Archives for November 2010

If Joesph Beuys is right that anything can be art and John Cage is right that anything can music, then Roy McMakin‘s furniture makes perfect sense. His chairs, tables, chests and stools both deliver and undermine the idea of utilitarian subservience. Within the fine craftsmanship of  their construction is a subversive insistence on a right to be wrong.

Currently at Ambach & Rice is McMakin’s Five Chairs and Ten Tables, a sweet little show with a large contemplative back beat. 

Remember Alice’s uncertain relationship to an occasional table? That table was what McMakin’s rarely are – an innocent bystander.

John Baldessari, whose home is full of McMakin’s, described McMakin’s endeavor in an essay included in Roy McMakin: When is a chair not a chair?

A love of minimalism (while slightly poking fun at it), a
Mattisean love of color, a goal of keeping others off balance, and a
love of removal/absence, a quest for the paradox of simplicity and
complexity. But overall, a mission to sharpen perception, it’s a
significant accomplishment to get one to really see and understand a
chair (and not feel self-conscious in sitting on it). I don’t think Roy
has designed an ironing board yet, but I’m sure it would double as a
painting.

Michael Darling called him a “master craftsman with the heart of a conceptualist.” His tables and chairs are facts with a twist of dry wit, as in the table top that doesn’t quite fit its base.

In 1965, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth created One and Three Chairs (a photo of a chair, a chair and a dictionary description of a chair). A point of view that is austerely tough-minded in Kosuth is sweet, almost goofy in McMakin. Kosuth invites us to consider a rigorous idea by turning it over in our minds. McMakin insists on taking the body along for the ride. His work is a voluptous challenge, a reminder that, as long as we’re awake, we might as well be aware, and take no chair for granted.

Through Dec. 5.

…for the memories, America. (Via Michelle Nicolosi)

She’s serving roasted cauliflower:

Looks like broccoli to me, which reminds me of E.B. White’s tagline for a 1928 New Yorker cartoon drawn by Carl Rose (Image via)
On Thanksgiving in Seattle, a pipe froze at my house and burst, just in time for a house guest, who’s arriving from Portland in an hour or so. Fortunately, we are eating elsewhere, and there are buckets of snow in the bathroom for that homey historic touch. As Strauss wrote in her email:

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Whether you celebrate it or revile it, have
a great day filled with love.

Those in the market for gifts might consider Strauss’ America, my favorite book from 2008, already a classic but still available on Amazon for $19.77.

Chris Engman‘s photos are evidence of his interventions. Using the deserts of Eastern Washington as stage sets, he constructs material plays about his process. Six barrels become a triangle, the red always in the middle bottom and the other colors rotating. He shoots a photo, rearranges the barrels and shoots again. Time passes in the sky, which shades from blue to mottled dark to white.

VARIATIONS, 2010
Archival inkjet print
52 x 44 inches
Edition of 6
Titled Dust to Dust, the exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery is overhung, which is a problem for an artist whose strategizing can devolve into the aridly clever. These photos need more space than they get. Like crabs in a barrel, however, the ones on top manage to hook a claw over the edge and climb out.

In Equivalence, a grid of empty frames becomes a rickety kind of Coptic cross. The top beam and arms are filled with photos of the sky, rephotographed. In the final print the sky is clear except for clouds in the cross. It’s a trick, but I like that it’s not a good trick. The structure is already falling apart, and the paper on which the clouds appear is visible on the left. His title is a nod to Alfred Stieglitz, whose series of the same name attempted to find in ordinary skies an alienating  distance verging on abstraction.

EQUIVALENCE, 2009
Inkjet print
38 x 48 inches
Edition of 6

Abandoned Crates needs no back story. Into a verdant harmony, what is made by humans floats on a lake. The photo is an immaculate version of the messy masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. (There’s meat floating by…) Vanity, vanity; all is vanity.

ABANDONED CRATES, 2007
Archival inkjet print
40 x 49 inches
Edition of 6

Through Dec. 24.

Rachel Maxi paints landscapes and still lifes you can carry in your pocket, your purse or briefcase. Larger ones are never bigger than two arms extended. She gives her portraits of ordinary places an extraordinary glow, as if a street sign, garbage bin, stretch of roadway or flower in a vase were a monk at the moment of enlightenment.

I missed her recent exhibit at G. Gibson Gallery, but Gail Gibson was kind enough to unwrap a few to show me.

From 12th Ave S., North Beacon Hill, 2010
oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches

From Columbia City, 2010
oil on panel, 16 x 24 inches

Toronto’s Kelly Mark belongs to the generation that identifies itself with the word “slack.” In 2006 in front of the Henry Gallery (website currently down), she reprised her performance from Toronto’s The Power Plant. Carrying blank signs, her group presented an opening night audience with her idea of militancy, chanting:

What do we want?
Nothing!
When do we want it?
Never!

Her videos, drawings, wallpaper, sculptures and photographs strike a deadpan note, like Buster Keaton but minus his anxiety.

I Don’t Need A Therapist, 2008 Crosstitch on linen
24″ x 30 ” x 1/2″

EXIST 2009 Powder coated aluminum w/ LED lights (altered Exit sign)
7.5″ x 12″ x 2″

Master of the laid-back she may be, but work takes work. When she wants to relax from the heavy cogitation and technical issues of doing it, she fastens a magnifying lens to her eye and hunches over a table, making interior blizzards full of press type.

Twenty of these time-out, going-nowhere-fast drawings are at Platform Gallery through Saturday.

Meek
2010 Letraset on archival mat board; 19 x 24 inches(detail on the right)
 

From Patrick Holderfield‘s cell phone. A narrative is easy to sense but hard to decipher.

Portland’s Ellen Lesperance won the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award in September, much to to the befuddlement of many in Seattle, who’d never heard of her. She has an exciting website, especially for feminists who appreciate the wider progressive history of their movement. Her site opens with rousing chants from decades-old street actions, currently, We don’t want Cruise!

Using archival footage, Lesperance photographs sweaters worn by demonstrators and  recreates them, first in yarn, second abstracted in gouache on paper. Five of these drawings hang at SAM, and they are inert: Paul Klee in a coma. What is lively in Klee’s line is dead in hers. Just because she has an appealing back story doesn’t mean her drawings are any good at all. Looks as if this year’s Betty Bowen jurors were seduced by intent.

We Will Cover Your Fallen Body, Beth O’Brien, and Tell You That It Was
Not in Vain. The Forest at Eagle Creek Remains! Let It Echo Your Most
Valiant of Names: Horehound…Horehound…. 2010

In the 11 years he has operated his aesthete’s paradise/curio and jewelry shop in Ballard, called Souvenir, Curtis Steiner has never featured himself in a solo show, till now, through Dec. 3. The insects in his ink drawings on paper – Insects and Alphabets
– step on dainty feet out of 19th Century England, when entomology was a
pastime as common as chess, surrounded by the kind of elegant handwriting that helped define the leisure
class.

Each
insect holds court on the page, antenna twitching, surrounded by the
calligraphy known as cursive. Last year, when my nephew Rafferty was
five, he showed me a sample of his, calling it “curse writing.” 
(“Cursive,” I told him. “No,” he said with a scowl, “curse
writing.”)

Rafferty is a fan of Steiner’s, thanks to Steiner’s interactive project at the Seattle Art Museum titled, 1,000 Blocks.(Steiner’s manipulations here.) Steiner’s arrangements are top hat and tail; Rafferty’s are dockworker, blocks roughing each other up in muscled heaps.

Steiner’s
interest in lists of things is not so nearly extinct as his fine hand.
The urge to categorize and define animates the work of his polar
opposite, Gregory Blackstock, who from memory draws images he has seen in dictionaries, encyclopedias
and other source books, starting with outlines and shading in. Each of
his drawings is a list, and the paper is often cut and taped together
into a kind of scroll, punctuated by block writing.

We
inhabit the world by naming its parts. In times of upheaval, names blur
and opposites stand in for each other, perfectly illustrated in 1942 by
Henry Reed, whose mind in the middle of World War II productively wandered between sex
and death.

NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,

To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica

Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,

        And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this

Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

Which in your case you have not got. The branches

Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

         Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released

With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

        Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

        They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

        For to-day we have naming of parts.

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]

Image (part of a series titled Shanghai Expo), comes from Marsha Burns‘ daily photo stream, which she sends to a fortunate few via email. There is no other way of seeing it. You have to know her.