Another Bouncing Ball: July 2009 Archives

(Photo, Art in America)

Carrie E. A. Scott is the new (and first) East Coast director for Seattle gallery Ambach & Rice, owned by Amanda and Charlie Kitchings.

Since May 2008 and ending recently, she was director at Nicole Klagsbrun in New York. Before that, she was director at James Harris and ran the nonprofit space known as the Hedreen Gallery.

Each month she plans to spend a week in Seattle and three in New York.

Scott:

I'll be doing everything a director does - curate and coordinate with clients and artists. Amanda and Charlie want to help build a bridge between the coasts that includes the Northwest. The gallery will continue to bring East Coast artists to Seattle, and I'm planning exhibits in New York that will help bring attention to some artists who deserve to be part of a larger discussion. While at Nicole Klagsburn I introduced Storm Tharp, and the Whitney bought a drawing. I'm looking to do more of that. We won't have our own space in New York but will find temporary quarters.

When do you start?

Now. I've started.

Any shows in the works?

None I can talk about yet. Soon.

The opening of Cupcake Royale on Capitol Hill earned ecstatic notices from Seattle art bloggers, some of whom are personally involved.

Joey Veltkamp of Best Of will serve as art curator after the first show, curated by Roy McMakin,  who with Ian Butcher (both from Domestic Architecture) designed the space. (Check the Best Of link for artists now on view.)

Not only is the place lovely, it features seriously good art perched in various nooks and crannies. If you want to know who did what, however, you have to follow the corridor to the bathrooms to find the credits.

Museums and (more frequently) galleries tuck identifying labels into obscure locations (or print maps available at the front desk) when they don't want to disturb the pristine experience of viewing the art. But this is a cupcake shop. There is no pristine experience. Put the artist's names and title beside the art. Hiding the who/what/when is pretentious beyond belief.

Nazi gnomes here.

From Eyeteeth via C-Monster, Picasso gnome. (Elliott Arkin's Seedbed)

Will Cotton

Lee Stoetzel

Doggie-style perspective isn't above a grade-school joke. The myopic have four eyes. (4-Eyed Dog, Pencil on paper)

Currently at Ambach & Rice, Eric Yahnker draws as if the camera hadn't been invented and he's the unreliable narrator assigned to keep a record. Exactitude is his straight man. He renders tongue, teeth, slack lip, the golden shine on the short hair to set up the punchline.

Another artist who drew this well would stick to drawings, but Yahnker has the nervous energy of a comic on stage. Visual jokes tumble from him. Part of the joke is their production: Serious craftsmanship is essential to being absurd and saves him from the trap of visual one-liners.

Dorothy's trip to bright lights, green city exposed a sham. If she'd read a little Existentialism, would she have bothered to go? Online, the drawing itself is hard to see, but in person, pencil on paper orchestras a drama - soft light pools across the top of her head as shadows curl around her fingers and deepen into the nape of her neck.

Robert Smithson's Mirror Displacement is the source of Yahnker's Analogous To The Fall Of That One Empire (Moby Dick); roughly a million cut-out and alphabetized letters from Moby Dick on 27 mirrored panels (26 for the letters in the alphabet and one more for punctuation).

It's also a tribute to Andy Kaufman, who read The Great Gatsby on stage.(here on YouTube). What to do with a masterpiece? Scholars who analyze cut it up, while cut ups like Yahnker take the process to its literal (and fatal) end.

Less Than Zero to 101 is a shelf full of CDs cassette tapes, LP's, books and magazines whose titles number in order from <0 to 101. Less Than Zero, Absolute Zero, The Beatles 1, Two Dads, 2 1/2 Men, Three Amigos! Four Brothers....7th Heaven, 7th Season, ...12 Monkeys...18-Year-Old Virgin, 26 Gasoline Stations...36 Hours to Die...Around the World in 80 Days to 101 Dalmatians.

Detail:
Yahnker is a maker run deliberately amuck. His methods are rigorous, and his results absurd but not frivolous.

Analogous To The Fall Of That One Empire (Gap Shirt), shirt in which all of the thread has been removed excluding the pinstripe pattern:

Drew Daly did something similar with chairs: Whittling away a sturdy one to produce a pair of barely-there ghosts.Yahnker began unthreading the shirt after Bush was elected for the second time, in 2004. The empire that fell is our own.

Somewhere between Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White is Bradd Skubinna at Francine Seders, with maybe a dog's left jog over to Richard (Dick) Elliott, whose murals are made of bicycle reflectors.

(Photos Spike Mafford)


On the floor, Skubinna's starburst pattern of plastic discards, Gabe Liked Jazz, radiates outward from a meticulously color-coded center. Plastic trays for apples, small appliances, meals to go, light bulbs and muffins inflect a wall with ripples of translucent patterns accented with the remains of torn labeling. A blue screen made of blue New York Times' bag wrappers torn to let the light through hangs in the middle of the gallery. Both indoor sky and plastic lace, it sways faintly when the front door opens.

The Northwest Film Forum is a one-stop shop for the Seattle's cultural life, a hub that draws from visual art, theater, dance and music communities, recognizing the fluid reality of contemporary art.

With a 30 percent drop in income, however, the forum needs help if it is to continue its programming at present levels, not only the film programming but the summer filmmaking camps for kids, screenwriting and film editing classes, filmmakers brought to town and the movies it is instrumental in getting made.

 Director Lyall Bush is asking anybody with a stake in the forum to send a $10 donation by Aug. 15:

Please walk it in, mail it in, or click here  to make your donation.

There's a crow in my neighborhood who wants me dead. Its screams when it sees me are heart-stopping. Do I look like someone who kicked a chick?

I watched Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds with a niece intent on seeing the classics. I wouldn't have picked that one, but when the hapless human herd is strafed by birds, I thought of one whose venom might be keeping it up nights.

Vanessa Renwick

Jean-Luc Mylayne takes an entirely different view, offering a fusion of factual clarity and high romance.

Jessie Henson liberates hers from embroidery.

Facts aren't enough for Justin Gibbens.


Elizabeth Sandvig is drawn to the avian world of improbable collaborations.

Mike Simi takes his birds past Bladerunner, into the realm of ordinary plastics.

Michael Spafford 's have mystical powers.

Anselm Kiefer's have read too much and forgotten how to fly.

Mine hops up and down on the branches of a high tree. Once earned, the enmity of crows deepens and grows.

Last fall, members of the Seattle Art Dealers Association (SADA) attempted to define who in their view is a singular artist for an exhibit titled, Century 21: Dealer's Choice.

Predictably, the results were mixed. Just because dealers align themselves in a group doesn't mean they have anything in common. Like every other city with a thriving gallery scene, Seattle's galleries run on different tracks. Many specialize in intimate home decor. As long as there is a market for art that contains no criticality in its approach to content, there will be galleries to provide it.

This summer, perhaps smarting from criticism about being out of touch, SADA is back with a second project. Each gallery picked somebody new. Setting aside the fact that summer is frequently a time for introductions, what are the results?

Richard Thurston of the Grover/Thurston Gallery picked his wife, Marianne Pulfer.

Thurston:

It's my gallery. I can do what I want.

He means of course that it's his and Susan Grover's gallery. Considering that Grover is his ex-wife, Thurston gets credit for his sterling sense of family values. Picking his wife is an expression of his up-yours attitude toward his peers. Plus, Pulfer is a step up for the gallery, fiercer and more compelling than much of its usual fare.

The other surprise came from Foster/White Gallery. With the photographs of Cara Barer, Foster/White moved decisively away from the visual niceties it too frequently features. Her images of ravaged books remind me of the Laura Dean Dancers in the 1970s and '80s.

Other strong intros: Brent Sommerhauser at Greg Kucera; David Huffman at James Harris; Michael Bryon at Howard House; Ariana Page Russell at Platform, and Mark Kang O'Higgins at Linda Hodges for one painting, Deposition.

Charlie Finch on the charmed trio, all now demised, of Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

The last of a great triumvirate, Merce Cunningham, died over the weekend. I'm the least dance-savvy person around, but it's fair to say that not a day has passed in my art existence without contemplating Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham. What they possessed like the Three Graces passing a chalice was an unstinting awareness of the world around them and its positive possibilities. When the garbage truck loads up at 4 in the morning, Cage turns irritation into music. When HBO posters pile up under a construction, Rauschenberg calls. When a hundred young folks stare down at their iPods, forgetting how to walk, Cunningham does a stutter step.

More here.

Eva Lake, in reviewing Jami Attenberg's novel, A Kept Man:

In just about every novel about artists I have read, dealers are made out to be vulgar or dumb, but I have found this to rarely be the case in the real world. It leads me to believe that the writers did not know any - or just liked easy, cheap shots.

D.K. Row calls Portland's art economy "frail and nearly bedridden" (here), a description that rings true across the country. These are desperate times, Mrs. Lovett. Bad At Sports offers brief analysis of the recessionary impact on galleries with upbeat news from LA, here.

Doug Britt reports on New York's Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue. It's a nonprofit that offers grants to artists who live in five cities - Houston, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta - in the hopes of providing a national support network for artists who don't live in NY or LA.

I emailed the group to congratulate it on its generosity and ask, Why not Seattle? Didn't hear back. Atlanta makes sense. If the program's going to be nationwide, it needs a Southern city. Houston and Chicago are obvious, and I'm fine with San Francisco. That leaves Boston. Boston instead of Seattle or Philly or Portland, Oregon? Somebody in the grant office is not paying attention.

Sue the bastards: Rose Art Museum board members take Brandeis University to court. (Story everywhere, especially good at Art Fag City. More on MAN.)

Art for the heat wave - Jeppe Hein's Appearing Rooms. His ice cube is currently melting at Western Bridge.

In response to this post, Henry Art Gallery director Sylvia Wolf writes:

As a response to the concern voiced above, I am pleased to report that the Henry Art Gallery is strong. Managing and thriving in this economic recession calls for bold steps from Henry leadership.

As Washington State's oldest art museum (founded in 1927), the Henry has been through tough times before. What has sustained the organization through past highs and lows is the pioneering spirit that has made the Henry a cultural leader and model of innovation in the Pacific Northwest. Those distinguishing characteristics have never been stronger.

Like all arts organizations, our revenues have dropped significantly, endowment earnings are down, and state cuts have significantly reduced our funding. To that end, between January and May, we developed a long-range plan for operating under significantly different economic conditions. Measures taken included a reduction in force and in gallery hours. In addition, effective June 1, all Henry staff work hours and pay were reduced by 20%. All of us at the Henry--staff and Board alike--have worked hard in the past six months to determine how best to serve the community during a period of diminishing resources.

Although the fiscal crisis greatly challenged us and called for sacrifices, we made our changes and ended the fiscal year, June 31, 2009, with a balanced budget. For the year ahead, we have a vigorous plan for providing access to art and artists at this time when the need for inspiration from the arts is more acute than ever.

Photographers sneak up on people or catch them on the fly. Walker Evans went so far as to rig his camera so it appeared to be focused elsewhere for his Subway series, Many Are Called.

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection at the Henry Art Gallery concentrates on portraits that are collaborative. The subject understands the scrutiny and has prepared a face to meet it.

Edward Curtis: Among others, Bill Holm defended Curtis against Christopher Lyman's 1982 debunking study, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions. which accused him of racism, sexism, nostalgic romanticism and intentional fraud. Lyman's harsh view has not prevailed. Yes, Curtis traveled with costumes and used them interchangeably when subjects presented themselves as insufficiently colorful. He wanted to reconstruct the past, not document the present.

Like Curtis, Marsha Burns believes in engaged contact. In the 1980s and '90s, she worked in gelatin silver prints or enlarged Polaroids, with subjects standing against a folded, gray backdrop. Her prints are are an orchestration of grays, blacks and whites, with the edges from the contact sheet and sprocket-marks from the film serving  as decorative borders and a homage to the means of her production.

Also like Curtis, her photos are theatrical presentations, sum points of edifice. They are visual stories whose internal construction delivers meaning. One thinks of Irving Penn's studio shots of tribal peoples around the globe, not in this show. Burns' are more intimate than Penn's, but just as crisp and elegant.

In Burns' view, style is substance, attire is destiny. Seeking to be a medium through which people could tell their own stories, she sought subjects whose bodies speak for them and (unlike Curtis) told them to compose themselves as they wished to be seen. Her lack of cynicism, her belief that portraiture can reveal essential truth, even the idea that there is something called essential truth, put Burns at odds with many of her contemporaries. While they were busy exposing reality as a series of selected fictions, she was after soul, the grace in character.

Her approach has more in common with Thomas Eakins than Cindy Sherman.

Also in the exhibit, curated by Sylvia Wolf, Henry director: Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, Frank A. Rinehart, Benjamin J. Falk, Samuel Montague Fassett, Jim Goldberg, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Deborah Luster, Fred E. Miller, Nicholas Nixon, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Andy Warhol.

Through Oct. 25.

Dominated by the Christianity for more than 1,500 years, art in the West continues to be seeded with its signs and symbols. They exert a magnetic pull over imagery that may or may not have been created to declare them.

Lauren Grossman's use is intentional, if not reverential. (Below, Clear Christ and Behold, via Howard House)


From his literal youth, Michael Lucero from 1978, via Howard House:

Folkert De Jong's could be accidental, but it's real in any case, a crucified figure who has become his cross.

Extended arms can be enough. (Damien Hirst)

A body made of Duct Tape slumping as if dead is a descent from the Cross. (Dan Webb, Mr. Fixit )

Speaking of a descent from the Cross: (Tom Otterness, Untitled)

Another descent. (Mark Kang O'Higgins)

Even a configuration of a (less than) heavenly host rings the old bell. (John Feodorov - Office Deity)

For Emily Duffy, the old bell is an alarm. In Constitutional Doublecross, she laments the blurring of the line between church and state. (Via Sandra)

As befits the iconography, the fallen continue to fall. (Maurizio Cattelan)

Faulkner:

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Jasper Johns' light bulbs came from comic strips. They remain a constant that pops up in his sculpture, prints, paintings and drawings. Jasper Johns: Light Bulbs is a survey of their appearance from 1957 to 1976, in 17 prints and six sculptures, at the Henry Gallery.

Johns, who also has a starring role in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum, likes his bulbs burnt out, which is possibly a joke on his status as the idea man of contemporary art.

I love this survey, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Limited to one idea, the range of the artist's material invention becomes evident.

Some light bulbs flicker before they go out, and some just go out.The world it is the old world yet.

At the Henry through Oct. 25.

In a good economy with a sold middle class, factory work seems dreary. Is this all there is? What about my hopes and dreams? In a bad economy with an eroded middle class, whatever factory work remains is an enviable a safe haven. As Bob Dylan put it in Tangled Up in Blue, "lucky just to be employed."

Cao Fei's My Future Is Not A Dream has a human-clog-in-the-machine feeling without the usual rage or desperation, because in this video, each clog is conscious of his/her contribution. Then there's the magic: A ballerina appears en pointe as a dying swan and, in the next scene, as a sorter of light bulbs. A man with a clip board takes up the dance, and so does a women in jeans.

My Future Is Not A Dream is not the alienated surreal of  Doug Aitken or the worker advocacy of Allan Sekula. It is a homage to those who make things with their hands and dream with their hearts, in Mark Twain's words, those  "valuable personages; the workers, they that make the bread the soft-handed and ide eat."

As Jacob Lawrence said about his Builders series:

There is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.

Yang Fudong's City Lights is a madcap improvisation of the classy noir mood of French gangster films.

Men in dark suits peer around the edge of buildings, guns raised. They hold umbrellas and dance in office buildings in the shaded light of venetian blinds. Some hold guns, umbrellas and partners, others pretend the props are in their hands, that they're not alone and ridiculous. 

Multiple short films by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong are at the Henry through Oct. 4.

Panda is a quivering mass of sexualized ectoplasm that in video time contorts from vaginal to floral to a closeup of a dragonfly in heat and back again.

As it collapses under its own metaphoric weight, the image reemerges as something else. Panda is a survey of the fluids that make life possible, created by dripping shaving cream onto a lit and transparent surface.

Drawing (in shaving cream) by Jeffry Mitchell. Video by Tivon Rice. At the Henry through September 27.

Previous post, none too flattering to gnomes, here.

Ries Niemi comes to their defense:

"Gnomes are always vulgar and almost always in the wrong." You ought to hear what gnomes have to say about Art Critics! British PM John Major's Father was a professional maker of Garden Gnomes, and Phillipe Starck's gnomes are friendly and lovable.

Personally, besides being a member of the Troll liberation front, I like gnomes quite a lot, and find them neither vulgar nor in the wrong. However, I take a very dim view of poetry.

In February there were layoffs (Jen Graves' story here). After that the Henry Art Gallery curtailed its hours (closed on Tuesdays as well as Mondays.) Now nobody on staff is working full-time. From director to curators, education and development heads, everybody's hours have been cut to 32. Soon: Why the Henry is worth a visit right this minute.

PS: Although the Henry is in no danger of closing or even starving itself into insignificance, it's useful to remember the rule that applies to democracy too: Use it or lose it. 

Seattle, Olympic Sculpture Park, Louise Bourgeois - Eyeball Benches (Image via)

Anyone heading to Seattle to see highlights of the Seattle Art Museum's Asian collections will land in the wrong country. Luminous Jewels: Masterpieces of Asian Art from the Seattle Art Museum (100 objects) opens Saturday at the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo and will tour in Japan through July 19, 2010. SAM's Asian art holdings are usually cited among the top five in the U.S.

Included in the exhibit:

Deer Scroll (Poem Scroll with Deer) 1610s 13 1/2 x 410 3/16 inches


Crow Screen, one of two, both are in the show. Early 1700s. Each 61 9/16 x 139 5/16 inches.

Press release here. Checklist here.

Obama's in the White House and the sun is shining, but money continues scarce for art museums, which are all (nearly all) engaged in serious cost-cutting.  The question is not, who's cutting back, it's how they're doing it.

AJ blogger Judith H. Dobrzynski exhibited a fine grasp of this issue in her post, Museum Hours: Time for a Change.

Cutting back on evening hours seems clueless, and self-defeating.

A few museums do seem to get this basic fact. When Seattle Art Museum recently cut hours, it announced that it will be closed on Tuesdays, beginning the week of Sept. 7 -- but according to its website, SAM remains open on Thursday and Friday nights until 9 p.m.

Who else is on this honor roll?  

Addressing the same issue, Jen Graves at the Stranger takes a harsher approach:

After Labor Day, Seattle Art Museum will be on a five-day rather than a six-day schedule, meaning it will be closed not only Mondays but Tuesdays as well.

This is an attempt to cut costs, said spokeswoman Nicole Griffin, but also an effort to focus more on late-night activities at the museum on Thursdays and Fridays, when SAM is open until 9. "The feedback we've gotten is that people want these late-night hours, but we're not seeing the traffic," she said. "Right now we're going to be trying to promote those Thursday and Friday nights till 9."

Hmm. At least some of that is spin, since it requires a logical contortion to need to save money so that it can be spent convincing people to want something they've already said they want. But what do I know about marketing?

I suppose missing Tuesdays isn't that bad, but what about adding just a few hours on the other end, say on Saturday nights?

Only in sports do hometown writers appreciate the home team.

The Bellevue Arts Museum's artsfair. Old. Big. In a parking lot. For the first time, missing its capital letter. 

New and relatively new. Under Michael Darling, the modern and contemporary galleries at the Seattle Art Museum are in frequent motion. New at SAM is an occasional series that will highlight what slips into the museum's galleries without a lot of fanfare.

Virginia and Bagley Wright own Living Room, Scene 2 (below) from his 2003 Krefeld Project, plus a set of the final photos of the series, promised gifts.

Never has the divide between classically cool modernist architecture and the people who inhabit it been as decisively painted as in this series, which grew out the Museum Haus Esters' invitation to Fischl to create paintings using the museum as backdrop.

Designed in 1928 by Mies van der Rohe, the museum was once a residence, and Fischl decided to treat it as one again. He hired two actors, shot thousands of photos, manipulated the most promising and painted 12 canvases inspired by the results.

Living Room, Scene 2 is all about psychic, social, sexual, aesthetic and financial power. The male figure owns all he surveys, including  woman curled in a submissive pose on a chair, the sleek interior and the art it houses.

Behind him is the man's Gerhard Richter (the artist's wife descending a staircase), his Warhol and Bruce Nauman. Some have speculated that these artists must be important to Fischl, which is why he included their representations, as homage.

Surely not. Fischl is a society painter in the tradition of John Singer Sargent and more recently (and to a lesser extent) Lucian Freud. His work has nothing to do with Richter, Warhol and/or Nauman. Those three are what he isn't, dominant. By featuring them, he's signaling that his fictional titan of industry owns the best, takes it for granted and doesn't bother to look at it.

Before the economic meltdown, while free market traders were still riding high, Fischl painted the character of Capitalism's favorite sons.  His painting reveals the pleasure he took in it. Rest of the series here.

High (Will Ryman via)

Low (Ellensburg Muffler Men, via)

Steve Davis photographs the marginalized, imprisoned and down on their luck.

The 2007 flood in Washington State drew him outdoors.

Currently at James Harris his series of landscapes titled The Western Lands. The photo above is lit and framed as if a body of brown water bordered by drowned trees were a face.

Familiar but strange, each scene is devoid of humans but imbued with evidence of their presence.

Richard Misrach comes of mind, naturally. His series, On the Beach, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and has been touring ever since, at the Henry last November till February and currently at the High Museum, where it closes Aug. 16.

Misrach's career has been distorted by the demand for his work. If 75 percent of it magically disappeared, leaving only his peak moments, he'd be magnificent instead of what he is, overexposed and underfed. On the Beach is a disgrace of an exhibit. It isn't curated, it's packaged to please, with 10 photos undoing what a well-chosen one would have accomplished.

Just because repetition works for Bernd and Hilla Becher doesn't mean it works for everybody.

With The Western Lands, Davis is in Misrach territory without being in Misrach's kind of trouble. Each photo is a distinct experience, with a formidable calm that opens into further reaches of calm the longer you look at it.

From Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum, Yoko Ono's  Painting to Hammer a Nail invites the audience to pick up a nail and pound it into a wood panel painted white.

Two weeks ago, the audience decided to up the ante. (Story here.) Instead of continuing to pound nails as per the artist's request, they turned her piece into a community bulletin board.

Two photos from yesterday, from SAM's Nicole Griffin.

In 1998 or 1999, I reviewed the major survey of performance art at LA MoCA for the Wall Street Journal (I don't have the catalogue with me in DC). Yoko Ono's "Painting to Hammer a Nail" was on display there too - with one key difference. There was a small sign next to the piece saying "Please Don't Touch." I'm glad to see that the piece has now been re-activated (and/or re-hammered).

In the catalog for Dirt On Delight: Impulses That Form Clay now at the Walker, co-curator Jennelle Porter wrote about Jeffry Mitchell:

The repetitive labor required to make such works is apparent, and one of the many themes in Mitchell's work along with redemption, transcendence, sex, death and hope.

She refers to Mitchell's high style featured in Dirt, such as his rococo fortress of a pickle jar from 2005. (Click to enlarge.)

Currently at the James Harris Gallery, 49 pots serve as examples of his low.

They include Green Peony, 2009, Lead-glazed earthenware.

Thirteen delicate yet fluid drawings of flowers in colored pencil accompany them. If a soap bubble could draw, it would aspire to create them. Barely there, they are their own de Koonings erased by their own Rauschenbergs.

Mitchell is, in the primary sense, a maker. In the middle of a description, he might unconsciously begin to draw it in the air, thinking with his hands. The history of the world he remembers through its colors, lines and densities. When he thinks of Alfred Sisley, he sees the sky reflected in Sisley's fish scales. When he thinks of Dickens, he mentally toys with the sagging mass of Miss Haversham's cake.

What Whitney Balliett wrote about gut bucket jazz applies to Mitchell: His feet are in the mud, but his head is full of celestial things. He owes his casual grace to bountiful skill. He drapes the shaggy world in silks and puts a top hat on the tawdry.

He likes alphabet drawings and Betty Crocker bake-offs; Chinese pots and Renaissance porcelain as well as Pop art and back-to-future Futurism. He casts a fond eye on country potters, Mickey Mouse, Babar and Curious George. He loves comic books and the militantly upbeat graphics of the Russian Constructivists. His gift is his ability to turn a chaos of sources into a coherent visual stream.

Low for him is not the same as plain. His 49 pots emerged from the rich terrain of his concerns. Incised into the surface of the clay are flowers, animals (especially birds, butterflies, bears, bunnies, monkeys and elephants from children's books), sentries, auspicious charms (horseshoe, 4-leaf clover) and messages, such as HELLO HELLO, from the Beatles' song, and JM for himself. He was here. He made this.

As in the Tang Dynasty, his figures are awash in colored glazes that run down the round shape or vase or jug, but he also dips into the traditions of English cream ware, the salt glazes of American South and Ming blue, into which he tends to float scribbles of white clouds.

In Mitchell's low style, his pots lack their foot, a sign that they are for the people.

When artists consider the early 20th-century divide between Picasso and Duchamp, many who are currently prominent side with Duchamp. Not Mitchell.

Picasso, via.

Mitchell, below. Note the stigmata. Although his work has a Chinese Buddhist heart that expresses the cycle of suffering leading to enlightenment, he was raised Catholic, and its imagery is a constant.

Like David Hockney, Mitchell can draw, paint or sculpt anything he wants, whatever occurs to him to make in clay, latex, glass, wood and various plastics; on canvas, paper, old metals and on the surface of notes, restaurant bills and books.

While Hockney increasingly distracts himself with technology, Mitchell sticks to the flesh, to life and death, to youth and beauty, to sex as joy (exuberant and excessive) and as a kind of death swoon (barely there).

Gerald Gerard Manley Hopkins, from The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo:

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,/ Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks,/ lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace/ -- Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,/ And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver/ Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death/ Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver./ See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair/ Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Artist Ottmar Hoerl was startled last month when prosecutors in Nuremberg threatened to charge him with violating Germany's ban on Nazi symbols. After extensive news coverage, the state announced Wednesday that it had decided to drop the charges, as his gnomes were intended to deride Nazis rather than promote them.

Story here.

Anselm Kiefer began his career in the 1970s with photos of himself giving the salute at sites of atrocities. However confusing such imagery is in contemporary Germany, the Nazis would have surely detected the mockery and ordered both artists shot.

Gnomes are always vulgar and almost always in the wrong.

Paul McCarthy, Santa Claus (Buttplug Gnome). Via

Dan Webb, Plop. Via

Webb, Gnome Installation (detail) Via

In Berlin a few years ago, I saw street carts selling Stalin kitsch. A cart with Hitler kitsch wouldn't have had the chance to roll into place. What's the difference? Not body count. Stalin's might have been higher. Could it be because the Nazis lost the war and Stalin died in his bed (maybe with help from a few heroic individuals)? Only history's losers (not necessarily history's thugs) become real outcasts.

With good news for gnomes, maybe Charles Krafft can take his Hitler Teapot through German customs without getting arrested. Via

 Debra Baxter You Turn Me Inside Out (glove) Carved alabaster

Baxter again, carved alabaster

Cynthia Camlin, Melted 6, These drawings are of icebergs, but they bring to mind the pudding-under-crust collapse of the aging body. Had Hamlet lived longer he'd have seen his flesh melt. Camlin is in Return to Departure at the Kirkland Arts Center till Aug. 6. She has a solo show at Monarch Studios till Aug. 26.

Late of Seattle, Fionn Meade will be in charge of the lineup at the Sculpture Center. A video installation by Meade and his wife, the artist Mary Simpson, titled Young Americans, is at the Seattle Art Museum through Aug. 30. Podcast interview with Meade and Simpson here. Their Web site here.

Horowitz


Only thing wrong with this story: It isn't true. BRAVO's Untitled Art Project did not add auditions in Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and Dallas.

Richard Lacayo on the addictive quality of watching live coverage of the 4th Plinth:

Thirty five years ago Chris Burden put himself on a platform in a New York gallery for 22 days. But since Burden was an artist, that made what he did "art" in a more -- is the word here "official"? -- way. Gormley has democratized Burden's work by letting anybody perform it, which of course is what all of us are doing all day anyway. I'm existing right now, and I'm not even on a pedestal.

More Lacayo here. Seattle's piece of the Plinth here.

Latest threat to Spiral Jetty here.

How did I miss this? Libby Rosof calls Jeffry Mitchell's contributions to Dirt on Delight from the ICA (now at the Walker) the "Versailles of pickle jars." Mitchell is currently at James Harris Gallery. Review soon.  Jen Graves on Mitchell here.

Last Saturday night, the Seattle artist team of John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zack Culler celebrated their ability to keep on keeping on through a morass of ecological setbacks and bureaucratic hurtles by throwing themselves a small party at their site.

The party had to be small, because they have no right to occupy the premises on which they pay rent. Nobody has occupancy rights, not even the owner. The EPA doesn't want people to hang around unless they're in hasmat suits.

Dealing with the EPA was never part of their plan. Their original idea was to create a mini-park/sculpture on the Monorail Line, but when voters said no to expanding the line in 2005, the idea lost its base. Not for long. Four years ago, they rented an abandoned gas station on the corner of Warsaw and Ellis, between Boeing Field and the Duwamish River, one of the most contaminated in the country.

Before renting to them, the owner showed them a 1980s clean bill of health from the EPA, which, as it turns out, means little. Because the station had been vacant for three years, another inspection was required.

"The '80s were the dark ages of environmental cleanup," said Ben Beres. "They'd dig a hole and sniff. This place wasn't soil tested."

Tests revealed more than the localized gas pump pollution the trio expected. Instead, 12 feet under the soil is a free-ranging plume of contaminants. Instead of the usual clump-and-treat method, the brown field they've been happy to call a home away from home requires a far more complex intervention.

Walk away, friends said. SuttonBeresCuller are not environmental artists. They're performance artists who make things. They have no manifesto to consult or burning desire to save the earth. Till now. They want to turn a ruined mess into a pocket park, public sculpture, experimental exhibition space and environmental remediation project and leave it as a gift to the South Park/Georgetown communities.

The hunt continues for funding and permission from a web of agencies. Creative Capital gave them $50,000 in 2005, and 4Culture just wrote a check for an Arts Cultural Facilities Award of $68,000. After the cleanup, they're going to bury the back of the station underneath a grassy knoll and light the park with solar panels.

When do they think it will happen?

"2010," said Sutton. That would be a small miracle. Brendan Kiley's story here.

In 1974-75, Alfred Leslie painted Virginia Wright, as part of his Red Painting Series. (Who she is here.)

The color can't be said to describe her politics, which tend to be casually, even indifferently, Republican. She broke with the party in the early 1990s over the Culture Wars and their impact on the NEA. (Story here.) Her husband Bagley waited till 2004 to follow her lead, reasoning that the world couldn't take four more years of George Bush.

Leslie painted Virginia Wright as if she were decades older than she was at the time. In his version, she might be a loose-limbed forest ranger with big bones and no make up, instead of the petite, urban and immaculately groomed woman she continues to be.

He was after the intensity of her character informed by her interest in art, which colors everything about her. Her daughter Merrill Wright once said that her mother had five children, the four of record and the fifth being art. Everybody thought she loved the fifth child best.

Operating in the tradition of Thomas Eakins, not John Singer Sargent, going for the specific, not the general, Leslie is true to his version of the facts. As he says:

You can't alter facts by filming them over with dead romances.

And

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Leslie has a terrific Web site for his books of images (and some text), a few of which can be viewed in their entirety online.

In Randy Kennedy's NTY story about artists trying out for BRAVO's yet unnamed reality show, he featured Jesse Edwards, late of Seattle and now, wrote Kennedy, living "hand to mouth" in New York, the only artist quoted at length and the only one identified in a photo caption.

He looks somebody invented by Flannery O'Connor, maybe the hero in The Violent Bear It Away. It's hot in New York in July, but if an artist is going to stand out, he might as well do it in a dark suit. Behind him, pikers look as if they're waiting for the bus.

Here's Edwards' piece of the story:

About a third of the way back in the line, Jesse Edwards, a 31-year-old painter and ceramics artist from Seattle who has been living hand to mouth since moving to New York this summer, opened his portfolio to show a picture of a work that the producers might keep handy as a cautionary reminder: a ceramic television with an image of painted apples as its screen. The piece was titled "Still Life Channel." "It's a snoozer of a channel, the Still Life Channel," Mr. Edwards said, but then quickly showed a picture of another ceramic television, this one with a mirror as its screen, titled "Your Personal Moment of Fame."

I wonder if he brought his bong.
I hope he brought a couple of portraits.


Good luck, Jesse.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning --

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Via

The new version of the green light: Yana Paskova photo in the New York Times, accompanying a story about using a dumpster as a hot tub.

Free floating on the Internet, via Nathan Lippens:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an artist in possession of a gallery must be in want of an artist statement.

Will this do?

Mark Flood

Ben Beres took another option, going on and on: Artist's Statement, Etching, relief roll, chine colle.12 x 9 inches.

Detail:

If Frank O'Hara were alive, chances are he'd be published at Wave Books, founded in Seattle four years ago by Charles Wright, former director of the Dia.

Wave specializes in poetry that can be mistaken for conversation but cannot be entered by a conversationalist. Wave poetry isn't as consumer surreal as John Ashbery, as lyrical as Charles Wright (no relation to the publisher), as war-haunted as Charles Simic or as romantically charged as Olga Broumas.

Wave poets are not in love with bars and do not want to be fish leaping in a river. They do not believe alcoholism will make them better poets. (See John Berryman and the Booze Talking.)

With the exception of Franck Andre Jamme, who turns the recognizable into the indecipherable and forces an admiration for clumped lettering, Wave poets are not islands. The celebrate (or at least endure) entangling alliances. They burrow. They grip down on a person, place or thing and take it for an interior ride.

Many are unreliable narrators. They mock their own pleasures and confess to crimes committed by others. They are serious and/or comic, occasionally honest but seldom sincere. They care about art without saying its name. Sex is graphic but fails to enthrall over the long haul. Even when reporting from the middle of a forest, they tend to be urban.

Unlike Rita Dove, they can't dance, but they refuse to cry a river about it. They are adults: Their childhoods interest them less than their children's childhoods. They crack wise about their political concerns, which are seen aslant. None is likely to proceed, as Denise Levertov did, from a gnawed-on dead squirrel in wet grass to urgent, anti-war narratives.

When I interviewed Frank McCourt and Mary Gordon in Seattle in 1998, he took issue with the idea that alcoholism is a disease.

Cancer is a disease. You can walk away from the bottle. A disease is something you can't walk away from.

He died today at 78 of metastatic melanoma.

Here's the interview:

Neither Frank McCourt nor Mary Gordon had childhoods anybody would envy, but as McCourt points out, "the happy childhood is hardly worth your while." The pair of New Yorkers shared the stage last night as part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

The reasoning behind their joint appearance is obvious: Both have written acclaimed memoirs published addressing the travails of Irish Catholic upbringings.

In Gordon's The Shadow Man, she writes of her Jewish father who converted to Catholicism and became rabidly anti-Semitic. He died when she was 7, leaving her in the care of largely Irish Catholic relatives who were suspicious of her dark good looks and ready to criticize any evidence of  "the Jew" in her.

"Mary's book is about mental and spiritual suffering," McCourt said. "My suffering was monetary. We were lacking for food, shelter and clothing. If I was particularly demanding as a child, my mother would say, `The next thing you'll be wanting is an egg,' as if it were a golden chalice."

For more than three decades, Merrill Wagner has tracked the transmutation of form and the shifting vagaries of tone. She has incised lines of color into fragments of marble and let them erode, and she has painted rectangular bands across steel panels already marked by the erosions of rust and industrial sanding.

She tends to participate in her own aesthetic process instead of commanding it, but not, apparently, when making flowers.

Below, Thistle, rust preventative paint on steel, 90 x 47 inches. Individual pieces held in place on the wall with magnets.


Wagner likes to improvise with nature and also with the work of other artists, which in her hands becomes a kind of nature.

Two brands of Naples Yellow on Marble (8 by 11.5 inches) is an answer to similar work by Brice Marden, located somewhere between Marden's magisterial marks and accident.


Her Northern (33 x 96 inches) could have been titled, Milton Avery in a steelyard.


Her Envelope  (66 x 96 inches) looks like Christopher Wilmarth, had he lived long enough to forsake glass and discover color.


Instead of being imitative, her aesthetic is communal in nature and yet steadfast to its purpose. I don't know if an exhibit devoted to Wagner and her family has occurred, but if it does, I'd like to see it. She's married to Robert Ryman, and the work of both their sons (Cordy and Will Ryman) is rounding the curve and coming on strong in the stretch. 


Wagner is at Traver though Aug. 2.

Siegel's Squeeze 2, from 1998-99. What does it look like now? Earth to earth, dust to dust, newspaper wall to soil.

Wrote John Perreault:

Steven Siegel elected to start with a grove of trees. A seemingly solid mound or wall of newspapers interacts with the trees and slumps to fit the slope; the newsprint stratum is topped by turf, further uniting the piece with the environment. This, the most unusual artwork in the exhibition, makes gravity, geology, and even time visible.

Time visible indeed, especially for those of us who thought we had forever.

Today from The Independent, via AJ:

In her coronation robes, Elizabeth I looks formidable and stately - the Virgin Queen in her pomp, an image to propel rivals into battle. Some 400 years after her portrait was painted, that is precisely what she has done.

Hers is one of more than 3,000 images from the National Portrait Gallery uploaded onto the free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia in April by Seattle-based Derrick Coetzee. The gallery, founded in 1856, responded last week by threatening legal proceedings against the PhD student.

That action unleashed outrage in cyberspace and quickly led to a stand-off between the proponents of free information and cultural institutions wanting to protect one of their few revenue streams - licence fees for reproducing images of their artworks. The row also goes to the heart of an internet revolution which does not recognise borders or national laws.

Image in question here.

Brian Sewell calls the National Gallery's legal team fools, which seems apt.

The National Portrait Gallery has always been managed by fools and this is another example of their folly. I'm on Wikipedia's side. The only thing the gallery has to preserve are the pictures themselves. The images must, in some sense, be public property already.

About the global pastime of suing people: Saul Bellow summed it up in Humboldt's Gift.

Humboldt: I'll be rich some day.
His friend: How?
Humboldt: Someone will wrong me.

More on the case here.

Tom Phillips began by finding his own lyrical poetry inside obscure Victorian text in 1970. (The Humument)

Tim Rollins & Kids of Survival, founded in 1982 (MoMA image), engaged text in a battle.

Christopher Wool (Apocalypse Now 1988) amplified the impact of a classic line.

Glenn Ligon  (Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored), 1990), amplified it by obscuring it.
Ann Hamilton turned the rudiments of text into a floor at the Seattle Central Library in 2004.

Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow from 2006 (Wave Books) circles back around to Phillips but with simplicity. Instead of elaborate painting on a Victorian story, she used white out.

Birk is in West Coast Drawing VIII at Davidson Galleries, through Aug. 1. Below, A View of the Ruins of the City of Chicago, 2001 Acrylic and ink on canvas. 44 x 66 inches.

Previous posts here and here.

Missed Rachel Maxi's one-day show July 11 at the Carport Gallery (her car port), featuring hand-sized oil paintings of Seattle's terrain. (Sorry, Rachel. If I didn't know where I was right now, I'd lose me.)

Still have a chance to see Rick Araluce is at Traver through Aug. 2. Below, The Very Last Breath, 3 x12 x 2.5 inches.

In the looks-intriguing-online category:

Kevin Yates, who was at Ditch Projects in Eugene till July 2. (Matt Browning and Anne Mathern are there now.) Below, Yates' Garbage Bags, image via. Bronze/cardboard, 12.5 x 34.5 x 35 cm.

Also, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Seated Man, Venice at LA Louver. Painted bronze, wood, concrete, asphalt 14 x 36 9/16 x 48 9/16 inches

Seattle painter Alden Mason, almost 90, leads an urban life without having acquired an urban viewpoint. His work is full of the things that moved him as a child, including the sparrows that flew around his head as he offered them carrots on his parents dairy farm in the Skagit Valley. While realizing that his art owes a lot to his early environment, he also credits a mail-order cartoon class. He earned the tuition by trapping muskrats.

I feel guilty about those muskrats, but I loved cartoons, with figures jumping, hopping and smooching. They were having more fun than I was. They lived in a brighter world.

Foster/White Gallery hosts a birthday party for him July 25, 2-4 p.m. RSVP

W. Scott Trimble

Brent Sommerhauser

Linda Beaumont

Leo Saul Berk:

Previous plinth post here.

Go here for live Web stream coverage.

On July 24, 1 a.m. Seattle time, Seattle's Ellen Ziegler takes her turn.

Says Ziegler:

I may regret this, but everyone might as well see me do it... And give the Web site a check from time to time. You absolutely never know what you're going to see. Some of it is unbelievably lame, some is brilliant, and most of it is a collage on a grand scale.

The project reminds her of what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about musical composition:

Hide what you compose in what you hear. Cover what you hear. Place something next to what you hear. Place something far away from what you hear. Support what you hear. Continue for a long time an event you hear. Transform an event until it becomes unrecognizable. Transform an event that you hear into the one you composed last. Compose what you expect to come next. Compose often, but also listen for long periods to what is already composed, without composing. Mix all these instructions. Increasingly accelerate the current of your intuition.

Anthony Gormley responds to the question, Is it art?, with, Who cares? Here.

Via

Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell is a murderous evangelical who stalks through Night of the Hunter muttering about love and hate, which are tattooed on his knuckles.

Powell:

Lord, I am tired. Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin's. Yore Book is full of killin's. But there are things you do hate Lord: perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

John Currin:
Currin is our Fragonard. For rougher trade, go to Grant Barnhart and scroll till you get to Midnight Special, 100 percent not safe for work.

Marcus Martenson contemplates the problem of good and evil by looking at his feet (Good and bad clog).

Before Yinka Shonibare appeared at the Brooklyn Museum as part of Sensation, he was at the Seattle Art Museum with a gallery devoted to him, a rare case of Seattle being in the lead on the work of a fast-rising, international force.

Trevor Fairbrother, at the time SAM's Deputy director of art and curator of modern art, had seen Shonibare's work in London and bought an installation titled Nuclear Family more or less on the spot.

Back in Brooklyn once again with his own exhibit I plan to see before it closes September 20, Shonibare has become ubiquitous. It's a dangerous position. Only an artist who is really hot can tumble in a season to tedious. So many write and talk about the star of the moment that the audience tires of itself and blames the artist for its boredom.

By taking longer to emerge and (in all senses) on a far smaller scale, Toronto's Shary Boyle might end up with something resembling an advantage. Before she reaches international acclaim, she'll have a back story to fuel her forward momentum and the ability to fail big without it costing her everything.

The gift in Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) remains one, despite legitimate criticism: Its message to Bible Belt literalists who thump others with their version of morality. Florida told them their principles are costing them money. Because nobody wants to live nearby, their towns deteriorate and die.

Florida has continued to expand his notion of whose presence is desirable, but it's still not broad enough.

It needs to includes janitors (via)

who dance in Antarctica, not just artists who focus on an appreciation of menial labor, most importantly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

Claude Zervas:

Sadamasa Motonaga

Cars are common in galleries and museums, beginning with Ed Kienholtz's Back Seat Dodge, 1964. (Post here.)

Rarely, however, is there an installation that puts viewers inside the experience of life in a broken-down, barely-running van.

The pure products of America go crazy:

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

Created by Eric Thompson and Aubrey Birdwell, the front room installation at OHGE Ltd has an air of inevitability. You're where you never wanted to be but knew you were going, slipping fast from middle class to teeter on the edge of dependent or maybe homeless. What you've got is the van.

Video screens serve as the outside world. They're blurry, as if you've been drinking. If you didn't know better, you'd think you were driving underwater. Sound seals the deal. It gurgles with a slap-happy lurch and dull roar.

OHGE Ltd is a tiny gallery, but this show gives it a sense of scale. In the backroom (really a closet) are Stephan Moore's power-of-postive thinking videos, playing simultaneously. As people beam and chuckle, a voice drones nonsense about unlocking the door to brain chemistry happiness.

Although separate shows, the ads and the van are collectively titled, ENLIGHTEN ENCOURAGE EMPOWER.

From van men Thompson and Birdwell:

In travel and as a form of rogue property we often carry with us a semblance of the familiar den.

The box with a locked door full of comforts for us alone. We carry this capsule to contain our individual and separate existences...We reject and embrace that we are free-floating and disconnected from everything around us. 

In space and temporal media, these pieces attempt to re-stage our memories of American life. Through cultural quotation we attempt to pry open the locked box and articulate the immense void of American culture. 

I asked Yahoo! Answers for the key to becoming successful. Here is my favorite reply by user "dagmar".

I think you need talent but you also need drive and determination. Set your mind to what you are trying to accomplish and keep at it. Of course a lot of it depends on what you are trying to be successful in. If it is an artistic pursuit that can be a lot more difficult to succeed in than say, being a Dr. or an accountant. No matter what your goal, do the best you can and do it with joy and love. Make the best of whatever success you find and don't be discouraged. If you try to enjoy life and not get too caught up in 'success' you can be very happy and satisfied.

Wouldn't it be lovely if this piece by Alison Brady from I Want You (Magazine) via Pilot Books (here)


were labeled a tribute to the late Hannah Wilke, whose S.O.S. Starification Object Series in the 1970s featured her body and chewing gum?

Rebecca Shapiro to the rescue, with embroideries on muslin, via.

If You Held My Breath, You'd Know What It Felt Like

After the war

Tyler Green on Bruce Nauman and the reality of torture, here. In the future, if we manage to climb back up the cliff we fell off during the Bush years, people will look to art for evidence that we grasped the horror of our situation. Green's writing serves as an affirmative:

Nauman's sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman couldn't have had any idea that America would become a kind of modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and Afghanistan. He couldn't know that 20 years on America would become a nation that engaged in extra-legal detention, a country that stuffed detainees into private jets so as to whisk them around the world to places where they could be brutally confined, tortured and, in several cases, killed. In 1981 Nauman's sculptures were about what happened to other people, people such as the Trinidadians, Argentinans, or Uruguayans in Naipaul and Timmerman. Today I look at Nauman's two 1981 artworks and I think about what the United States did in its fanatical, unprincipled pursuit of terrorism suspects and in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the things that makes art imperative is this: During its lifetime it can jump beyond its inspiration to become about us.

911 Media Arts Center moves in with Jack Straw Productions, story Jen Graves. Money quote:

It's becoming more cloud-like.

911 and Jack Straw have a lot in common. Both are multi-media populist with aesthetic ambition. What they won't have is any room (or good location or parking). 911's Steven Vroom, who with Jonh Schwartz constitutes the only 911 Media staff left, has a down-not-out message on his site, here.

Bravo casting call for artists: Here's the opening paragraph from application instructions:

How do you go from struggling, emerging or even semi-established artist to selling a complete show for $198 million? It's a big art world out there, but maybe this is one place to start!

Far be it from me to piss on anyone's parade, but people, read those sentences again. Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint has the best response:

I'm urging older artists, particularly mothers, to take a shot at it. Bring the kids to the audition, change a diaper or two while waiting in line, and show the dirty ones as work samples. Seriously. At the very least, document the whole experience, upload it to YouTube, and don't forget to send Two Coats a link.

Good Target Practice: Reviews from Emily Pothast, Jen Graves, Art Knowledge News, e-bourne and Publicola.

From Graves:

(Curator Michael) Darling is not restating a canon, he's refining it, bringing together artists from several continents and pairing lesser-knowns with household names. The arch sensibility of Pop, the communalism and performance of Brazilian art of the period, the sunny California renegades, the anarchic Viennese Actionists, Japanese postatomic hysteria and despair, the quotational impulse of the pre-Pictures generation, hippie-style madness, the chilly conceptualists, the early feminists, highly codified and organized German pain--all these come together in a grouping that's different from the classic (and overly cerebral) New York-centric story of minimalism-and-after. This version of the story is deliberately visceral.

Choice, but I don't agree with what followed in the same review:

The first two galleries feel crowded and awkward; the last few, plodding. By the end, at Warhol's sidelined Oxidation (piss) Painting and Lynda Benglis's poured-paint piece (did it have to be mounted on a pedestal rather than lying on the floor?), the exhibition has run out of energy.

That's what diversity of critical voices is all about. Not long ago, Seattle exhibits would be lucky to see one review. If there were two, they either failed to spark discussion or there was no place to air it. As an arts editor at the former Seattle PI once told me, responding is beneath your dignity. (That version of dignity remains in place for most critics who still have jobs at newspapers.)

The outer limits of what constitutes a photograph do not include spray paint on a spider's web, unless its shape minicks a Polaroid gone to seed. By asserting itself outside the definition, Josh Tonsfeldt's web expands the category to include it.

Curated by Bob Nickas for Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery, phot(o)objects made a seamless leap from nonprofit to commercial space, setting up shop at Lawrimore Project.

If the audience were frequently in motion from Portland to Seattle and Vancouver, a Seattle stop for a Vancouver exhibit wouldn't make sense. Everyone inclined to see it would have.

Alas. Not the case. Determined not to wait for a bullet train, Scott Lawrimore is doing what he can to strengthen the links between cities that have everything in common except the reality of free exchange. Exhibits important in one city rarely register in another, which makes phot(o)object a welcome exception.

Jennifer Bolande transformed the mass-produced visible with a curtain that bears a photographic image and impersonates carved wood.

Wolfgang Tillmans inserts a false memory of a classic photography moment.

Joseph Park, L'evier, 2008, oil/panel Via

Isaac Layman Sink with Lettuce, 2008, Archival ink jet print  Via

Veteran of Helter Skelter at MOCA in 1992 and the 1999 Venice Biennale, Los Angeles painter Richard Jackson participates in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum (review here) by pouring paint on canvases and smearing them in arcs on a museum wall. They comprise something like a painting tornado, with a passage of dead white calm at their center.

SAM documented the process on YouTube.

Jackson explains, via:

It is my idea to try to expand painting, not just in size but to see how far it could be extended or pushed. I don't feel my work as a criticism of painting but an optimistic view of what it could be. I felt then and I still feel that painting doesn't need to be an area of art described by the materials that are used ...My work doesn't edit anything, it's evidence of a work performed...

Jackson began by emulating the Action Painters of the New York School and kept on working in that vein, which took him other places. He works with the accidental but is absolutely in charge of the process. I'll think of his painting whenever I see a younger generation's paint leaking into space with vigor and intention.

Ed Templeton

Jim Lambie

Via

Via

Why is this image smoking, while countless others featuring falling down barns are born stone cold dead? Renaldi's absence of nostalgia. His image is a clean hit.

The title of this post comes from the 20th-century's most influential poem, Yeats' The Second Coming:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Sherman Alexie's Web site is titled, Falls Apart. Joan Didion's breakthrough essay collection? Slouching Toward Bethlehem. And  Chinua Achebe's best novel, the African version of King Lear? Things Fall Apart. The first 8 years of the 21st century suggested an answer to the poem's last line. What beast slouches toward Bethlehem? We do.

My ride is the kingdom of God. Via

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but if you bark, beg, drool and growl, people figure it out. Once acquired, can that identity be shed?

Troy Gua is interested in character that can assumed, rejected, fictionalized, asserted and deleted online on social networks, blogs, fan sites and chat rooms. What part can be claimed as easily as picking somebody else's coat from a cloakroom, and what is hardwired as a fingerprint?

He's at Vermillion through Aug. 7.

As a tribute to Garry Winogrand's 1981 series, Women Are Beautiful, Alice Wheeler created her own collection of beautiful women. Her exhibit at Greg Kucera is the first foray for the series, which is ongoing.

Unlike Winogrand, Wheeler is not looking at the other. Plus, her definition of the beautiful is far more generous than Winogrand's. He focused on the affluent, urban young. She includes the rural, the old, the flaky and defiant, as well as those Winogrand would agree are lovely by anyone's measure.

The Winogrand-Wheeler connection is the sweep of a moment in motion, a fragment from life's random stream that speaks volumes about the whole.

Women own their space in Wheeler's work. Even when they are clearly being steered by a man through a scene not their own, their contact with Wheeler is electric.

Nan Goldin comes to mind, for good reason. Almost everybody working on the fierce end of the sexual vibe owes her, but if Goldin's and Wheeler's prints were in the same show, the differences would be apparent.

Wheeler is heads-up play. There's an upbeat, irrepressible refusal to judge in her work, a determination not to call anybody a freak, unless as a compliment, and an inability to accept a depressing scene as a downer. She's the kind of person who'd read The Metamorphosis and think it's a comedy.

 In the photo above, PREGNANT WOMAN AT EVIL KNIEVEL DAYS, BUTTE, MT (2007), the man on the right looks as if he slipped out of a Matthias Grunewald to join the festivities. In Wheeler's hands, he's no longer an outsider. In her work, all the outs are in free.

Sims:

As a Post-Modern Surrealist my desire is not to be mainstream; Instead, I want to be upstream, and continue going up until I evaporate.

I've heard of  art being a kind of geological strata, with the famous anchoring the face of a wide seam until the earth rolls again, but not of artists as salmon, swimming up their own streams to leave what they have to give and then die.

In this context, the utter out-of-it of Sims' (aka BRIMS') choice (to be an echo), appears inevitable, a biological imperative to be true to his own extinct school.

This is a salute to the artists who are commonly thought to be going nowhere, who don't rise to the level of being thought about but persist all their lives, leaving canvases rolled behind couches and installations in the attic. If anything they make happens to survive, who's to say someone in the future won't be thrilled to see it?

What Nick Cave does with sound suits, Ariana Page Russell does with her skin. Both suits and skin are a means of a expressing a flamboyant relationship to the body. (Click to enlarge.) Says Russell:

The power of a blush, an ephemeral and uncontrollable response revealing internal sentiment, becomes the fashion of skin. I have sensitive skin that easily flushes. In Dressing, I use the imagery of this temporary change as my medium via collages made from photographs of my skin. These collages show shades of sensitivity in reds and pinks made into patterns, then scanned and printed as temporary tattoos.I place the skin tattoos back on skin, adorning myself with a longer lasting, intentional blush. Rather than being frustrated by my skin's transparency, I claim it by dressing up in the crimson hues that reveal my vulnerability.

Vulnerability is not the word I'd chose. She turns the meaning of a blush inside out, into a celebratory song of self. She's at Platform Gallery through July 3.

Rest your weary head on this:

What a dead fish or a bowl of flowers was in 17th-century Holland, text is to us. Art with writing in it is ages old: God's word written in the air or the king's codes on banners unfurled over a battle scene. Becoming a dominant thread in the late 1960s, however, is the idea that text stands alone.

Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, key figures in the text take-over, are in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum. (Review here.)

Lawrence Weiner, An Amount of Paint Poured Directly Upon the Floor and Allowed to Dry, 1968

Joseph Kosuth Title (Art As Idea As Idea) 1968

In Seattle, Alex Schweder's tribute to Lawrence Weiner is titled Painting Instructions from 2007.
Speaking of tributes, Stand Up Comedy from Portland has a wall of epigrams from Ed Ruscha,169 Bits (installation), all printed in a lovely wave of mechanical calligraphy, $20 a pop at Howard House, as befits the current economy.

The text piece I admire most in Seattle is Mark Mumford's Hold Still from 2003, ink on paper.

Believe me, I'm trying.

Carl Andre's floor pieces from the late 1960s are direct. Flat squares are in contact with flat ground. The way they appear to occupy the space above them is pure magic.

Lynda Benglis' are instead a kind of intrusion. They creep over, puddle and change the character of the floor, depriving it of its function as a common base for all.

Benglis: Baby Planet 1969 Poured pigmented latex 106 x 24 x 1 1/2in. (269.2 x 61 x 3.8cm) Cheim & Read. Baby Planet is in Michael Darling's Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78  at the Seattle Art Museum. (Review here.)

Between Andre and Benglis, her floor work is (at present) the most influential. That wheel will turn, but right now, take a bow, Ms. Benglis.

Jessie Henson:

Claudia Fitch:

Brent Sommerhauser, now on view at the Greg Kucera Gallery, finds fertile ground between Andre and Benglis. He choses neither, evokes both and cuts the curl of his own wave.

Some light bulbs flicker before they go out, and some just go out.

It's Jasper Johns time in Seattle, with a sweet little show focused on Johns' myriad-minded explorations of the (don't) let-there-be-light theme at the Henry, here, and Johns' essential contributions to Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78, at the Seattle Art Museum, here.(Review here.)

Watch it big on YouTube.

While contemporary art's most famous skull is encrusted in diamonds, skulls continue to be a potent symbol of the masses made by the masses for Day of the Dead, the ceremony that invites the demised back to earth to party in the graveyard.

Between the rarefied and the populous exist Marcus Martenson's. They tap into a deep thread of darkness, a dread that any moment, your time on earth could be up. (Via Garde Rail)


Marstenson's paintings evoke W. Somerset Maugham's version of a folk tale that serves as epigraph for John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, published in 1934:

 A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

From the White House in 1961, via, her own pen and ink. More on the link.

CORRECTION: Comment below was anonymous. I misunderstood it to be from the TM Sisters, as their name was right beside the signature, CriticofCritics, and I reversed them. While it may be them writing in, they are entitled to the anonymous signature they (or somebody else really peeved) provided.

It is sad that Regina is an amateur at her craft. I can understand trashing one artist but trashing all the artists? She's a bore and does not understand what's happening in the art world today. Contemporary art has been stuck for some time and the incoming paradigm change of cross-pollinating game technology, the Hi-Tech, Human Interactive Media with art is a breath of fresh air. Regina, you need to change your profession. You want to be vogue and cool but you only show your ignorance of what is happening in the big art centers of the world. Hang it up!

If you're drunk at a dinner party and desperately pretending to be only mildly inebriated, you might be talking about Dostoevsky but you're thinking about the door. What are the chances when you're ready to leave, you will be able to walk through it?

Brad Biancardi, Entry Way Exit Way, ink on gesso ,18 x 8 inches, at Grey Gallery.

I love the pink lips and the baby blue suit. Marcus Mårtenson's 48 Hours via Garde Rail.





















Murphy partied all the time (Via Tahirih Brown)


Make that some of the time. The person who partied all the time was John Cage (Via Jim VanKirk)


I'm keeping both. If Cage's version were the only music, the disco ball wouldn't have been invented. Even those who are blind to Murphy's brilliance will have to admit he makes a hell of a parade float. (Via)

When Dale Chihuly went to Venice in 1996, he called the project Chihuly Over Venice.

Nine years earlier, Jon Kessler took a subtler approach. Below, Kessler's Under Venice (Aluminum, Plexiglass, photomural, Murano vases, gears, chain, lights and motors).

In the 1980s, Kessler and Christopher Wilmarth staked out what became a road-not-taken in glass. Kessler's commitment to the medium proved fickle. Wilmarth died in 1987 in his mid-40s.

Kessler: (City, 1989)

Wilmarth, who more or less owns that smoked glass and dusty metal (images via artnet):

Via

On Leary near 11th from My Ballard, one of Seattle's proliferating neighborhood blogs, via Eyeteeth.
Alternative to billboards: Matthew Betcher's   via Eco Art Blog. With ads gone and the space awash in light, they're electronic stars that fell to earth and refuse to flame out.

Stephen Hilyard is a meticulous and inventive technician with a tendency to think his work into the ground. His eight large digitally manipulated landscape images titled Rapture of the Deep at Platform  Gallery are something else again.

Shot in Iceland and reconfigured till what's underwater becomes dry against the sky, the images feature the artist striking various poses associated with the grandiose sublime. He's as tricky as ever, but this time his results move beyond craft into the inevitable.

Calvin Tomkins' The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde recounts the story of a woman who asked Rauschenberg why he put, say, beds in his paintings or maybe goats. He asked her in return why she wore birds or maybe cherries on her hat.

Maybe she looked like this, in a painting by Noah Davis:

If Rauchenberg was a shock, the adornments of Reid Peppard would have been unimaginable. (Via Jena Scott)

Opening at the Lee Center in Seattle last night, the TM Sisters' interactive dance pads - (((sparks))) - can't compete with high style games available in the lobby of any upscale multiplex.

The distinction of their project is its frail claim to powder-puff eco-relevance. Participants can move a TM sister around the screen and try to protect her from getting struck by lighting or overwhelmed by trash.

Even so, the score is lopsided: multiplex 2, TM Sisters zero. Instead of critiques, TM offers awkward imitations of the corporate industrial game complex, with shadows that quiver on the screen.

But wait, I said to self. TM Sisters Monica and Tasha Lopez De Victoria are performing in person later in the evening. Maybe they'll redeem the false start of their doppelgangers.

Alas. They are dancers who can't dance and video artists who appear to be taking a break from decorating the gym for their high school prom. Next to them, assume vivid astrol focus is Bruce Nauman, and Tiny Tim is Baryshnikov.

To say they are trivial doesn't cover it. They're trivial with moxie. Their self-confidence inspires others desperately seeking a girlie-girl version of the new, such as the long-ago great ARTnews, which put them on the cover of its 2007 Trendsetters issue.

Had the evening's festivities been limited to the sisters, their brevity would have been a virtue, but no. They were preceded by Hooliganship and Extreme Animals.

Hooliganship's Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris are slight but adorable. As they exercised (not danced) to tame techo-pop in funny suits in front of their candy-colored Kool-Aid videos (mountains and seas of light-hearted dump sites), they were charming for a few minutes. The 10 or so that they played felt longer and wore out whatever good will I had managed to muster.

Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman) offer a different set of problems: substance sandwiched between long stretches of the physically painful. When Ciocci asked the audience to remember its favorite heavy metal moments, I stiffened. I have no favorite heavy metal moments.

Those whose idea of music is the equivalent of beating themselves over the head with a mallet in a volume that threatens immediate sensory neural hearing loss are fodder for the war. Building a bridge between them and and the visual art community is laudable, but a bridge is not a capitulation. (Anne Mathern did it with better art and better music in 2007.)

Wightman's guitar operates in the upper registers of cat torture. On the video, flickering images of people tossing their hair around went on and on. And yet, in there somewhere, greatness kept trying to rise to the surface. Ciocci shops for images on the Internet and rolls familiar fragments into a fascinating (if exhausting) collage. In another context, he might easily be brilliant.

TM's dance pads continue at through Oct. 3, curated by the ordinarily reliable Yoko Ott.  (TM Sisters on YouTube here.)

William Cumming, in a style he developed 40 years ago and stuck with:

In response to this post, David Ross wrote:

Kind of a mean-spirited post, Regina. Yoko is an extraordinary artist, and though you seem to object to sincerity, she is a sincere peace activist. Her sincerity seems impossible to you, and perhaps you are more comfortable with the attitude of cynics who inspire apathy and a world of Sara Palin supporters.

But here is a 76 year-old woman who has worked as an outsider all of her life, whose poetic response to life in the late 20th-century is profoundly moving, and who is interested in making art that reaches outside of the stuffy confines of the art world, and you dismiss it.

She was "lucky" to marry Lennon? Well, yes you can say anyone who find the love of their life is lucky, as that relationship transformed her (and him). He was lucky to marry her, as it opened him up in ways he would have never predicted (or imagined).

I object to sincerity? I love Billy Budd, Prince Myshkin, Jesus and John Lennon, sincerity's fictional and fictionalized emblems, but yes, in real life, sincerity frequently strikes me as the dead zone where the ball won't bounce.

Add to sincerity the intolerable aura of one who knows, the wise thing in the cave, the keeper of cryptic secrets, and yes again, my skin crawls, possibly in part because I grew up in California, awash at the time in self-actualizing delusions.

P.S. David: Sara Palin supporters are sincere. They believe in simplicities with all their hearts, and that's why there's no point in talking to them. If we're going to have delusions, let them be grand delusions with corkscrew twists and frightening depths. A yes at the top of a ladder doesn't qualify and neither does a billboard telling me that I can end a war by wishing it away.

Ono is in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978 at the Seattle Art Museum.

Merdardo Rosso, Ecce Peur (Behold the Boy), 1906


Oliver Michaels, undated and untitled as listed on phillips ART expert forum.

Born 18 years after Rodin, in 1858, Rosso never approached the significance of his French peer during his lifetime. After it is another story. While Rosso's impressionistic version of the abject is everywhere, Rodin gathers dust in museums, awaiting his comeback. 

Not long ago, the meaning of Melanie Bonajo's series of women encased in possessions was clear - here stand victims of white, middle-class, Western-world sex-role stereotypes. A few  observers might have seen the series as a consumerist-glut trope, but most saw diary-of-a-mad-housewife feminism.

That was then.

From Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch:

First mournful voice: We never had a house. We lived in a corridor.
Second voice: Oh, we used to dream of a corridor. We lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road.

Hard to pity the self-pitying, especially if they are financially safe. The travails of those comfortable enough to purchase extra stuff tend to leave today's audience dry-eyed.

On the other hand, Bonajo's Monday Morning means more now. Even if the princess of the pea-under-her-mattress fame has lost her stock portfolio, she's as thin-skinned as ever. Grudging respect goes to the resilient down-and-out who still have the confidence to be their fussy selves.

The princess needs multiple mattresses beneath her to soften the horror of contact with the world, with several more on top to muffle its sound. Criticize if you will. She gets the job done and is dead out.

Turquoise trees? Go left. Via

Via

If its title were Art Baloney/Art Brilliance Blog, I'd be such a fan. (Previous post here.)

Well, a fan, anyway. The site's obsession with critic Karen Archey seems wide of the mark.

Recently posted under the category, Critics Gone Wild is a sentence from Archey's review of Rebecca Morris:

Violette's drawings are always coming together and falling apart in the eye of the spectator. Soft edges, hardened into image through cognition, vanish into nothingness and slip from legibility. Violette's work, sometimes crushingly monumental and brutally hard-edged, always so present, is actually, delicately, about the 'after' of things."

The after of things? Were it not for his unfortunate encounter with a laundry truck that took him out of this world, Roland Barthes would surely take this press release writer out to lunch. I read these two sentences, and Banks Violette clicked in my head.

In response to my first post about the site, Art Baloney quoted Wittgenstein:

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. (our emphasis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, introduction to Tractatus logico-philosophicus)

I wrote back:

Ludwig is a tough act to follow. I can't imagine him being much of a fan of any art critic, unless maybe Meyer Schapiro, especially if Ludwig went to the lectures at Columbia or happened to catch Schapiro on Cezanne's apples.

Way downhill from that is where most of us work. Writing for us is practicing, over and over, trying to get something right. A rhythm, a coherent thought, an image. Only by doing it again and again and seeing it printed or published somewhere and having people react one way or another is there any chance of getting close to the clarity you seem to demand first time out.

In other words, I'm typing this in my sack of flesh with my fingers stiffening at the knuckles, past several deadlines that haunt me like bill collectors and with no confidence that any minute now I'll solve the writing problems that beset me. When I turn in my essays, will they be perfect? Hell no.

Target Practice review here. Previous post (Yoko Ono) here.

Below,  from Target Practice, Shigeko Kubota's Vagina Painting, 1965

Second-wave feminism had just begun when Kubota contributed her version of change the joke, slip the yoke. Using women as paint brushes in performance begun with Yves Klein (The Monotone Symphony, 1949, restaged March 9, 1960). Unlike the bar antics of certain talented strippers, Kubota did not paint with an intimate body part. The brush is attached to her underwear. Proving that her performance was an all-star event, George Maciunas took the photograph.

Review of Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (here).

Included in the exhibit is Yoko Ono's Painting to Hammer a Nail from 1961. What she knows about painting could fit in a can with room left over for the paint.

Target Practice makes a terrific case for the artists who cut, stomped, burned, melted and made fun of painting in the middle of the 20th century. Lest we get carried away by the thrill of it all, however, curator Michael Darling also included the self-righteously smug, always a big part of this movement.

And when it comes to smug passing itself off as deep, nobody tops Ono.  With her Fluxus credentials and her weird luck of marrying John Lennon, her knack for engaging banalities gave her a major career.

The list of critics who've fallen for it is long. Here's Kenneth Baker discussing a billboard that accompanied Yes Yoko Ono in 2002 and bore the legend, War Is Over! If You Want It -- Love and peace from John and Yoko.

Ono's conceptual works are thought experiments. Performing them -- or even thinking about performing, which often amounts to the same thing -- can alter one's sense of the power of inner reorientation. Do we want war to be over or merely think we do?

Be the ball, Kenneth. Visualize world peace. Up with people. We are the world.

The problem with the world is, it continues to be the world.

Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Back to Ono. Painting to Hammer a Nail invites the audience to pick up a nail and pound it into a wood panel painted white. Why this exercise qualifies as an attack on painting is beyond me. It has nothing to do with painting. It's all about Ono telling people what to do.

But over the weekend, this oft-seen piece took a weird turn. In Seattle, people didn't follow her instructions. They started to, but then they gave up.

Here's the piece on Friday:

Here it is Tuesday:

Instead of a place for pounding out the artist's message, it became a community bulletin board. (Anybody seen my puppy?) Credit for inspiring it goes to Ono, as all of it qualifies as a homage.

Since Western Bridge opened five years ago, singular visions of the soggy have served as exhibition mainstays. Its current exhibit, Underwater, is a salon-style greatest hits. The new shares space with work in play from earlier efforts, such as 19 Rainstorms and River Styx, both from 2005; Insubstantial Pageant Faded from 2007, and You Complete Me from 2008.

It rains in Seattle. Why has no other exhibition space made note of the city's interest in the subject?

As part of You Complete Me, Jeppe Hein's 20-inch square Ice Cube melted around the clock a few feet north of the front door, watering the plants and staying out of everybody's way. Taken inside, however, the cube takes advantage of being in the wrong. Ordinarily, art doesn't leak on a gallery floor.

Ice Cube is Minimalism in a confessional mode, spilling everything it knows. Every day it opts to change formal rigor into an inconsequential mess. Outdoors, Ice Cube was an ice cube. Indoors, it's a metaphor. As it disappears, even optimists find themselves thinking of what else is melting and what else is rising in its wake.

Underwater not only confronts the real world, it offers a chance for change in both senses of the word. Paul Ramirez Jonas' Well is open and ready for business. Drop coins into its cup, and the job of well-wishing is well done.





Mark Shetabi's oil/panel painting, November from 2005, is a historic narrative impersonating a random moment.  After the second Bush/Cheney victory, we were well and truly underwater.

Roberta Smith laments the slow death of the gallery card announcement here. Personally, I'm just as happy to get mine online.

Jeffry Mitchell:

Mitchell's studio, via Facebook:

From Vital 5, a continuation of its awards to anybody at all who can follow a few simple instructions and happens to get lucky. Each time out, one person (or group) walks away with $500. (More here.)

Till July 10, all who post on YouTube demonstrations of themselves (or others) dancing as if they'd been shot will go into a pool from which the winner will be selected at random. Inevitably (and unnecessarily), the great participate, such as (below) Jessica Jobaris in Germany. Film by Luke Allen; score, I'mma Shine by Youngbloodz.

 


Previous posts: Arbitrary awards in performance art and sculpture here and here. All entries in all fields will be exhibited in Seattle in the fall. The project is an attack on the idea that experts know what quality is and panels full of them are doing a heck of a job, Brownie, at finding and/or supporting it.

Denver's Dan Ericson (Dunn) is the Johnny Appleseed of heavy metal street instructions. What is barren he makes bloom. (Via)

May we suggest a Charles Ray with that? (Idea, Robert Mittenthal. Image via)

Law Abiding Shopping Cart, via Retail Hell Underground (Related: Not Always Right, via Slog)

Red (Ketchup)


White (Tara Donovan)

Blue (John Grade)


Those are good, but I also like:

Red (Jeff Weinstein, kosher edition)


White (Jack Daws, Serf's Up! - Chromogenic print of artist-made construction from sand from Florida, 2004)

Blue (Sherry Markovitz, Mortimer and Friends, detail)

Joseph Anthony Velazquez (Via Vermillion)

Dan Webb (Via Greg Kucera)


Elizabeth Sandvig

Jenny Zoe Casey (detail)

Andrew Keating

Tip Toland

Previous post here. Context? Paul Krugman will do.

Edith Isaac-Rose (Last Supper, detail)


Edith Isaac-Rose (The Cronies)


Teun Hocks

Nigel Cooke (To Work Is To Play)

Joe Biel
Karen Ganz (Float)

St Helens super-volcano news here and here. Mark Morford explains it all in Your imminent apocalyptic death. It's just around the corner. Any minute now. No really, including:

Did you hear? It's quite possible. Right there, under Mount St. Helens up in Washington state, scientists think they can see a true, epic monster of an eruption brewing, one far more intense than the classic 1980 model, a perfect storm of gasses and pressure and molten magma, all of it the size of, well, a mountain. Times ten.

And so you think, well gosh, thank goodness I don't live up in Washington state! I shall live far away and watch the pretty eruption, should it happen, on YouTube someday!

How cute you are. Did you miss the noun? It's not just a volcano. It's a supervolcano. The eruption zone potentially spans from St. Helens over to Mount Rainier and Mount Adams ... upwards of 75 miles, total. If this region blows, they say it would be the equivalent of the blast that formed Yellowstone National Park a half a million years ago. The spew would block out the sun, worldwide. It would drop the temperature of the planet. For days. Maybe longer. Does it matter? It's the sun. The sun is sort of important.

We can't say we weren't warned.

Bruce Conkle, Middle Kingdom Earth is Fucked  (Blubberlamp IV)

Shaun Kardinal at Vermillion to July 5. (Group photo exhibit with Katherine Dyke, Jesse Delira, Aaron Morris and Joey Velazquez.)

Anne Karsten, Sink

Bothering President Obama is not a good idea if you're a fly. (Much-watched video encounter here.) There's something about the president's calm focus followed by quick action that reminded me of this:

Catherine Chalmers


There are always more insects.

The history of the world, my sweet,
Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.

Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim

It had to happen. The (new)  Art Baloney Blog describes itself as a collection of the "most egregious and pretentious art speak or outright bullshit we manage to unearth." (Via C-Monster)

Writing deserving such notice certainly exists. Reading it is like shoveling smoke. But too often readers lose patience with a complicated text, assuming if they don't understand it right away, it's bullshit.

Art lives in its complexities. Critics digging into them can lose themselves in the effort, but isn't that effort admirable? It's easy to be jaunty. No, that's hard too. To be jaunty with brains takes real effort, with the final flourish of making it look effortless. But sometimes cruise-control clarity is wrong for the art under consideration, and the writer who lets the sweat show is being most faithful to the subject.

I'd defend at least a third of Art Baloney's examples of baloney as struggling but real.

Isn't Colby Chamberlain's sentence, held up to ridicule on the site, really a fine sentence marred by a typo? (From his review of Frank Magnotta at Derek Eller Gallery, artforum.com)

A display of virtuoso draftsmanship and procedural rigor, the resulting drawings offer a fluid interchange between the recognizable and the repulsive.

I think Chamberlain was going for "unrecognizable." There are no copy editors left on earth, but that's another problem. (File it under "no net.") If Chamberlain meant what he wrote, recognizable, he's got a problem with parallelism, because the repulsive is contained within the recognizable. He could have written, between the reassuring and the repulsive, I suppose, or the recognizable and the unknowable.

Onward. As a decaying bohemian who is pleased by the shout out, I'm firmly behind the following sentence by Ram Moshayedi, part of his review of Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon at the Armory Center for the Arts, also from artforum.com.

Persisting as a remnant of the city's unofficial history, the decaying bohemian icon enters into Pettibon and Okon's project as the subcultural ideal, as the anachronistic embodiment of political nonconformity to the point of primitivism.

What's wrong with that?

Wishing makes it so in the Museum in a Shoebox, the online-only institution that pretends to take up space in the world. (Via Bad at Sports.)

Its summer project hits me where I live. If I had ruby red slippers, I'd click them.

This July, every single billboard in the city has been taken over by the Museum. It is part of the summer advertising campaign. Usual billboard motifs have been replaced by images of clouds, the theme of the Museum's major exhibition. Look up at the sky and see if you can find a billboard that matches the sky at this very moment!

Writing for Art Fag City, Karen Archey is persuasive on the subject of  Carsten Holler's Vogel Pilz Mathematik at Esther Schipper in Berlin, a "high-budget, in-vogue exercise in industrial design" saved, partially, from the fatally sleek by its "off-putting, saccharinely magenta walls."

Each of his cages had a canary in it.

Persuasive, yet I was not persuaded. Ordinarily, I am not drawn to Holler. Maybe this piece impresses me because I haven't stood inside the gallery and instead seen only reproduced images, but a nervous blur of yellow isolated in a cluster of cages appears to animate his chilly geometries without raising their temperatures.

It's fine to be an iceman, but an iceman voguing on art's runway is a tough sell for those whose experience with runways is deliberately limited.

Canaries no longer exist in the wild, which isn't enough of a reason to keep them in cages. (The same could be said of us.) In 1992 at the Henry Art Gallery, Ann Hamilton gave 200 of them the free run of the place. In the show's early days, they kept having heart attacks. Volunteers hired to tend and feed found a couple dead on the floor each morning. After the shock of the new wore off, the death rate diminished quickly, not quickly enough to prevent animal rights activists from picketing.

I can't remember what their signs said (Get those birds back in cages?), but the protesters at one point blocked entry to the museum with their bodies. One woman who brought her young daughter and had to step over the prone to get in reported that she was chided by them for being a bad mother.

To this day, whenever I think of canaries or see one, I think of that show, titled Accountings and curated by Chris Bruce.

Its power came from a metaphorical assumption of geological time, with the Henry transformed into a blighted hulk. Entering through smoked glass doors, viewers saw the elegant main gallery thoroughly undone. Nearly 300,000 metal tags covered the floor in woozy patterns. Blackened soot covered the walls, smoked by candles.

Canaries flew free. They perched on moldings, hopped around the floor, sailed through the air and sang. With a long case in the back gallery filled with a jumble of wax heads made from plaster molds sold in Brazilian churches as amulets against sin and evil, Accountings functioned as a giant, moldy coat wrapping the audience in its living signs and wax symbols.

Hamilton risked sentimentality. Holler, superficiality. She overcame her limitations, and I have a feeling that Holler did too. 

Bateke Proverb:

One crosses to the other side of the river only for an important reason.

In Seattle, the same applies to a lake. There are three important reasons to cross Lake Washington to get to the Eastside: the Bellevue Arts Museum, Open Satellite and the Kirkland Arts Center. The habits of a lifetime have worn a rut into the neural pathway saying, don't go, but missing real exhibits so nearby demonstrates real inertia.

While nothing's in the over-soon category at BAM, Seth Kinmont, Vehicle, closes tomorrow at Open Satellite and Cutism closes today at the Kirkland Arts Center.

About that title, Cutism. Being a bad speller myself, I hesitate to make a suggestion, but why not add the e? Cutism could be collage with a sharp instrument, instead of cute as an ism, Cuteism.

From Cutism:

Jason Huff

Ahren Hertel

Melissa Jones

Rebekah Bogard

Giorgio Mordandi was not easily distracted. When fascism wreaked havoc in his country and for decades after, he painted the same cluster of bottles, plates and tins in his studio. For each small painting he found a rhythm, as if each were a universe that could hum.

The artists in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 tend to be tone-deaf to that hum. They see what it leaves out, the world brutally making and unmaking itself in a chaos of repression, beauty, murder and freedom. Nor were they persuaded by the paint-driven ambitions of the New York School, those who rode into history after World War II as abstract expressionists. The giants of ApEx looked inward and advanced the idea of timeless aesthetic values.

By 1949, time was up on timeless values. Curated by Michael Darling, Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum is a survey of the means, motives and results of a global generation questioning the lofty aspirations of painting as well as painting itself.

Scorched-earth gardeners, they hoped to make way for a bloom. Darling picked not only key work from key figures, he included a host of artists who are less familiar but hold up well in the context of the famous, such as Gunter Brus, using his body as canvas on the left, below.

Sharing space in the galleries, art from disparate sources clicks in place to generate the passion of a critical moment, dispensing with the usual thing - scholarly dissection and imposition of hierarchy.

As a survey, it's  wide but deep, and nobody in it comes up empty. The artists are as they saw themselves, or, as Alan Ginsberg wrote about William Carlos Williams, what "he tried to be among the bastards out there."

Darling opens with Lucio Fontana's Concetto spaziale from 1949.  Fontana punched holes in the canvas as a means of marking it. Aside from the novelty of his approach, his effect fits comfortably inside the all-over realm familiar from ApEx. He tore into the canvas, but nicely chewed what had already been chewed by others.

In the work of Shuzo Shimamoto, however, the innovative makes an appearance. In his Work (Holes) from 1950, tears in whitewashed layers of newsprint approach their own kind of tragic, and his scribbles in pencil on what is left of the ground anticipate Cy Twombly.

Still, Shimamoto is firmly within ApEX, with new means to old results.

Back to Fontana, whose Concetto Spaziale from 1952 evokes Arthur Dove's Fog Horns from 1929. Fontana's single echoing circle stands in place of Dove's three, but with the same reverberating lightness.

Who will look at Niki de Saint Phalle's ripe and juicy Tir neuf trous from 1964 (left) and not think of Joan Synder, who came later?

Unlike de Saint Phalle, Synder needs no guns in her studio. Her holes dripping paint are made of paint, but both de Saint Phalle's small canvas and Synder's many larger ones are not about their means of production. They are about female sexuality, and a ripeness that is past its peak.

Art comes from art, even when it doesn't come from painting. Jasper Johns' iconic Targets from 1958 is rooted in early 20th-century ideas, especially Duchamp's. I'm rarely moved by Johns, the ice man of contemporary art, but in this exhibit, the brilliant humor intrinsic to his endeavor is in high relief.

Fontano and to a lesser extent Alberto Burri made careers out of tearing up canvas, and Johns put the capstone on it and similar efforts in 1964, with a small pencil on paper demonstration, Untitled (Cut, Tear, Scrap, Erase.) In vertical columns, it does all those things, foreclosing on the option of doing them again outside the repeat mode. How concise Johns is, and how powerfully his work unfolds in the company of those who also tried to make it new in the mid-20th century.

Sam Gilliam's Bow Form Construction, from his best period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, hangs near Lynda Benglis's Chi from 1973. His painting-on-canvas sagging against the wall functions as a giant shawl, and hers as a tumorous type of jewelry.

With his modesty, Richard Tuttle engaged the abject with an elegance few equal, but who isn't sick of Arman? Unlike Mordandi, who traversed a tiny amount of ground without repeating himself, Arman's mounds of similar objects wear out their welcome quickly. Not the one in this show, which is a one-piece Arman rehabilitation project: Ochre from 1967.

More than 200 tubes of paint vomit their color, both tubes and paint squiggles trapped in clear resin. Each squiggle is a gesture, and a gesture is, in Roland Barthes' phrase (quoted in the catalog), "something like the surplus of an action."

The Japanese are a strong presence in this show, especially Ushio Shinohara, whose performances (seen in large photos) with paint are the equal of anything happening in Europe and America at the time.

Shinohara:

Not content just to use brushes, we came up with ways that would shock, aiming to evoke an effect on those who would appreciate it.

Those who would appreciate it. He wasn't trying to unnerve outsiders but to delight those who are capable of being delighted by him.

Johns' Cut, Tear, Scape Erase is the cool end of Target Practice. Otto Muehl's Untitled from 1963 (below, left) is one of the sensations on its hot end. Made of sand, plaster, stockings and emulsion on sackcloth, with gaping holes bound by dark, ropey knots, its golds and blacks gleam like old jewels.

A word (or two) about the aesthetics of violence, celebrated in Target Practice. Walter Benjamin dealt with the subject in his much-celebrated 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, here. Benjamin wasn't impressed by the manifestos of the Italian Futurists, fascist to their cores. He must have thought that quoting from Futurist fascist poet Marinetti was sufficient to discredit him.

Apparently not, but in light of this exhibit, Marinetti's point of view is the elephant in the gallery. Isn't it more interesting to acknowledge it as a kind of disgraced roots music? I like a machine-gunned canvas as much as the next person, but what was the back story from the artists' point of view?

Marinetti:

War is beautiful because it enriches a flowery meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns...War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease fire, the scents and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.

More on this exhibit to follow. It's the single best survey of contemporary art ever mounted by the Seattle Art Museum.

No where is it better demonstrated than in the blog of James Maybe. He loves the former and dismisses the latter.

James Maybe on the mural below by Can Two:

I hesitate to even upload this crap to my site, but eventually the buzz about some artist rings so loud in my ears I have to do something. The above mural is typical of Can Two, who is doubly dammed for working in a medium that, to date, has produced exactly one artist worth more than ten seconds of your time, and for making his work "kid friendly". Stylized, airbrushed, illegible text, uninspired color choices, urban hip-hop caricatures, sloppy composition. Instead of Bombing the Suburbs, how about we tar and feather the graffiti artists?

The idea that there are different kinds of intelligence makes the reactionary sector of the old school queasy. Its members insist on a vertical hierarchy, in which IQ aristocrats deserve to rule the IQ-merchant class and the IQ-deficit proletariat.

Among their targets is Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983). Gardner argued for more fluid version of smarts, including verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical and interpersonal.

Nonsense, wrote Christopher J. Ferguson in the Chronicle of Higher Education, via AJ. Especially grating to him is Gardner's contention that each child has mental strengths as well as weaknesses. Smart is smart, and dumb is its opposite. What about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence?

The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

Ferguson's argument derives from Sparta, not Athens. It assumes a world in which survival is always at risk - bullets over ballet. Battleground tacticians are essential; painters are wasting our time.

No wonder they don't want to fund the NEA.

In Potemkin's most famous scene, police stampede a panicked crowd down public steps, creating a diagonal killing ground. It lasts less than two minutes but extends its imaginative reach over time and circumstance. Whenever the forces of authority unleash themselves on a crowd, Sergi Einstein's Sergei Eisenstein's movie comes to mind.

 

The recent death of Neda Agha-Soltani in Iran (caught on video) echoes an earlier one in the film - a fatally wounded young women who falls against her baby's carriage and sends it rolling out of control through the carnage. Under the stage makeup, the actress could be Agha-Soltani's sister.

But if there is one figure who represents Eisenstein's moment, it's a middle-aged intellectual, his glasses shattered. In reacting to his sudden trip to hell, he serves as the audience's stand-in.

Jeremy Geddes took out the blood but left the scream, instantly recognizable. (Nothing, detail, oil on board, 2005)

Celebrities occupy a similar niche. Richard Nixon owns the victory sign, which, since his use of it, has become ironical. He owns the word crook. It was passing from use but rebounded as part of his dubious negative.

There is only one Michael Jackson, and yet the shadow of his parade-float smile, the haunted look in his prematurely elderly eyes and his definitive use of white-face will will continue to slide through unrelated representations.

Geddes reminds us that Jackson would have made a hell of a joker. (Doomed, oil on board, 2005) Take that, Batman.