, his version floats. Even the stoutest forms are light on their feet. Working through Autio, Picasso’s ceramics, pre-Columbian pottery and late Ming dishes fired in the shape of horses, birds, squirrels and fish, he creates his own theater populated by characters who need no text to tell stories. It’s in the sag of an old woman’s shoulders, the self-possession of a young intellectual, the fierce command of a dowager. Her chin may be weak, but her eyes glitter and her hair, painted in whirls of black ink, rises over her head like a planet.

His current exhibit James Harris Gallery includes 12 small porcelain figures paired with their photographic portraits, the latter inspired by Danish photographer Rigmor Mydtskov, plus five large figures in stoneware.

The photos reveal different aspects of the character: the modest concrete and the marquee. 

Through Dec. 19.

The Seattle Art Museum moved into the international limelight for its exhibit earlier this year, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78. Reversing Garder Eide Einarsson‘s intent, All My Friends Are Dead brings to mind another kind of target practice taking place in the Seattle area – the gunshot murders of police officers, one in Seattle and four in Tacoma. They were singled out not because of anything they as individuals did but because of who they are as a class. Is this a new way for wars to come home?

Einarsson:

The power of horizontal lines that beat on the body’s clock, like heartstrings pulled out endlessly.

Agnes Martin, 1979

Joanne Mattera, 2008

Left: Velazquez, from Las Meninas (1656-57) Right: Picasso,1957

Akio Takamori, 2009

Lewis Hyde opened The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by describing a rift in understanding between Pilgrims and
Indians. Because the latter expected that gifts would
stay in motion, the English called them “Indian givers,” meaning, those
who take gifts back.

From
the Indian point of view, wrote Hyde, the Pilgrims might have been
called “white man keepers (or maybe capitalists, that is, people
whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a
warehouse or museum or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it
aside to be used for production).”

Northwest Coast Indians turned
this principle of gifts in motion into a banking system, known as the
potlatch. What was given away bestowed prestige and power, not what was hoarded.

Hyde:

The
Indian giver…understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we
have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it
is kept, something of similar value would move on in its stead, the way
a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the
felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present,
but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given
something else away. As it is passed along, the gift may be given back
to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better
if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third
party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are
other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or
resist momentum, but the gift keeps going.

After the gift shop at the Henry Gallery failed and the space went dark, Seattle painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed turning it into an artist space. (Story here.) Different teams of artists run it on themes of their devising. Through Dec. 13 is The Gift Exchange by Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata,
based on a come-one, come-all version of a  potlach. Anyone can bring a
gift and take one, or bring several and take several. Cowie, Hashemi
and Hirata set a high standard for the exchange by seeding the original
stock with their work.

Since it opened Nov. 14, the audience
has risen to the occasion. Although some people tear open corners of
wrapped gifts and keep going until they find treasure, many, many
others bring treasures and take what they’re given in a blind exchange.
Not all gifts are blind. Some lack wrapping, in the interests of making
sure a gift goes to someone who will value it.

As a profile of the community, The Gift Exchange
proves that people raised in an individualistic, me-first, capitalistic
system can transcend their training and rise to higher ground. Since
the 1980s and accelerating ever since is the assumption that art equals
money, that its value can be translated into cash on the secondary
market. The Gift Exchange argues for an older, truer version of art, that it is in essence a form of grace. To all concerned, well done.

Note: Remember the hours. Thanks to budget cutbacks, the Henry is open only Thursdays to Sundays.

Baxter – brass knuckles with crystals, 2009

On Facebook, Cable Griffith wrote, “You could gut a unicorn with that.” Eric Fredericksen added, “I’m going to realign your chakras, motherf*****!”

Now

Then

Why do people assume artists love nature? Because they’re sensitive? As Woody Allen liked to say, “Nature and I are two.” Kelly Mark hails from the Woody Allen School of Environmental Art. Asked to participate in a nature-friendly exhibit at The Tree Museum, Mark told curator David Liss she wouldn’t and later, agreeing to take part, that she had no intention of visiting the site.

According to Liss, she told him she “despised the outdoors, rural environments and any thing and any activity associated with nature such as insects, dirt, inclement weather, swimming in lakes, etc, and any situation that lacks a full complement of domestic amenities, utilities, appliances and facilities.” (more)

Her contribution, A Little Piece of Heaven, was a set of instructions. She told the curator to plant and maintain the equivalent of a residential lawn in the middle of the site’s wilds.

I’m not sure if the piece passed the Woody Allen test. Allen hates lawns too. Nevertheless, Kelly continues to define her position. From 2009, No Tofu, No Yoga Matt.

Seattle’s James W. Washington Jr. was a stone carver who sought to reveal spiritual forces in the physical realm. His roughly hewn and symbol-studded stone altars, hatching
birds, sacrificial lambs and marble reliefs are guides to higher
ground. He was drawn to life that is on the point of coming into being or making
a breakthrough, not only the birds for which he’s best known,
but also snakes ready to squirm out of their coils, sperm swimming
across a marble relief to a radiant egg, and human figures caught in
the moment of enlightenment. Each chiseled stroke echos the New Testament promise, that every hair of the head is counted.

A survey of smaller sculptures is at Woodside/Braseth Gallery through Dec. 31..

Washington was 91 when he died in 2000, having proved to be a fiercer artist in his old age than in his youth. In his 80s, his work became bigger and more brilliantly festooned. In places he painted his stones with colored encaustic and set his symbols of ancient life flowing across the surface, as if the stone were supple and easily yielding to his chisel.

Washington:

I visualize the subject within and feel it out as I go. I
am the medium, just like copper wire is the medium for the current of
electricity turning on a light bulb.

I was speaking with some ministers a few years back. There were preachers of all things. I asked, how many of you
can tell me how many times you’ve drunk your own bath water? Life goes
in cycles. The last breath of a minister may turn out to be the first
breath of a pig. Life exists and continues. It uses everything.

For 60 years, painting has been stomped, stabbed, stepped on; set on fire, bound in ropes and hung on a clothesline like wet laundry. When it comes to doing violence to the medium, the thrill is gone. (See my Modern Painters review of the Seattle Art Museum’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78.) Damaging paintings is now just one more way to make them. Like the iconography of the Catholic Church in Africa and South America, painting expands to include its opponents.

Case in point, Margie Livingston. Ordinarily, she paints in oils from models she constructs to explore the relationship between three-dimensions and their translation onto canvas. Her end results tend to look like forests fractured by colored light.

Her exhibit at the Greg Kucera Gallery include forms that reverse that process. She’s now using paint to construct objects. They’re paint as objects, either on the wall or rolled and folded onto shelves or draped in shreds from the ceiling.

Lynda Benglis preceded her, and so did Charles Ray. Livingston’s Paint Line brings to mind Ray’s Ink Line from 1987. She is in their debt but not their shadow. Her interactions with paint map her thinking about her endlessly flexible medium. She uses it to dissect her representations, to pool her resources and to chart a lyrical course through light, space, form and time.

At Greg Kucera through Dec. 24.