Archives for April 2010

When Michael Darling leaves his job in July as modern and contemporary curator at the Seattle Art Museum to become chief curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s good news for Chicago, bad for Seattle. He’s an extraordinary gifted curator. Objects speak to him, suggesting patterns and relationships that root and waken in his exhibitions.

He is not, however, only the second curator to hold the modern and contemporary slot at the Seattle Art Museum.

New York Times:

Mr. Darling’s appointment reverses his last professional transition, which took him out of a thriving contemporary art environment — the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — to Seattle, where he became only the second curator of that museum’s modern and contemporary collection. (more)

The second curator in the slot was Bruce Guenther, hired in the 1970s. He too left SAM to become chief curator at Chicago’s MoCA MCA. He’s now back in the region as chief curator at the Portland Art Museum.

Between Guenther and Darling were Patterson Sims, Trevor Fairbrother and Lisa Corrin. (Sims, Fairbrother and Corrin were also deputy directors, signaling the importance the museum places on the field.) How could the NYT have disappeared four people?

Correction, please.

In years past, my visits to the Met tended to be focused. I’d pass wide swaths of world culture in a glance and on a trot. Today everything stops me: the heads and feet, swords and shields; gossamer-thin stone draperies wrapping stone bodies fresh as flower buds; cups and chairs, scrolls and silks; tombs, animal emblems and more than a millennium of painting.

Unlike the Louvre, the Met is not an airport hangar where visitors seek the great amid wide stretches of less than. The stately architecture that can handle crowds without being crowded serves collections whose breath and depth are curated into singular experiences. 

I do wish, however, that the Met would stop pairing Vuillard with Bonnard, or, rather, sticking a few Vuillards in a Bonnard gallery. Bonnard poured his colored light over everything. In his company, Vuillard comes across as timid, when he is actually a deeper and more complex painter, interested in domestic suppression: how his sister fades into the wallpaper in his mother’s presence, and how silence in a sitting room can fester, rattling the tea cups. I’d pair Vuillard with Munch: one scream choked, the other expressed.

Exhibits I might have missed in the old days include the drool Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photo Collage:

Kate Edith Gough (English, 1856-1948) Untitled page from the Gough Album, late 1870s Collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37 x 29.5 cm) V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

I might not have seen Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection. Five thousand is a discouraging time span. I tend to favor exhibits rooted in time and place, with artists who connect like balls ricocheting across pool tables: contact and motion. There’s nothing but connection here, from the Neolithic to the 19th century, economy as a path toward abundance.

Kano Sansetsu (1589-1651) The Old
Plum Edo period (1615-1868) 1645 Four
sliding door panels (fusuma); ink, color, and gold on gilded paper

Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy

From the French High Middle Ages come 37 16-inch monks (and two boys) in a mournful procession, carved in alabaster by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le
Moiturier. A lucky accident of a renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in
Dijon pried them out of their oranate architectural settings and set them in high relief on a table in the Met. Too bad they’re going back. On their own, they are killer good: distinct individuals each in his own way awash in emotion, surely the model for Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.

Given everything there is to see, who has time for Highlights from the Modern Design Collection, 1900-2006? Not me, and yet I saw it with pleasure.

Who wouldn’t admire Otto Prustcher’s black/white checkerboard plant stand, zig-zagging across space, from 1903; Harold Van Doren’s ode to motion, his Snow-Place Sled, from 1934; Charles and Ray Eames’ Buffalo Chair, from 1946; Lucas Samaras’ plaster, falling-apart chair, from 1969-70, and Dale Chihuly’s Speckled Gold Venetian with Cobalt Leaves and Stems, from 2001.  

There’s been a lot of talk in Seattle recently about a proposed Chihuly Museum at Seattle Center, much of it implying he’s some kind of lowest common denominator huckster, not a real artist at all. I looked in this show for anybody else from the Northwest who’d made the cut. Who else shared the honor? Nobody. Take it to the bank, nay-sayers. Your account is empty.

On a recent Saturday, a woman behind me in line to get into MoMA said, “I hate the young.” She was assuming they were there en masse to see the museum’s grotesque hagiography of Tim Burton (every scrap preserved). If true, they didn’t limit themselves to the man who made a mockery of Sweeney Todd but poured out into other galleries, their numbers mitigating against anyone’s engagement.

Obviously, the problem is not the young but the museum, which needs to determine what is a sustainable number and what is a stagnating overflow. People were four or five layers deep in the Cartier-Bresson. Who can see his immaculate, small prints in such a physical cacophony? Full of respect for those who forged ahead, I gave up, thinking of Yogi Berra: “That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.”

In such a mob scene, the courage of Marina Abramovic’s performance retrospective, The Artist is Present, is overwhelming. She’s there every day, all day long, as members from the audience in three minute increments take a seat in front of her and lock into the energy of her presence. Surrounding them is a parted sea of humanity hushed by her intensity.

What a dazzling exhibit. (Hats off to curator Klaus Biesenbach.) Performance retrospectives are a difficult breed of cat. If you missed the originals, you’re limping along afterward with description, analysis and documentation impersonating the real thing. Instead, with fifty works spanning four decades (including sound pieces, excellent videos and photographs), this exhibit recreates a number of her major pieces by restaging them with a frequently nude cast of others. (They deserve bravery badges too.)

Back to the audience, swollen into a problem for itself. It’s an enormous hurtle for Abramovic, who either makes contact or makes nothing. Even with thousands around her, she succeeds, both in the galleries and in the atrium where she presides, inspiring many who signed up to sit down with her to cast off their public shell and give her something back.

Marco Anelli’s photographs of the sitters on flickr are a record of the audience as artists, sharing what they are capable of sharing with the woman in front of them. (Via) I love these faces. Hearts open.

Through May 31. 

Tim Burton’s last day is Monday, which will undoubtedly thin the herd. What will be left is the chill of the architecture. There is no grace in the new space.

Also managing to triumph over crowds in a chilly surround is William Kentridge: Five Themes, organized by Mark Rosenthal for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art.

In prints, charcoal drawings and animated films based on charcoal drawings, he surveys the human predicament. I wish I’d seen this show in San Francisco. Here, the videos dominate, as the drawings are tough to see cheek to jowl to baby carriage with others. He calls his cut-out drawings of shadow puppets stone age. Across a rocky terrain they come, carrying their plows,
their parents, their prisoners, their party props and weapons. It’s
human history in motion: The fleet, the lame, the guilty and innocent,
burdened by their sick and their dead. In the middle of it all, a real
human eyeball pops up, and later a real cat.
Shadows enlarge, dissolve and double into shadows of shadows, stories
lost and found; the dynamic, overlapping chaos of history. 

Through May 17.

Down in the basement, Marilyn Minter’s video, Green Pink Caviar from 2009 drew a cluster of the gorgeous young. Watching them watching, it occurred to me that Abramovic, Kentridge and Minter are all from my generation. The young look great, but they’ll have to work hard to catch us.

Historically, when city fathers were moved to blight a neighborhood, they put a freeway through it. New York’s Robert Moses was master of the practice. Today, the same purpose is served with a monolithic, dead-to-the-street convention center.

 From Purvis Young’s obituary in the New York Times:

He lived most of his life in the Overtown section of Miami, a
once-thriving community that was ravaged by the construction of an
interstate highway through it in the 1960s, and he painted what he saw
around him.

Artists are the bloom that blight cannot kill.

Image via:

Images via:

(Image via This Isn’t Happiness)

I’ll be walking on the right. Will continue to post, although I’m using a laptop for the first time and might fail to figure it out.  (Into every life progress comes, however haltingly.)

Leans into a black hole. (He/she who digs newspapers is an ongoing series.)

OSCAR TUAZON
“BLACK HOLE”
2003
Newspaper, tape, paint
250 x 900 x 600 cm
Edition: 1

Curators are entitled to put whoever they can get (and the director is
willing to defend) in a show. I find it inconceivable, however, that a
Northwest curator would mount an animals-in-art exhibit that failed to
include Seattle’s Sherry
Markovitz.

Not in Rock Hushka’s The Secret
Language of Animals at the Tacoma Art Museum:

Encrusted over the
surface of Markovitz’s fiberglass molds, gourds and papier mache are
many
thousands of tiny glass beads woven into streams of colored light and
bordered with oil paint, leather and velvet, foil and nails, amulets and
jewels.
All that complexity becomes a simplicity in its realization.
Her sculptures are presences that come from time slowed down. Her deer
and bear heads aren’t trophies but relatives, linking us to all beings
who lean into light and live by breath.

In the Northwest on this
theme, she is too big to ignore. Ignoring her becomes a statement, and
that statement serves as the elephant in the room, invisible but
determinative, sour and eccentric.

Hushka’s exhibit is still a pleasure. (My review here.)
The more time I spent in it, however, the stronger became the
conviction that a good effort could have been a great one, given certain
additions and a lot of deletions. The exhibit wants to be all things to all
people. Hushka is too good a curator  not to know that he padded in the
interests of popularity. A starker survey would give the exhibit’s core
samples a chance to reverberate in each other’s company.

First, almost everything made
before 1960 needed to go. In this show, contemporary art sets the tone.
With the sole exception of Audubon’s hand-colored engraving, Three-Toed
Woodpecker from 1832 (a perfect accompaniment to Justin Gibbens‘
present day riffs on it), the mostly modest art from earlier eras needs
its own space in another show. Most of these prints and small paintings function
as florid digressions in sentences that want to be muscular.

Second,
Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace‘s eight cast glass sculptures from Bird
Pages are a dead spot where the ball won’t bounce, far from their
best work. One might have slipped by, but twelve?

Another big chunk that needed to go: Just say no to
the corny, fey, conventionally literal and the whimiscal.

Had the muscular been achieved, there are a few possible additions that could have augmented it, besides, of course, the essential Markovitz. The ones below would have been easy to get in Tacoma, not, in other words, the impossible dream.

TAM owns Scott
Fife‘s LeRoy, 2004. 118 x 78 x 120 inches, archival
cardboard, glue,
screws.

Of course it belongs
where it is, in the exhibit, but it would have been swell to offer a darker
side of Fife as well, something less ingratiating than the dog that
normally sits as a greeter in the lobby.

Wer
Wulf
25 x 25 x 34 inches, archival cardboard, glue, screws, 2007

The
touch of the mythological would not have gone amiss.

Michael
Spafford The Iliad #19
woodcut, 2004
image 12 x 20″, paper size 19¾ x 26″

I
would have appreciated something from the heart of old Hollywood.

Grant
Barnhart, Elizabeth Taylor, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 inches

An  animal-in-art exhibit is a good place to explore 
the anguish of
childhood.

Pat
De Caro, Toilet with Snake, oil/glassine,  2003 42 x 40″

How about touching on the theme of the kinks in the Wild West?

SuttonBeresCuller Beast of Burden II
2003
C-print on Sintra
18 x 24 inches
Edition of 5

Every exhibit is a
series of
moments. In great ones, the moments cohere into an overwhelming
conclusion. Hushka’s had the makings of great but settled for pleasing,
well below his capabilities.

Through June 27.

With a lifelong affection for Desolation Row, I contemplate the abandoned Fun Forest at Seattle Center with pleasure. Cracks in the asphalt and gaping holes where the rides used to be are not an amenity to be taken lightly. For that reason I’m sympathetic to those who are outraged that a Dale Chihuly glass house and green shed with garden might supplant an excellent place to shoot an end of the world movie. They say they want grass, but tearing up the concrete and seeding it with what Walt Whitman called the lovely hair of graves will cost millions. Millions the city does not have.

Yoko Ott would prefer a botanical garden. Alas, we have one already and
can’t afford to take care of it. (If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, what a Merry Christmas we’d all have.)

To wit:

The City of Seattle is scrambling to cover a multimillion dollar budget deficit. Now, people close to the situation say Parks and Recreation will take the biggest hit, with first cuts planned as soon as July, according to the Associated Recreation Council, an independent non-profit that partners with the city department.
“Community members need to share their personal stories with the Mayor and City Council members if they expect the doors to stay open and the parks maintained,” said Christina Arcidy, Project Coordinator for ARC, in an e-mail sent to CHS. “There are no public meetings or formal requests for public comment, so individuals must reach out to their elected officials and start a dialogue if they want to have an impact.”
Cuts could include lawn and mowing maintenance for all Seattle parks. Pools and public facilities in all parks, including Volunteer, Cal Anderson and Miller Parks, will not be open to the public any longer, or may have shorter operation hours.
While none of the major planned cuts have been confirmed by Parks or the city, CHS received confirmation from a City employee with knowledge of the situation who asked to remain anonymous about the severity – and certainty – of the cuts being planned. (more)

Surely better times await, and then we’ll be stuck with a Chihuly center, right? Well, wrong. The privately funded venture would have a 5-year-lease. If Chihuly fails to dazzle the public (and bring in from $300,000 to $500,000 annually to city coffers), his glass plug can be pulled, leaving the building that’s already there and a garden. (Even if he’s a raging success, the lease will terminate at 20 years.)

For these reasons and so many more, anti-Chihuly forces, please continue to fight the good fight. Save cracked asphalt for the kids. They’ll thank you when they grow up to be disaffected hipsters. I for one admire your moxie and your effectiveness. The mayor sounds as if he’s leaning toward siding with you, as well he should. You helped elect him.

In the meantime, Bobby D. has the closer:

Here comes the blind commissioner

They’ve got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they’re restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row

In response to this post, Charlie Kitchings sent me the video below. Being ArtsJournal’s video editor, I would have posted it on AJ’s main page, but the video’s credit line extends too far right. It would cut into the blogger’s corner, interpreting somebody and no doubt stimulating complaint.

Rathman creates his own rumble in the jungle: drawing vs photos, drawing vs film. Drawing wins. 

Zaire: David Rathman Project – Muhammad Ali Rumble in the Jungle 1974 from Tom DeBiaso on Vimeo.

If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?

A soft-bodied dog, a hen
Feathers and fur to begin it again

when the sun goes down and it gets dark
I saw an animal in a park

Bring it home to give it to you
I have seen animals break in two

You were looking for something soft
And loyal and clean and wondrously careful

a form of otherwise vicious habit
could have long ears and be called a rabbit

Dead died will die want
Morning midnight I asked you

If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?

Robert Creeley

The Secret Language of Animals is not a secret. Instead, the exhibit of that title at the Tacoma Art Museum is almost entirely about us. Ever since humans stood up to look around, we’ve made images of animals as shipping containers addressed to ourselves. From the bull on the wall of a cave to the shark in a gallery, it’s a myriad-minded stream of us projecting into them.

The stream never ends, and neither does our interest. Through animal depictions, human consciousness parades. As a theme, it’s a hearty perennial, hard to kill. The good news is, Tacoma doesn’t. Curated by Rock Hushka, The Secret Language is, like his currently running A Concise History of Northwest Art, a winner.

Unlike A Concise History, however, The Secret Language is a baggy monster, drawn from the museum’s collection and beyond it, from the 19th century to the present. From its title to the structure of its categories arranged in zoo fashion, like with like, Hushka’s attempt to order his offerings fails to convince. What saves this exhibit are the objects in it. There are too many of them crammed together, but the grace and force of their diversity creates a gravitational pull of interest that sweeps the audience along.

There are three giant Deborah Butterfield‘s in one spacious gallery. Her horses are drawings in space. The best are lumbering but light, well bred from wreckage. These three are fine indeed. Why didn’t the museum give her the entire gallery? The small prints on the wall (Stubbs, Delacroix) are hedged bets. Hello Tacoma Art Museum: If you’re highlighting an artist, go ahead and give her the space. If she needs Stubbs to matter, she doesn’t.

Vanessa Renwick  Longhorn, 2010
16mm to video loop
shot at Patty Pink Chap’s Ranch in Montana, from the Oregon Department of Kick Ass
Renwick’s Longhorn is a rarity, a piece about an animal that offers nothing but the animal. Bill Viola’s buffalo breathing steam in the morning is an emblem of spirit, but Renwick’s shaggy star offers only itself. No meaning beyond its own adheres. With an economy of motion that makes sense in one so heavy-headed, it stares, turns, grazes and steps to the side, over and over in a repeating loop. It’s a massive utterance on a wide plain, and it has nothing to say to us.

Elizabeth Sandvig‘s Peaceable Kingdom series was inspired, of course, by Edward Hicks. Unlike Hicks, she has no hopes of lions lying down with lambs, but she likes the lights and darks of their colored shapes and suggestive densities. Instead of family, the deer is as distant as the sun, and the black bear with a possessive paw on the flank of a sheep cannot be trusted.

Sandvig, Peaceable Kingdom at Night, 2003 oil/canvas 24 x 32 inches

Soaring past William Wegman’s dress-up dogs is Fred Muram‘s eating breakfast. The artist calmly dips his spoon around his dog’s lapping tongue and eats as if there’s nothing odd in doing so. He’s Buster Keaton who sees the train coming but doesn’t leave the tracks. Muram divides the world in two: those who know a train with a tail won’t hurt them and those who are fearfully freaked out.

Muram Sharing a Bowl of Fruit Loops with My Dog, 208 Single channel video Dimensions variable
In monochromatic sepia, Joseph Park‘s The Grand Odalisque takes
Ingres’ boneless paintings of nude women (all flesh, little
structure), and sets not only the figure but the ground
around it in motion. Curtain, bed, tassel, turban, tail and trunk have a seamless flow. It’s a lost time looked at again with humor and a
strange, silky gravity.

Park, The Grand Odalisque, 2001 oil/linen 30 x 36 inches

I’m not sure that Malia Jensen‘s bronze bear would matter much without its title. With it, the animal is the epitome of a guilty party, confessing only when caught.

Jensen, Is This Your Cat? 2006 Bronze 22 x 14 x12
Hats off to Hushka for recreating Jeffry Mitchell‘s elephant pile from 1990, sewn by Tacoma Art Museum volunteers. Let’s hear it for battered hopes and dreams, for what goes soft and slack and lies discarded in a sweet heap.

Mitchell, The Pile of Elephants, 1990 recreated 2010 Muslin and Styrofoam, 114 x 108 x 108 inches. (Claire Cowie’s Villagers on Horse, 2004-05 in the rear)

Richard Hart paints marsupial girls.

Hart The Poetic Truths of High-School Journal Keepers, 2009

Maki Tamura‘s painted paper constructions can be overworked. Not this one, whose image fails to do it justice. The incredible lightness of its being evokes Fragonard.

Tamura Circus 2009 watercolor paper
Geoffrey Chadsey‘s paintings cannot be reproduced. Missing is the queasy subtly of the shading, the face and chest whorled like diseased tree rings, the way the small dog is actually more of a rat resting on the root of a cadaverous man.

Chadsey Pet 2010 watercolor pencil on Mylar

Air, desert, blue owl:

Joseph Goldberg Chaco 2005 encaustic on linen over wood 36 x 48 inches

Nice to see Justin Gibbens‘ birds hanging with one of Audubon’s, their source. Also worth the trip in this show are the Joan Brown’s, Muarizio Cattelan’s taxidermized dog sleeping in a chair (Good Boy, 1998); Morris Graves’ Walking Bird, 1943; John Baldessari’s Two Onlookers and Tragedy (With Mice) 1989; Kenneth Callahan’s dragonfly, late 1950s; Nole Giulini’s Mickey Mouse Organ, from 1994, several Claire Cowie’s, and Alden Mason’s Polka at the Public Market, 1987.

Post to follow: the downside.