Another Bouncing Ball: January 2010 Archives

Karla Lieberman liked to build tottering things, held together by the force of their personality. In ceramic and later in glass and ceramic, she made elephants as spirit catchers, boats to cross troubled waters and towers to take you higher.

She died at home on Tuesday a year and a half after being diagnosed with ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. She was 57.

"She was gracious about her illness," said her sister, Joan Lieberman-Brill. "It was devastating to get the diagnosis because there is no cure and its progression is terrible, but she stayed true to who she was."

Lieberman-Brill remembers visiting her sister in her dorm room at Evergreen State College to find her reading Ram Dass. Like him, Lieberman became a spiritual person in the widest sense and completely free of dogma. "She wasn't judgmental, didn't care about acquiring  material things and gave everybody the benefit of the doubt," said her sister.

Lieberman was a founding faculty member of The Northwest School, where she taught ceramics for 28 years, retiring because of her illness.

Michael Bell, who gradated in 2009, wrote of her in the Northwest School Magazine that she taught with "mystical Peruvian music" in the background.
 

Help was easy to receive whenever you needed it, because Karla was always available to teach you how to construct anything you wanted. She knew that a few students may be too timid to ask for help, so she would patrol the studio and take it upon herself to help those who looked stuck. She always provided constructive criticism on any piece, and was more than willing to take whatever steps necessary to help you improve. Sometimes Karla would just walk up and share a book on ceramics that she thought would spark up some new ideas. Every day, five minutes before the end of class, you would hear her tell the class, "It's cleanup time in the valley, and this is the valley."

Blue Pagoda Boat Float #2 2002 ceramic, glass 14.5" H x 18" W x 10" D 2002

With fellow artist Kirk Bell, Lieberman created the Garden of Everyday Miracles in a vacant, overgrown lot in Fremont. When it was razed in favor of condos, Robert Zverina expressed his indignation, here. Liberman did not express hers. It existed, acquiring temples made of old TV sets, ceramic balls and pink flamingos. "Everything's temporary," she said at the time.

She traveled widely, most frequently to India, Costa Rica and Nepal. One a week she met with friends who chanted through a prayed service. Her work is in the collections of the Fred Jones Junior Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, OK, the Johnson County College/Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS, and the Museum of Northwest Art. In Seattle she is represented by the Patricia Cameron Gallery.

She is survived by her parents William. S. Lieberman and Mae Samuelson Lieberman, both of Mercer Island; her sister Joan, brother-in-law John, nephew Alex and niece Danielle of Bellevue. A memorial service will be held on March 23 at 2 p.m. at Seattle Unity Church, 200 8th Ave. N., with a reception to follow.

Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers, oil/canvas 1946 (image via)

Robert Colescott, Love Makes the World Go Round, oil/canvas 1985

Oliver Jackson, Untitled, 1988 Intaglio drypoint: ink on Arches cover white paper

Chris Ofili, Douen's Dance, 2007, oil on linen (image via)

The man made of wine bottles sports a surveillance mirror. Like his maker, he's monumentally interested in keeping an eye on everything.

Jerry Pethick's Le Semeur/Sunlight and Flies, 1984/2002, is at the Seattle Art Museum as a solitary representative of the artist's career.

Born in 1935, Pethick died in his home of brain cancer on Hornby Island in 2003. He's affiliated in Vancouver with the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, which means he is far from overlooked. Why is it, then, that so few Seattle artists under 40 know who he is? (And I'm thinking of the ones who are using his ideas.)

 That's what retrospectives are for. Even if it only traveled in the Northwest, rattling through museums and art centers from Vancouver B.C. to Eugene, it would serve to introduce a new generation to a man who gave structure to their region's aesthetic thinking.

I've heard him called a glass artist, and that's true if glass art extends to cover optical lenses, Styrofoam, solar panels, found objects, photos on transparent plastic, diffraction foils, holographs, silicone and straw. He had a head full of celestial things but never failed to find beauty in a rusty bucket lying in a ditch.

More Pethick, from Catriona Jeffries.

Wheelbarrow & Cabin, 1987-1988 Glass, plastic fresnel lens, instamatic photos, florescent light fixtures, silicone, aluminum

A History for Greg (Mountie Red), 1993-1995 Canvas, felt, paper, spectrafoil, photographs, silicon, graphite and postcards

Black Retort Travelogue, 1991/1992 Crayon, spectrafoil, wood, plastic (fishing lure), pen, plastic, metal

From Olympia Dumpster Divers:

Some people do not believe that Seattle reads. Portland's bookcase is also bare. If we're going down, it's good to take Portland with us. (Ron Arad, image via Look Into My Owl)

Into every life advice falls. Few things are as unwelcome, except if it comes from an artist who wraps it in spin. Such messages can be comically explicit, fearsomely obscure or rooted so deeply in banality as to turn on the light inside a cliche. (Previous post expanding on the theme here.)

What follows is a small survey of artists whose visual exhortations and aphorisms deserve to be cited.

Dave McKenzie, Self-Help Hyperventilation Bag, 2002 (Image via)

Shawn Wolfe, Panic Now

Zack Bent, 2007

Charles LaBelle Exterior Song, (detail) Hollywood, (Cracked Actor), Alley W Fairfaix N Beverly 2003

Scott Wayne Indiana

Jason Hirata, Untitled, from video, 2008

Marc Dombrosky Get Signatures/Drop Tub 2009, Embroidery on found paper, 5 x 3 inches

Squeak Carnwath, Good Ideas, 2006, Intaglio print, ed. 24, 12 x 12 inches

Mark Mumford, Break it Down, 2004 Color Lamda print, 40 x 29 inches

Allison Manch, Wink

The Art Guys

Grant Barnhart, Beg For It, exhibit announcement card, Ambach & Rice

Hoping to best whatever the present day offers by way of minotaurs, Man Bartlett, son of Seattle painter Bo Bartlett, approached midtown Manhattan this morning as if it were a maze and set out to walk it in less than 24 hours, from 59th and Lexington to Times Square and back. Follow him on Twitter, here. He expects his own personal minotaur to be waiting for him on the red stairs.

His map:

Another view of the confrontation, Michael Spafford's Minotaur & Maiden I, 1987, oil/paper, 28 x 18 inches. (Note the red stairs.)

Assume since 1915, the bride has grown weary of being stripped bare by her bachelors. There are the conventional methods of fighting back, including broken promises, failure to deliver, failure to appear and failure to care.

The more daring brides turn their bachelors into spectacle.

In 1999, Maurizio Cattelan taped Massimo De Carlo to a wall. The following year, Cattelan talked Emmanuel Perrotin into spending a month dressed as a pink phallus.

Making a spectacle of one's dealer has taken a more intimate turn in Seattle.

Susan Robb's DIGESTER (2008) is six 55-gallon drums designed to extract methane from human waste to make energy. The waste in question came from her dealer, Scott Lawrimore of Lawrimore Project. (Waste not, want not.)

Opening February 20 at the James Harris Gallery are the line drawings of Jason Hirata, made by mixing sweat with raw Prussian blue pigment.

James Harris:

To create the works on view in this exhibition, the artist and gallerist worked up a sweat doing jumping jacks, sit-ups and push-ups, jumping rope, and running down the hallways of a storage facility that Hirata rented for just such purpose. As he has done in the past, Hirata collected perspiration in two containers to use as a painting medium. The artist and gallerist collected their own sweat by scraping it from their foreheads, necks, and backs.

(Hirata left, dealer right)

Bob Dylan's text prompts in Don't Look Back (1967) are the most famous part of the documentary. (That's Allen Ginsberg on the left, a celebrity non sequitur.)

Euan MacDonald's headless tribute (the video, Where Flamingos Fly, 2005) has no similar loose ends. MacDonald eliminates what he can, including, on occasion, the point.

At the opening of MacDonald's exhibit at Western Bridge, A Little Ramble, bewilderment prevailed. The question in the air could be succinctly summarized as, What? MacDonald's work is full of narrative, but its connections with hundreds at a party are hard to discern. He makes sense one on one. In a crowd, his work is mute, even when it's taking up almost all the room.

One on one, however, a mood emerges. The birds have eaten the bread crumbs leading out of the forest. No, they've eaten the forest. It's there and not there. What swells around the consciousness of the solitary viewer is anti-climatic. The artist who isn't there is a tour guide to a mystery. In his absence, he left notes for a reassuring brochure. These notes might be helpful. They look as if they are intended to be helpful, but they're in code.

Few objects signify as quick a trip to the bottom. Besides the slippery peel, there's the flesh, which is on its own personal bullet train from ripe to rotten.  

SuttonBeresCuller

Whenever you are, you've gone the wrong way. (Via)

Caleb Larsen's Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is on view at Lawrimore Project, but it sold on e-Bay earlier today for $6,350. Auction over? No. This auction will never be over.

Review here. Frquently asked questions below.

• Q: Doesn't the first sale doctrine prevent you from collecting further payment past the initial sale of the item?
  A: In order to be recognized as a work of art the contract must be adhered to, and regards of who owns it and who buys it the contract remains between the artist and the purchaser, not between buyer and seller.

The art world is always saying next, please. I'm bored with your dead tiger shark and live nudes, your singing museum guard and your fallen Pope. The shark that is never dead is the art world itself, which, as Woody Allen explained in Annie Hall, has to keep moving to stay alive.

Those who work in that world shovel the present into the past as a kind of necessary clean-up. For market reasons disguised as aesthetics, key power players determine who among the previously celebrated remains a live wire. The rest will be regulated to the heap of has-beens, to be humiliated and disappeared. Only live wires make the market hum.

Even as they rose like surface to air missiles to art world's stratospheres, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. lived with an undertow of detractors, those who thought somebody was being exploited here and it could well be them for taking this project seriously.

How could it be taken seriously? The odds against it are impossible.

In 1981, when collectors were drinking pink champagne out of glass slippers at the Mary Boone Gallery, a serious student of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey and Joseph Kosuth stepped off the subway in the South Bronx to the smell of the burning garbage.

Zinn died Wednesday of a heart attack. He was 87. Boston Globe obit here.

If American history is hard to read, it's because the country's aspirations fall so far short of its practices. Textbooks tend to respond with cover-ups, but not ones written by Zinn. A People's History of the United States is a courage teacher. Not only is it scholarly, clear and elegantly written from original source materials, its focus is justice: how and when it was denied and how and when it was achieved. His outrage is accompanied by his hope, wit and patriotism.

Below, a scene from Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fine documentary titled, Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. (To purchase, go here.)


.

Unlike the other major members of the Northwest School, Kenneth Callahan did not seek transcendence. What was on earth was good enough for him.

He started out strong as a figurative painter in the 1930s. Forging a silky yet monumental style, he created men to match Northwest mountains. He liked muscle-bound grandeur but released the figures who displayed it from the confines of gravity. Full of light, many hover on the edge of floating away.

By the 1940s, he had pinned his figures to the ground with webbing. There are excellent paintings from this period, but by the late 1960s, he was more interested in abstractions. By the 1970s, his work had taken a brazenly ugly turn, with hot strokes of orange against blood brown and crinkled masses of shadows.

Bad taste is a fatal flaw in a decorator, but in an artist it's neutral. Artists who fully inhabit their bad taste take it to another realm, where taste is irrelevant. Callahan inhabited his whenever he chose. There were moments in his career when his work was highly prized and edging its way into national prominence, and moments when even in the Northwest he was overlooked. The Northwest School's Big Four (Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey and Callahan), evolved into the Big Three, with Callahan missing. If he cared, he did not let on.

A small survey of his career is currently at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, from the 1940s through the 1980s. (He died in 1986 in his early 80s.) All the best work is missing, but what's here is swell. The exhibit is light on the abstractions that lost him so many fair-weather friends and concentrates on what everyone admires: his sumi inks, oil portraits of animals and small, florid landscapes.

North Lake Camp, early 1950s, sumi ink. 35 x 46 inches. Imagine that the image the gallery supplied is on white paper in black ink. The sepia tone appears to have arisen from the process of transmittal. At any rate, the fallen cabin on the left belonged to Guy Anderson. Callahan sketched it soon after its demise, when the snow that brought it down had started to clear. The trees moving in and out of focus have a skittery grace. They lean into the light as if they're starved for it.

Somewhere between Paint By Numbers and overexposed film negatives are the blue paintings of Joey Veltkamp. Boldly present and barely there, they are illusions floating on soap bubbles and gone.

The series started last year with 1977, below. (The last good kiss you had was years ago.)

Bear is more recent. It appears to be a self-portrait. (I am the name of my desire.)

Hunter toys with the stereotype, with what it means to be male.

Cowboy celebrates the fun. Note the underwear. This isn't your grandmother's cowboy.

These images and others are on Veltkamp's flicker stream, here. He also fronts an excellent blog known as Best Of. Before Best Of, Veltkamp was known primarily as an illustrator. In Seattle, he was around but not central.

The blog allowed him to introduce himself to those who thought they already knew him. With his generosity, wit and ability to engage with the work of other artists, he raised curiosity about what he seldom alludes to - his own work. Partly due to all that engagement, his own work has improved. 

Those who bemoan the death of print and the rise of online journalism fail to realize how static print is. Before blogs, somebody like Veltkamp would have had few options to express himself. Newspapers had no room for him. He doesn't fit their formula. I loved working for a newspaper, but I don't miss the paper part. Let the trees live.

Nicholas Nyland paints on paper, which he crumbles up or tears into shreds and hangs in garlands. His painted clay looks crumbled too.

His work can look like nothing at all, tidbits left over from an elementary school art class.  What makes it distinctive is time spent. Stand in front of them long enough, and these fragments become wholes. They evoke not rocks on a beach but scholar's rocks in a studio, each plane and  color pattern worthy of attention.

Nyland is in Soil's back room through Saturday. In the front gallery is a terrific new members show featuring Iole Alessandrini, Julie Alpert and Ellen Ziegler, also through Saturday.

From the file of up-and-out: Seeking to expand their reach beyond Manhattan, artists send their work to... Seattle.

Outside The Time Zone, the curatorial partnership between Chris Rawson and Julian Calero, is pleased to announce its first collaborative project outside of New York City. The exhibition is also the inaugural exhibition for Kymata Project Space. Seattle was chosen as the first host city because the exhibited artists and the curators have intimate connections with the Emerald City and the Northwest. The four-person exhibition of new work by Chris Burnside, Garek Druss, Ben Needham and Adam Taye is conceived as a meditation on landscape and is inspired by the act of homecoming, travel and displacement, which are themes prevalent in OTZ's ongoing nomadic curatorial project.

They couldn't have too many ties in Seattle or they wouldn't call it the Emerald City. That's a marketing term, the equivalent of The Big Apple. Those who use it are on the take, out of it or kidding. At any rate, welcome. They open Feb. 11, 6-8 p.m. at 340 15th Ave. E Suite 305.

Chris Burnside, acrylic painted directly on the wall, 2003

Nancy Grossman, Head, 1968

Sarah McDougald Kohn - Wrapture,  2008

First tragedy, then Elmer Fudd.

On a personal note: Seattle's Doug McLennan, founder and publisher of ArtsJournal, interviews an ArtsJournal blogger at Town Hall Tuesday night, 9:15- 10 p.m., free admission. Because I am the only ArtsJournal blogger located in Seattle, that means he's interviewing me.

To date (and time is running out), the event promises to be free form. We have yet to discuss content, but I'm assuming it relates in some form to arts journalism. Maybe he'll surprise me and ask about baseball. I could change the topic to fine wine and dining or string theory and still be at sea. Arts journalism it is. 

From Randy Kennedy:

In 1969 (Ida) Applebroog, then known by her married name, Ida Horowitz, was a mother of four, a native New Yorker living unhappily in San Diego, where her husband had moved the family to accept an academic position. Ms. Applebroog had been struggling to make a name for herself as an artist and struggling with depression. Her only sanctuary in her chaotic household came at night, when she shut herself in the bathroom and climbed into the tub.

Over a period of several weeks just before her 40th birthday, she took a sketch pad into the bathroom with her too and perched in front of a full-length mirror, making obsessive self-portraits, more than 150 in all, but portraits focused exclusively on her naked crotch. (more)

Now in her 80s, she found the drawings again, which she scanned into a computer and manipulated, printing them on Japanese paper recast with watercolor. (At Hauser & Wirth till March 6.)

This week, Pinchuk announced the prize's jury. Among the seven members, again, just one woman -- (Yuko) Hasegawa), Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); former Chief Curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. That mix is hardly representative of the art world, and it's a snub to the talented female curators, museum directors, critics, academics, dealers and collectors that populate the art world. Not to mention female artists.

Let's hope Hasegawa has a strong voice. She'll need it among these other jurors: Daniel Birnbaum (Sweden) - Director of the Städelschule Art Academy, Frankfurt am Main; Director of the Venice Biennale 2009 * Okwui Enwezor (Nigeria) - Director of Documenta XI; former Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute * Ivo Mesquita (Brazil) - Chief Curator at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Curator of the 2008 São Paolo Biennial * Eckhard Schneider (Germany) - General Director of the PinchukArtCentre * Robert Storr (USA) - Dean of the Yale University School of Art; Director of the Venice Biennale 2007 * Ai Weiwei (China) - artist. (more)

Judith: Daniel Birnbaum is pretty good on this issue and Robert Storr is excellent. Possession of a vagina guarantees nothing. The interesting thing about this panel is that both Storr and Okwui Enwezor are on it. Unfortunately not online is their highly entertaining exchange of insults and insights  in the letters-to-the-editor space in Artforum, 2008. If they're meeting in the same room, somebody needs to sneak in a camera.

The Museum on Fire makes a sensible comparison - Walter Hopps and Jeffry Deitch, both dealers turned museum curators.
Joanne Mattera on the perils of storing images electronically.
Two Coats of Paint on the demise of  Art on Paper.
Jonathan Melber on the Brooklyn Art Museum's progressive, public-friendly copyright policies, via NEWSgrist.
Seattle's John Morefield, an out-of-work architectural designer, set up an architectural advice booth (5 cents) at the Ballard Farmer's Market and got covered in the New York Times.
Liz Stone, who identifies herself as a web master for the Seattle Art Museum, wrote about some of the negative mail that finds its way to her inbox. (Note to Stone: The writer who called SAM's site boring was being kind.)
Seattlle artist Amanda Manitach is off to a good start with a blog titled, my heroes died of syphilis, via Translinguistic Other.

I've gone to the countryside outside computer range to root around in the mud, admire the naked fists of bare trees and avoid eye contact with the methamphetamine farmers who populate the neighborhood.

Christopher Buening, Methhead

Not as lovely, but far more likely to be loitering around:

Scott Wayne Indiana from Coin Op

At Elizabeth Leach through Jan. 30. Interview with Christopher about his father, Robert, after the latter's death in 2008, here. Podcast interview with Eva Lake (30 minutes, worth it), here.

Philip McCracken, Buddha's Mind (Via) - Eternity as dinner

As long as artists are using your work, you're not dead.

Leo Kenney, Formation No. 4, New Center, 1966 (At Seattle artREsource)

Jeffrey Simmons, Proxima, 2008 (At Greg Kucera)

Susan Dory's paintings could not have existed before satellite transmissions, personal computers and cell phones. Like Tim Bavington's, her color sense is electronic. But while his stripes relate loosely to musical tones, her horizontal pulses appear to be celestial. When sending messages to galaxies far, far away, we could code them on her color wheel. There are worse ways of saying hello.

Post-It Notes are raw material for Marc Dombrosky, and so are notes on the backs of envelopes, receipts and letters. He cares about what people want to remember after they've forgotten it. Dombrosky is the kind of person who does not look up. What interests him is on the ground. When a written fragment speaks to him, he takes it home and reinforces the text by sewing over the script.

With homespun domestic skill, he returns trash to the bosom of the family. Lost or tossed messages are upgraded into a kind of street poetry.

Lately, Dombrosky has moved beyond saving the written word to saving thrown-away tarps and corny t-shirts.  Beside eroded gold lettering, King of Pop, is a hand-embroidered black mass: The King of Pop develops a goiter.

Dombrosky's Neverland at Platform Gallery through Feb. 20.

In college in the late 1960s, a friend of a friend knew a guy named Fred. Thanks to Fred's bad luck, his fame spread beyond his immediate circle. He walked into an elevator that wasn't there and had to be rescued, clinging to the cables. If he was on a bus, it broke down. A teaching assistant lost his research paper. There were no copies. He went fishing, and his girlfriend's hook snagged his cheek.

Rumor had it that Fred carried Kenneth Fearing's Dirge in his pocket.

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;

   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow--

One day, Fred's fortunes rose. He had scored a summer job as life guard at a posh LA hotel. The pay was great, the work light and the atmosphere relaxing. What could go wrong? On the first day, arriving as dawn broke, he found a corpse floating face down in the water. Because he failed to jump in to check for vital signs, he never got a chance to sit in the life guard station.

Looking at Amir Zaki's digitally manipulated and color-saturated photos of life guard towers in L.A., Fred came to mind.

Not only is no one there, no one could be there.

They are cool-school emblems of futility, a perfect match for Raymond Chandler's view of swimming pools, a world away from David Hockney's:

Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.

At James Harris Gallery through Feb. 20

Calvin Coolidge

The business of America is business.

Andy Warhol

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Caleb Larsen

Pay my (art-related) credit card debt.

Tire Truck Buddha by NameTheRabbit via deviantART (Thanks, Paul O'Neil)

Gary Snyder, from Mother Earth: Her Whales

And Japan quibbles for words on
          what kind of  whales they can kill?

A once-great Buddhist nation
           dribbles methyl mercury
           like gonorrhea
                       in the sea.
...

Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
               the monkeys,
                  like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.

On a battered trunk sits a TV set so old and ugly it would get tossed from a donations box. When it's plugged in, the screen lights to bluish-white and black static. Through its haze appears a head-and-shoulders shot of University of Washington art professor Doug Jeck, the terror of undergraduates. His big fake nose makes him look like a forlorn, featherless parrot. Covered in ceramic dust, he sings I Will Always Love You in a trembling falsetto.

My brother once owned a dog who could sing like a saxophone. Trying to encourage a performance, I half-crooned a howl to get him in the mood. Nothing. "You have to put your heart in it," my brother said.

Jeck puts his heart in it. Even if he'd never made anything else, for this one piece (Pathetique, 2003) he'd deserve a place in art's memory bank.

But that's not all. Jeck's After Muybridge 2007 - suite of 9 photos of clay figures morphing from one frame to another - hangs on a wall.

Detail:

Muybridge documented motion and Jeck breakdown. There's a foolish attempt to rise again in the final frame, a burnt offering. Jeck's figures lack the resilience of Thomas Schutte's lumpen freaks from, for instance, United Enemies. Instead, the Seattle artist parodies American individualism. His tiny people are masters of their own ships and captains of their own souls with nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Jeck is part of Wet and Leatherhard at Lawrimore Project, curated by Susie J. Lee. Instead of final products, Lee looks at process, at what a devotion to the muck of the earth does to contemporary artists.

Photos and a video document a 1972 performance by Jim Melchert and his friends. They stuck their heads in buckets of wet clay and waited for it to dry. Kristen Morgin recreates old tin toys with unfired replicas, the new far more fragile than the old. Wynne Greenwood's attempts at a vessel wouldn't pass muster at summer camp, yet like the obese in bikinis, their bloated splendor insists on attention.

For Tim Roda, Meiro Koizumi and Ben Waterman, clay is a prop for performance. For Sterling Ruby, the ultimate performance cannot be controlled. It's what happens in the firing. Artists make offerings, and the kiln decides who is Cain and who is Abel.

Through Feb. 13.

Unite and make something! The irrepressible David Shrigley's video for Pringle jumpers on Pacific Standard Time.

Spiders decorate their webs.  

Guidelines for dealing with book (or gallery/museum) assistants, via Paul Constant.  

Art criticism for the stupid: From the London Times Online - Behind the smile Mona Lisa may have suffered from high cholesterol. It's a painting, people. Plus, everybody knows Mona is made of coffee.

From Amy Goodwin

The nicest-possible-way-of-writing-a-negative-review award goes to Roberta Smith for her non-appreciation of Lynda Benglis' recent efforts.

But all innovative, driven artists -- of which Ms. Benglis is definitely one -- have comfortable ruts they periodically fall into, or pitfalls they need to avoid. This show emphasizes hers, while giving notice that in all probability she will soon be working her way out of them.

Related: From NewsGrist - Ten most scathing reviews of last year. (Howard Halle, whoever that is, is dead wrong about Emily Jacir.)

The under-appreciated art blog award goes to John Perreault, whose Artopia is on ArtsJournal. Perreault's last two entries, How the West Was Won: Fetish Finish and Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced Art? are among the best things I've read anywhere about anything in the new year. Perreault refuses to rush his posts. Once a week or less is all we get from him, but he makes every word count. His complexities are polished to a rare clarity.

Most-patronizing-post-from-an-art-blogger award goes to Tyler Green for his ruminations on Byron Kim. First Green says that Kim's Synecdoche is not a great work of art. Green follows with the incredible opinion that the National Gallery of Art was right to acquire it anyway, in the interests of diversity.

Synecdoche, the Byron Kim installation acquired by the National Gallery of Art late last year, is not a great work of art. It is closer to the end of every art historical precedent it engages than it is to the beginning: abstract painting, the use of the grid, monochrome painting, abstraction-as-portraiture, minimalism, even its use of art world insiders as models to help the work 'get over,' WWE-style....

Still, it is a worthwhile acquisition for the National Gallery of Art, a mostly federally-funded institution that should be collecting works of art that engage the most prominent American philosophical conversations. Synecdoche, which Kim began in 1991 and to which he has added ever since, is one of the better examples of American artists engaging with with the 1980s and 1990s debate about multiculturalism in America.

I don't agree about the piece, but if I did, I wouldn't praise the National Gallery for buying it. Green seems to be supporting affirmative action for unqualified art works. Few things could be more insulting to artists of color.

More Green: I admire Green and read his blog daily. Learn a lot. Appreciate his hustle and intelligence. But his arch attacks on Jerry Saltz are getting old. As Green reports, linking to an ARTINFO blurb, Saltz used what Green calls "a four-letter epithet" in a facebook post. It's fuck, by the way. Saltz typed the word fuck. Big fucking deal.

Stefano Catalani is now director of curatorial affairs/artistic director of the Bellevue Arts Museum, a promotion he earned. Working in an impossible building in a crafts niche, he has made his shows matter.

Michael Brophy's paintings have good lungs. They expand to fill a sky with room left over for the land, which is frequently dark save for moonlight on water.

During a residency last year in Reykjavik, Icleand, Gretchen Bennett noticed that, as in Seattle, people in Reykjavik tend to hang onto their holiday lights way past the occasion. Till sluggish, dazed spring approaches, colored light strings hang in doorways and along the edges of the windows.

Walking home one night, she saw smashed beer bottles in the street, pieces of glass held together by the adhesive of the label beneath them. Reflected party lights turned them into jewels. The stars she could see were not in the sky but under her feet.

Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars, 2010 glass plastic bag

"No ideas but in things," wrote William Carlos Williams, early in the 20th century. Early in the 21st, the idea continues to have resonance.

Bennett is interested in decay and repetition as an affirmative position - an eroded X marks her spot. Like many in her generation, she offers an open-ended approach to materials instead of a specific style, in her case especially materials that have kicked around the edges of urban cultures, such as fake wood grain and skateboard decals. Her drawings in colored pencil are based on images that are past their technical prime and have been reproduced nearly to death, frayed and blurred instead of specific.

The Dull Flame of Desire, 2010, prisma color pencil on paper 22 x 30.5 inches

Ghost Dog 2010 prisma color pencil on paper 26 x 26 inches

Her current exhibit at Howard House takes its titled, Community World Theater, from a movie theater in Tacoma, Washington, that served as a pivotal site for dozens of punk concerts in 1987 to 1988. An earlier series of drawings treated Kurt Cobain as a kind of J.M.W. Turner weather-event - atmosphere overtaking concrete form.

In Iceland in a semi-permanent gray dark, she began to think of a culture whose recesses could be staged. In the dark, stage light is the sun. A generous use of it includes all the ordinarily lost moments. It can celebrate not just a performance but the moments after, when even a lost soul who may have fallen into an empty drum set gets up again and stumbles toward the folds of stage drapery, looking for an exit.

The Dull Flame of Desire 2010 felted panels, prismacolor pencils on paper, installation, dimensions variable

Her question is not, what is new? It's what can be stitched together and born again.

See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered. (more)

Through Jan. 30.

From Evagee via This Isn't Happiness

Benefit for Haiti's Yele Fund. All prints 8 x 10 inches, $50.

Including, Jason Hanasik, Untitled, Two Lemons, 2008

Via

SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade took the title of his current exhibition, Leopards in the Temple, from a story by Franz Kafka that reads in its entirety:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

In his review, Ken Johnson praised what he took to be Meade's refreshingly modest claims for the artists in his survey:

Fionn Meade, the show's organizer and the SculptureCenter's curator, says in an essay that he is under no illusions about which kind of cat he's wrangling. The artists he has picked, he writes, "return to distinct formal vocabularies and art historical trajectories," and they are intent on "borrowing and unsettling rather than wholesale attempts at either remaking or deconstructing." In other words, while working with familiar elements of style they mix and match their sources of inspiration in new but not shockingly novel ways.

Mr. Meade is describing the essence of contemporary academicism, and while he puts a positive spin on this, it could be read as a devastating critique. These are not the bestial vandals so beloved by myth makers of the modern. It's rare for a curator to assess his artists in such honest terms, and in a sense Mr. Meade is operating in the gap between curator and critic. At a time when curators too often function more like smooth-talking hucksters than independent intellectuals, that is good and refreshing.

Meade's claims are only modest for those who still accept a modernist trajectory that peaks with destructive originals. Behind these tigers trail house-broken copycats, footnotes in someone else's story.

But what if the artists in Meade's show do not seek to despoil new frontiers but instead chose to acknowledge that the ground on which they stand is occupied?  What if they want to make art out of an old ceremony rather than create a new one? What if their aim is not to shock but to unify? What if, in other words, they are not academics of old struggles but pioneers in new harmonies, ones with roots in the chaos of old scores?

Installation view, Leopards in the Temple:

Meade comes from Seattle, where Ezra Pound's injunction to "Make it new" matters less than E. M. Forster's "Only connect."

The artist statement of an exhibit at Tacoma's now defunct Helm Gallery, Second Peoples, is worth quoting in full:

We have coined the name 'second peoples' to describe the people who arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance, after the traumatic event, after everything's been said and done, after, even, the end. We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are too.

This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational noise. Our corner of North America-these mountains, that timber, this rich land-belonged to someone else. Our popular culture-those TV shows, that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they're cool-belonged to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position. How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in "Second Sex", we think we should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy, presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position, a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

Johnson again, about Meade's show:

No one here, however, is likely to topple the current regime of art, and in that respect these artists stand for the majority of contemporary strivers. They are resourceful, alert and eager to please, but are not wildly imaginative. Call them the mild ones.

Note the verb topple. Artists need not make war on their predecessors to qualify as major. Back in the 14th Century, Chaucer cast tributes behind him: "Out of old fields comes all the new corn."

Jeff Antebi in Haiti before the earthquake:

I was in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, wandering at the edge of a marketplace as the sun went down. Whole swaths of the city are without electricity, government services or security. Things become spectral, as areas heavily trafficked and lively by day transform into deserted, nightmarish landscapes. I navigated for several miles using distant bonfires like homing devices.

Cite Soleil, 8 x 10 inches

Antebi's  photo-portrait of Haiti here. All proceeds from the sale of Cite Soleil go to Doctors Without Borders and OxFam, earmarked for Haiti. To purchase photo, email Wall Space Gallery at <mailto:gallery@wallspaceseattle.com>.

Note from Seattle writer Dean Patton Paton about his son, Jesse Hagopian, used with permission. (Donate to Mercy Corps here. For information on text donations, go here.)

Photo, Dean with Jesse at Jesse's wedding

Some of you know this; some of you don't: My son Jesse, his wife Sarah and their young son Miles went to Port au Prince, Haiti, last Saturday and were there when the earthquake devastated the country (Sarah was there to do HIV trainings, part of her work with the University of Washington).

Half of their hotel, the Hotel Creole, collapsed; the half they were staying in remained standing, and they are physically okay. Somewhat miraculously, Sarah had come home from work uncharacteristically early, five minutes before the quake hit, so they were all together.

In the hotel was a nurse, and because of this the Hotel Creole was turned into a kind of de facto hospital. For the past two days Jesse has been this man's deputy, first going through the hotel to strip sheets off of the beds and tear them into strips; then breaking apart furniture to use as splints; finally doing what the nurse told him to do, resetting broken bones, splinting, applying tourniquets, trying to stop bleeding and cleaning wounds. We were all relieved to learn the hotel had a supply of rubber gloves for Jesse and the Nurse to use as they worked on the stream of patients. Yesterday, despite what seemed a complete blackout of telephone and Internet connections, Jesse managed to find some unexplainable iPhone pathway through Miami and was able to call several of us; he said everything was awful, there was no medicine, no gauze, no hydrogen peroxide, no ibuprofen.

"Everywhere people are screaming, crying," he said. "People come up to me and say, 'Doctor, please help my child," and I say, 'I'm not a doctor, I don't speak Creole, and we don't have any medicine. I can't help you, I'm sorry." He told a story of a man who managed to get out of his house, but his son remained trapped. After a day, he managed to dig out his son and he brought the boy, with a head injury and a bone poking out of his leg, to the hotel because he had heard a nurse was there doing what could be done. Jesse wrapped the boy with the torn sheets, to staunch the bleeding and do what he could to straighten the leg and clean up the young boy's skull, "But then," Jesse said, "he died. We couldn't save him."

Artists come and go from galleries all the time. Usually, it's the former dropping the latter. Artists either get better opportunities or they just can't stand to work with their dealers a minute longer.

Gallerists drop artists too, most frequently because the artists prove unreliable. They miss exhibition dates and leave the dealer hanging, sell their work on the side in violation of an agreement or trash talk the dealer on a regular basis. If a dealer is found chained to a radiator after an S&M session that went badly, he won't look kindly on his own artists spreading the word.

Dealers may feel certain artists have failed to evolve. When Linda Farris found herself in the position of representing too many artists whom she felt had not delivered on their early promise, one of the top reasons she closed her gallery was to avoid cleaning house. She loved all the artists in her lineup but didn't necessarily love what their work had become.

Closing for that reason is rare. Also rare is for dealers to drop an artist for sales reasons if they continue to appreciate the product. Bruce Nauman sold badly until fairly recently. A dealer who let him go due to a paltry economic return (and I don't know of one) would be covered in shame. If dealers think a particular artist is top of the line, they hang in through the thin hoping to help create the thick.

On the other hand, if the artist's rise proves meteoric, the loyal dealer might well be dumped in favor of one who couldn't have cared less during the lean years. That's a painful payoff, intolerable in other business contexts, but gallerists are more than business people. They can never be great if they keep both eyes on the bottom line.

Enter the recession. Solid artists sell little or nothing. Trade that was once brisk has slowed to a trickle. Unless dealers have a trust fund or represent at least a couple of recession-proof cash cows, the price of mounting shows they couldn't have sold in flush times becomes more of a mental burden.

Case in point: Seattle gallerist James Harris recently dropped Glenn Rudolph. In terms of Northwest art, it's similar to a New York dealer dropping Nauman twenty years ago.

Rudolph is a poet of the post-apocalypse. He likes to photograph bad news once the news value has faded and people are making the best of their diminished circumstances. He favors those who live it up on the margins of society, in a bizarre social club (the Duct Tape Warriors in the Kent Valley), the artificial splendor of a suburban housing development (Kent, again) and his own neighborhood in North Seattle.

Via

DeLillo, from Pafko At The Wall:

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

Barnhart, at Ambach&Rice through Jan. 24.

Brodsky, from a 1996 essay in the New York Review of Books:

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time.

Taylor

Yuki Nakamura is interested in old, hand-blown electric lights. So is Chris Burden, Sheila Klein, Jim Hodges and Jeff Wall, among others. Because there is no more than a genetic hair's difference between us and chimps, Terry Pratchett thinks electric lights are more interesting than stars. We swung down from the trees to cast our light against the dark.

Nakamura, Filament Drawing, porcelain, DVD projection, 2010. The dark bulb is stage set for the electronic drawing, a line that advances, coils and disappears to reemerge for another try - let there be thin, fragile lines of experimental effort.

Light Bubbles (porcelain, plexiglas) depends upon conditions in the room, either projecting rabbit ear shadows or pooling its darks at each bulb's base. Her plexiglas bases evoke Robert Irwin's, but with more of a back story. Her bulbs are containers for the thing contained, our history from torch to gas to common glow.


Nakamura is a kind of landscape artist, interested more in emblems than places, in maps that explore the meaning of the destination.

At Howard House through Jan. 30.

From Best of:

(Cuban born painter) Juan Alonso wants to help out in Haiti but like a lot of us, he isn't in a position to donate a big wad of cash. Instead, he's donated a beautiful piece of his art called Sent. You have until Friday at noon to bid on it. Currently, the high bid is $550. All money raised goes to MercyCorps. More information here.

Sent, 2005, color pencil on paper. 19" x 14" image / 33 ½" x 28 ½" framed

I want to give beauty its due, but I'm a sucker for the beast.

The beauty:

Dale Chihuly, glass ceiling, Victoria And Albert Museum

The beasts:

Auroa Robson, from discarded plastic bottles, via

Judy Pfaff, made from whatever's at hand.

If a writer inserts a couple of paragraphs written by someone else into an essay without attribution, the end result is not called a collage. If an artist does the equivalent, it is. Art is an omnivore. It will eat anything. The law calls the practice fair use, although the protection the term implies exists only on a case-by-case basis. Since the 1980s, the art world has called it appropriation. The practice predates the movement by a century: It's hard to imagine Modernism without it.

Even so, Bill Eppridge's outrage is understandable. (Via C-Monster)

Eppridge, Barstow to Vegas Motorcycle Race, 1971

Seattle's Deborah Faye Lawrence, The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, 2008

Undeniable, from Eppridge:

The artist used my work to make her collaged work look better.

Debatable:

I risked my life many times to make photographs -- in this case I was standing on the skid outside a helicopter at 500 feet. Seeing my work stolen in this manner just flat-out offends me because the artist used something that she didn't earn or create for her own benefit.

That's cowboy logic. It's true that you can't rope a steer from your desk, but you can make powerful art without breaking a sweat.

Back to undeniable: Great image, Mr. Eppridge.

Life is cheap on TV. Cattlemen, town mayors, grocers and gunslingers are always going down in Western reruns. They slide to the floor in a bar or hit the dirt on Main Street, arms blow wide like Christ crucified or clutching their chests like Fred G. Sanford setting-up his guilt-trip line, "I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth."

Whoever is left standing is the dream man, the American version of Mao. We celebrate not him but his parade-float iconography. No matter that cowboys worked long hours in menial jobs, like miners only in the open air and on horses. They're remembered as rugged individualists, not trigger-happy alcoholics.

Justin Colt Beckman is always willing to play once upon a time as long as he can mess with what follows the intro. In his photos and video at Punch Gallery, he impersonates the familiar in order to undermine its credibility. Although his square-jawed good looks tip us that he's the hero, when he goes for his gun, he does what TV cowboys never did - bungle the draw.

Sometimes he's fairly subtle. Striking a Roy Rogers/Dale Evans pose, he and his wife are so close to the real thing (the real TV thing) that memory collides with doubt. Who are these people? Don't we know them?

Beckman makes the commonplace rare. A bullet-ridden can? He painted it silver and serves it under glass.

He's the man firing over his shoulder, the light on his white hat. But because he shot his face in shadow (like a bad guy) and the flesh of his hand flattened, as if it's pressed against the glass of the TV screen (screaming fake), he revels in his scam. In the heart of the he-man ideal, the hero cuts himself off from the past and charges blindly into the future, where he will, if the camera followed him, fade from view. Beckman's version doesn't ring entirely true, and that's what's good about it.

Through Jan. 30.

Chen Yanning, Chairman Mao Visits Guangdong Country

David Nordhal, Field of Dreams

Via

Hardgrave - tombs and worms and tumbling to decay: Death Sheild, with ribbon. Hardgrave is showing at the Joshua Liner Gallery through Feb. 6.

Eva Speer - flowers that rot on your wrist. An accessory for the prom in hell.

The dark prince of American history was smarter than any Republican to hold office after him, and not nearly as far-right on social issues as his party today. For personal resentment distilled to poison, however, he has no American rival.

From his papers, a new portion of which was released Monday: (Story via)

In a Jan. 26, 1970, memo to Haldeman and secretary Rose Mary Woods, the president demanded that the administration ''turn away from the policy of forcing our embassies abroad or those who receive assistance from the United States at home to move in the direction of off-beat art, music and literature.''

He called the Lincoln Center in New York a ''horrible monstrosity'' that shows ''how decadent the modern art and architecture have become,'' and declared modern art in embassies ''incredibly atrocious.'' ''This is what the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in and they had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in,'' he wrote. ''But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now. If this forces a show-down and even some resignations it's all right with me.''

More than Nixon's artistic sensibilities were at play here. He made the political calculation that ''those who are on the modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway.''

If Macbeth and his wife were one person, Nixon would be him. Reagan was an empty suit, and Bush is too stupid for tragedy. He caused tragedies but could not embody them. The last Republican who was worthy of his part in the play is long dead, but his papers will continue to tantalize.

Philip Guston, via

If masculinity were a bubble, Mark Newport would pop it. He has the knitting needles to get the job done. His hand-knitted, 6-foot, 8-inch tall hero suits line the walls and step out in the gallery space to mingle with visitors at the Greg Kucera Gallery.

The artist looks like a mild-mannered nerd, which is why the photos of him knitting his way through his superhero fantasies are compelling.

Alter Egos: At the Game

Just dreaming of them works too.

Alter Egos: Cowboy

Through Feb. 13.

The New York Times reported last week that H&M and Wal-mart both deal with excess inventory by throwing it out, instead of recycling it or passing it on to charities. That's not all. Before putting new clothes and shoes in the dumpster, they cut them up to be certain that no one has a chance to make use of them.

Thank you, journalism. After this story hit the NYT and began to bounce around on blogs and facebook, these corporations changed course. They now say they'll donate to charities what they haven't sold.

The situation is different for artists. Those who discard drawings in recycling dumpsters have found them again for sale or framed in some collector's home. It's necessary for artists to cut up what they want to destroy or it might live again, the art that they have every right to edit out.

And cutting up clothes doesn't mean the same thing in fashion as it does to Wal-Mart.

Viktor & Rolf (image via Amy Goodwin)

Via

Via

Andrea Zuill - The cake she won't let herself eat, she paints.

Anya Gallaccio - Nothing lasts. From frosting topping to symbols of the sacred.

Russell Crotty

Patrick Kelley

Time for a positive note. As Jeffrey Mitchell, both artist and bear, likes to say, "Two paws up."

Here's Seattle novelist Jonathan Evison on an artist's life, via Harold Hollingsworth. They both identify with the Charlie Kaufman line from Adaptation, "You are what you love, not what loves you."

  Hollingsworth in 1967:

He still wears that hat or one suspiciously like it. What he does today, image via.

From Paul Campos, via Paul O'Neil

I'm quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I'm going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;

(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

Heide Hinrichs, from The Expected Obedience of Your Thoughts

Campos continued:

The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or syndicated columnist can't really imagine not being able to afford to take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight that's blown out of the sky. And while it's true the risk he faces of suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are for a poor person, literally zero.

Kris Martin, Mandi VIII (Note the absence of the snakes, and yet the figures writhe.)

Campos:

Terrorball, then, is an elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face - after all, it's certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year, and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by terrorism -- but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting the fear of terrorism.

And now this, via:

U.S. President Barack Obama has announced he would suspend the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners to Yemen, where an Al Qaeda-linked group is said to have planned a failed attack on a U.S. airliner. Around half the 198 remaining Guantánamo prisoners are Yemeni nationals and, according to the latest data available, less than 40 have already been cleared for release. In a statement, the Center for Constitutional Rights said: "Dozens of men from Yemen who have been cleared for release after extensive [government] scrutiny are about to be left in limbo once more due to politics, not facts. Halting [their] repatriation is unconscionable."

In other words, dozens of Yemeni men are going to continue their prison stay not because of what they have done but because there is a threat that someone in their number might do something in the future, inflamed, no doubt, by being detained by us without trial and tortured for years. 

Lacking evidence to bring them to trial, we must release them, no matter how unsavory their future actions. If we imprison people for crimes they may commit, we have become what we fear. This is not what "Yes We Can" was supposed to mean.

Look around the world baby it can't be denied
Why are we always on the wrong side. (via)

Selma Waldman

Leon Golub

Nancy Spero

Michael Spafford

Jack Daws

From two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Schneider on his blog, Cold Truth, a meal to kick off the tens, as in, 2010.

For the appetizer: San Antonio Bay oysters polluted with Noroviruses. For the main course: grilled beef infected with E. coli from contaminated tenderizing needles; chicken with Campylobacter or imported ham with Listeria monocytogenes. Then there's a side dish of stuffing loaded with salmonella-contaminated hazelnuts. And for those watching their weight: a popular nutritional drink fouled with the food poison Bacillus cereus.

Even the family pet wasn't forgotten. Its pigs ears and beef hooves were laced with salmonella. All those item were recalled in December by the federal government or were the subjects of warnings by food safety experts.

And 2010 isn't shaping up to set a safer table, according to some of the country's leading food safety experts. (more)

Carrie Schneider

Happy New Year!

Jen Graves on Do-Ho Suh:

Some/One has been up so long at SAM, and in such a prominent way, that its impact has faded for me. But it is a majestic work, and by a terrific artist; I love his silken architectures, houses and structures that hang in the air, memories. (more)

Made of 100,000 dog tags that sweep the floor to rise to a hero's armor, Some/One is a salute to the soldiers whose deaths become a monument to the man in charge. Seen from the front, the gown is an empty cavity whose inside is covered in cheap reflective material, giving viewers the dubious honor of seeing themselves as the One in the title surrounded by  the Some.

There are music critics who call for a moratorium on Mozart. They've had enough, forgetting that for each generation, he is new, and new to those who know him already as they hear him again at different stages of their lives. But music critics are in concert halls all the time. The music holds up, but they wear down.

At least music critics are forced to sit in their seats and listen. Art critics, hurrying from gallery to gallery, museum to museum, respond to art that stops them in their tracks, art that, in Peter Brooks' phrase, pulls them up by their own hair and turns them inside out. The next time they see that piece, they want the same high, the flush of the first time.

There's the pleasure of encountering a significant form and the joy of its reverberations, figuring out its relationships and meanings in its context.

Tim Appelo:

Sometimes the only cure for boredom is to look harder.

Nice essay by Appelo, but his solution is wide of the mark. The problem is not lack of work.  Critics seeking to reengage their original reactions have already done the work. The thrill of that effort is gone. They've moved from being on a hot date to being with an old friend. The bedrock of any critic's experience is old friends. As Graves is brave enough to note, it can be difficult to keep old friends from boring us.

Rare chance to see Dan Graham's film, Rock My Religion from 1984. According to Graham, rock predates Chuck Berry to take root in America with the Shakers.

At the Henry, Jan. 15, 7-8:15 p.m. Preview below.

E.V. Day's Cherry Bomb Vortex is a party dress having (bad speller alert) an organism orgasm.


Turns out, that's what brain neurons look like at any given moment. (From Wired, via)

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there.

People who want to protect American lives by means of a war on terror aren't usually the same people who want to protect Americans with health insurance, education, decent jobs, pollution controls, bank regulation, safety nets and social justice.

Seattle painter Ken Kelly needed emergency brain surgery, which he was lucky enough to obtain. Now he has the bill, which is large. He is uninsured.

Were he a European, his friends could limit their involvement to a card, an email, a texted well-wish, a hug or a flower or two. Because he's an American, they need to do more. In an event that is surely repeated for other artists many times around the country, Kelly's friends are organizing a fund-raising art auction for him on Jan. 23, 7 p.m. at Lemon Lime Studio, 411 Yale Ave. N., two blocks north of REI.

(1/7 Update from Kelly: "As you can see, the brain surgery caused complications...")

He opens Jan. 21 at Carmichael Gallery.

Nobody's perfect, especially list makers. Half way in, they're looking at the finish line. Which is to say, mistakes were made. This post, Opening Thursday Night in Seattle, needed to include Lawrimore Project. There is never a good reason to leave out Lawrimore Project, which is surely one of the West Coast's top galleries.

Opening at LP Thursday night, 6-9, are Caleb Larsen's Everything All of the Time Right Now plus Wet And Leatherhard, a group exhibit focused on ceramics curated by Susie J. Lee. The latter features Sterling Ruby, Jim Melchert, Kristen Morgin, Wynne Greenwood, Ben Waterman, Meiro Koizumi, Doug Jeck and Tim Roda.

From Larsen, the $10,000 sculpture, in progress. It accepts your dollar bills and gives you nothing back.

Seattle's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs is looking for an artist to enhance a two-mile streetcar line from the International District, First Hill and Capitol Hill, slated to begin construction next year. Here's the pitch:

The artist's artwork and design enhancements will be incorporated during construction of the streetcar line. The design should include reproducible or repeating elements and components that contribute to the overall identity of the streetcar. (more)

Sounds like a branding opportunity, more ad than art. There are artists who can make something substantial from these dim prospects, but why are they so dim? Must public art be yes-man to public projects? The problem is, no one is dreaming of baboons and periwinkles.

Wallace Stevens

Disillusionment of Ten  O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers In red weather.

Those who aren't inclined to hoof it to gallery openings Thursday night have a reasonable indoor alternative. The Seattle branch of Pecha Kucha is host to What Was Old Is Now New at Ouch My Eye. Twelve designers and artists will each present 20 images that reflect the role of recycling in their work.

They are David Wesley Black - guerrilla letterpress; Joe Kent & Sallyann Corn - reduce, reuse, restraint a return to normalcy; designer Michael Taylor - 30 going on 8; Valerie Farber - designer / musicians of stories past and present; Jenny Fillius - recycled tin artist; Ann Wolf - Old! New! Old! NEW!; Animish Kudalkar - MUNDANE mass; Brianna Holan - music and fashion from the eye of an urbanist; Kristen Young - blank canvas; Todd Waffner - 1000 years of evolution continues in a 21st century sailboat, and Deborah Faye Lawrence - recycler of political propaganda and pop imagery .

Deborah Faye Lawrence, The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, 2008

Eric Hairabedian

Jeanne Silverthorne

Andrew Miksys

Galleries are a never-say-die enterprise until they do. They're fine even if they aren't. What are gallerists going to say? Nobody wants what we've got, please be the exception? A desperate vibe deters collectors, who don't want to be part of any gallery that is overly eager to have them.

If buying art is a habit, many have broken it. The formerly flush will have extra money again, but when will their hearts swell with acquisitive desire? The kind of collectors who are capable of turning the tide (and encouraging others to join them) are motivated not just by the pleasure of owning one more piece but by standing by the artists whose work matters most in their lives as well as stretching to interact with the new. 

In hopes that their artists can provide those experiences, Seattle galleries are looking to come on strong in January.

The top of the list:

Gretchen Bennett and Yuki Nakamura at Howard House.

Bennett: The excellent text for both artists produced by the gallery.

Gretchen Bennett's show, Community World Theater, takes its name from an old movie theater turned punk venue in Tacoma, Washington, the site of about three dozen shows in 1987 and 1988. Bennett's work of the last two years has explored Kurt Cobain as a sort of a natural event--an eruption or a cultural moment as relevant as the first step on the moon. In her new work, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the atmospheric paintings of JMW Turner serve as a conceptual basis for this continued exploration, both for their subject matter and for their connection to 1816, a year of significant climatic abnormalities due in part to the historic eruption of Mount Tambora.

Nakamura:

Yuki Nakamura's porcelain light bulbs, cast in antique and contemporary forms, are ruminations on light, beauty, and the history of invention and obsolescence. Thomas Edison unveiled his carbon filament bulb 130 years ago, but today this classic design is quickly disappearing, replaced by more energy efficient models. Nakamura's evocative installations create a new landscape of an electric world. Transformed into porcelain skins and animated projections of filaments, her light bulbs are a investigation of texture, shape, and volume as well as the contrast between the bulb's surface the exterior light source.

Justin Colt Beckman at Punch. Beckman blurs the distinction between cowboys, hillbillies and rednecks, all of them aspects of his rugged person. O give me a home, where he-man images roam....

Mark Newport and John Buck at Greg Kucera.

Newport continues to knit his way through the sagging fortunes of low-rent superheroes.
Buck continues to carve his own picture dictionary of people, places and things. (Below, detail.)

Amir Zaki and Ron Nagle at James Harris.

Zaki's recent focus is the color-saturated purity of life-guard stations. They're very L.A. and very pertinent to our present situation. Save us, we cry. Nobody's there.

After half a century, everything Ron Nagle does is new. No false moves for this wily old clay master.

Michael Brophy at G. Gibson. The painter from Portland wants to be alone.

Marc Dombrosky at Platform.

Michael Jackson died on the day that I both started and lost my job in Las Vegas.

Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in Say Anything, 1989:

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

Robert Francis Zvernia as himself, from email sent, 2010:

I guess I'm what you'd call a new media artist. I work primarily in digital photography and video and have been distributing my work online since 1997. I'm no Luddite but I am concerned about the inclusion of cell phone art and the like as appropriate media for submission in the below call for public art proposals. Here's why: Public art by definition should be free and accessible to all. Cell phone art and the like violate this basic principle by requiring the purchase of equipment and/or services from commercial interests in order to access the nominally public work. While the incorporation of fee-attached technologies may be acceptable in private settings, any work which is publicly funded and located should be self-contained and present no financial barriers to its appreciation. I hope you will keep this in mind as you fulfill your roles as stewards of the public trust.

Zverina takes issue with a call for proposals from Seattle's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs:

In collaboration with Seattle Parks and Recreation and the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), Seattle's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs seeks an artist to create a new media artwork for the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop. The Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop is a pedestrian trail that surrounds Lake Union in Seattle. The selected artist will create a new media project drawing on the history and/or context of the site. Possible media include podcast- or cell-phone based audio work, audio and/or video tours using mobile media and GPS, and walking tours or interactive events using the Web.

Eligibility: Open to professional artists living in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and California. Budget: $18,000 all-inclusive Deadline: 11 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 (Pacific Time) Details here. 

A quick way to kill interest in a contemporary painting is to call it Abstract Expressionist, even neo-AbEx or in the tradition. As a tradition, it played itself out more than half a century ago. From dominant it fell to irretrievably historical, rooted in post-World War II New York with variants in other places (Paris, San Francisco, Seattle), all of which are also signed, sealed and delivered into the past.

Before AbEx, abstraction was reductive. ApbEx gave flesh to those bones. Exuberant, intuitive and of-the-moment, it allowed the hand and arm to speak for mind and represent matter. Pop pushed the movement aside by making the passions of the second generation look hysterical, ego-driven and (worst of all) contrived. Pop was cool and fun-loving. AbEx was neither. Its pioneers held their own, but artists interested in carrying it forward risk being accused of playing "torch songs on dead batteries," as David Thomson unfairly wrote about Chet Baker.

The dead-battery-torch-song theory has only one flaw: It isn't true. AbEx's powerful progeny are everywhere, doing their bit for overall fields and the pleasures of push/pull, but the ones who rise to prominence refer to their family tree at their peril.

Here are a few:

Joan Snyder

Susan Rothenberg (Image via)

Robert C. Jones

Lauri Chambers



Alden Mason

Denzil Hurley

Jacqueline Barnett

Mark Takamichi Miller (At Howard House)

Via

An art dealer expounding on the difference between hacks and has-beens said that in the right market, the work of a hack can be sold, but a has-been has no market. For art critics, the situation is the reverse. A has-been may be only a brilliant defense short of reemergence, but about a hack there is nothing to say.

In spite of the categories into which others try to tidy them away, artists continue. Why? Virginia Woolf attempted an answer in the person of Lily Briscoe, a painter of little or no prominence in To The Lighthouse. 

Lily stepped back to get her canvas - so - into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea.
...

Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer of who originally spoke them.

Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slow, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and blues.

...

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was - her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

Chester Arnold, Inventory, 2005, 22 x 26, oil/linen