Archives for March 2009

Why is it that Gee’s Bend quilts could have come from a country fair when at the Tacoma Art Museum but were brilliant in Philly?

The installation crew. The curator in charge.

Sometimes the same curator improves dramatically from first stab to second. Greg Kucera Gallery‘s present Gee’s Bend show looks much better than the gallery’s previous. Through Saturday.

Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata are undergraduates at the University of Washington. Their exhibit at the Seattle cooperative known as Punch continues to enthrall. I would have written about it earlier but had to move my books and files out of the old PI so the new online-only crew can get to work without formers hanging around, looking wistful.

Young as they are, Hashemi and Hirata have a wistful edge.
Maybe it’s because all the good positions are taken. For artists in their early 20s, the chances of doing someone else’s work without realizing it are good.
Alert, awake and aware, Hashemi and Hirata have a sly magpie sensibility. Yes, they’re recycling, and yes, isn’t everybody?

Hirata licked a canvas till his tongue bled red. (Hello, young Chris Burden.)  Hashemi sent a droopy houseplant for a ride on the top of one of those movable disc vacuum cleaners. (He’s looking at you, Buster Simpson.)

But nothing in their show is anybody’s old school. Hashemi’s light touch in the world of manufactured things and Hirata’s pathetically puny use of props celebrates a world of reduced circumstances. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back. Their flimsy take on what’s happening now is what’s happening now.

Saturday night, they’re closing with a party. Expect  fog machines.

Finalists for the Brink Award at the Henry Gallery are Matt Browning (Seattle); the unlinkable Alex Felton (Portland); Aaron Flint Jamison (Portland); Isaac Layman (Seattle); Gareth Moore (Vancouver BC), and Isabelle Pauwels (Vancouver BC).

The selection committee – Henry director Sylvia Wolf and curators Elizabeth Brown and Sara
Krajewski; Seattle artist Joe Park; Portland artist Harrell Fletcher;
Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery director, Christina Ritchie; and
arts patrons John and Shari Behnke – will announce the winner April 17, 8 p.m. at the Henry. The award was the Behnkes’ idea, which they bankrolled.

What’s the Brink? Explained here, although the Henry responded to criticism and took out academic requirements. More on the Henry’s Hang Blog Hankblog.

Mike Simi‘s version –  I Want To Make Something Beautiful But Find It Extremely Fucking
Difficult To Do So (Bowl of Froot Loops) – in cast plastic and cereal from 2009 has an undertow of tragedy.

Fred Muram‘s is robustly vulgar – a video titled Sharing a bowl of Fruit Loops with my dog, from 2008.

With rare exceptions, Matthew Picton‘s work is more satisfying to ponder than see. His ideas are rigorous, his delivery limp.

Take his Postwar Landscape, An Urban History at Howard House. These documentary urban landscapes purport to show past and present in layers, all visible at once. If Harry Potter had one that worked in his debut novel, he wouldn’t have needed those profitable sequels to understand his own story.

Anselm Kiefer paints the Nazi past as poison leeching into the present, but covering the same plot of ground and history, Picton is recessive, letting the facts speak for themselves.

Except they don’t. Below is Picton’s Berlin, 20008, in duralar, enamel paint and pins, 45″ x 55″ x 3″.

What is evoked here? I see nothing but tricky clutter. Below is another version of the same idea from Picton, and this is the one piece in his show that connects. Underneath a contemporary street name is the Hitler Platz in translucent Jello-shades of lime over strawberry: Berlin Text Work #2, 1943, 1962, 2007 – laminated duralar, from 2007.

Other Seattle critics are more favorably inclined. Here’s a Jen Graves preview of  the same show, and an Adriana Grant review.

Maps in general leave me cold. My brainy brother who refused to admit he needed glasses once pulled his car over in a rainstorm to try to read a map’s small print in the headlights as the paper puddled in his hands. Sitting in the passenger seat I thought, that’s the way maps are for me all the time.

On the other hand, Fred Muram‘s version – I’ll let you drive if I can read the map, 2009 –  is my idea of soul food.

Nearly half a century after his death, Franz Kline still passes as an abstract painter. His breakthrough was a rejection of the worn-out world of surface representations. Beneath surfaces, he found good bones that he articulated as slashing diagonals, made either in black house paint loaded onto a broad brush and applied with the whole arm or condensed into smaller spaces in ink on paper.

In a 2002 review, Holland Cotter described Kline’s “fascination with radical forms of East Asian calligraphy,” citing a drawing from 1955 that “has the explosive look of Zen thrown-ink painting.”

Kline was no Zen priest, however. His achievement is the appearance of spontaneity without the fact of it.

The recent photographs of N. P. Thompson offer evidence of what many have suspected, that instead of being purely abstract, Kline was painting the urban scene, specifically the scaffolding of tall buildings under construction.

Here’s a Thompson photo, titled Intricacies.
And here’s Kline’s small ink-on-paper, Untitled (Study for Wanamaker Block) from 1955, image from Stephen Foster Fine Arts.

The SF Chronicle’s Mark Morford logged in on Friday with a spirited defense of the news organizations previously known as newspapers and a fine sprinkling of contempt for media theorists prognosticating about the future – Die, Newspapers, Die? – linked in ARTicles.

Morford offers grudging respect to Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, because of Shirky’s solid analysis, but Morford is sick of everybody without a stake in the old newsroom calling it done for:

This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy “a mature
blogosphere will supplant old media” argument. In the howling absence
of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the
fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who
know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all
hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility — what’s
the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some
fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many
followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.

I disagree with Winer in one huge way: When the professional
news filters vanish, when you lose that vigorous center of storytelling
expertise, you don’t necessarily get a rich ‘n’ wonderful mix of
new choices. You get chaos. You get noise. Sure, it might be a boatload
of fun to read, but it’s also maddening as hell.

Of course Morford is right. Nothing has yet arisen to replace the organization of fact hunters and checkers who research and verify what sees print in a newspaper. Working without a team paid to weigh and assess every word is writing without a net. Editors can leave rope burns on copy or strangle it outright, but more often they save writers from themselves.

In spite of their expertise and devotion to the truth, however, newspapers have too frequently failed us.Take the New York Times, the best of the best. Judith Miller’s reporting on the Iraq War helped get us into that war. Those phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction? According to her, they were real. (Morford, on the other hand, got it right, early and often.)

In my own small case of online only, as a former member of a far less illustrious newspaper team than the NYT, I’m banking on readers to tell me when I’m wrong and to debate the debatable. So far,so good. Plus, change is inevitable.

Here’s Mitchell and Webb on orientation day at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Stone chippers were not amused. (Thanks to Tim Appelo for link.)

Museum curators have no problem thanking collectors, both private and corporate, but frequently indulge a hardwired reluctance to share credit with dealers. Collectors can take a thank-you for granted unless they want to remain anonymous. Dealers, however, can’t assume they’ll see a tip of the curatorial hat for a job well done.

Two recent cases in Seattle:

Now at the Frye, Swedish video artist Nathalie Djurberg was at Howard House last year in a show curated by HH director Sara Callahan. The Frye wall text acknowledges only the high points of Djurberg’s resume, which is fine, except in Seattle, where Callahan put her on the map. Why not say so?

More egregious is the Henry Gallery‘s treatment of Greg Kucera. Kucera is Seattle’s go-to guy for all things William Kentridge. Because Kucera sold a hefty share of it, he knows who has which Kentridge, and who’d be willing to loan it.

Naturally, when organizing her own Kentridge, Henry chief curator Elizabeth Brown asked Kucera for help, which he promptly provided. Fast forward to show time.

Kentridge performed I am not me, the horse is not mine earlier this month, sponsored by the Henry. The Henry’s Kentridge exhibit is up through May 3, and Greg Kucera’s through March 28.

Introducing Kentridge before his performance, Brown failed to mention Kucera’s show. She also failed to thank the dealer for the major role he played in putting hers together, although she thanked as a group the local collectors who made loans.

Surely these omissions were inadvertent? I’d like to think so, but it’s hard to imagine the reverse – dealer acknowledged and collectors snubbed.

Isn’t it time to abandon the illusion that dealers are all about money and curators are all about art? The dealer who’s in it only for the money doesn’t make any, and the museum curator who thinks the bottom line is beneath her helps to sink her/his institution. 

When I asked Kucera about this subject, he said, “Don’t write about it.” Why do it anyway?  Because it’s healthy to air certain aspects of the art world that used to be hidden.

As Robert Creeley put it in Like They Say:

Underneath the tree on some
some grass I sat, I

watched two happy
woodpeckers be

dis-

turbed by my presence. And
why not, I thought to

myself, why
not.

But do you have to do it in person? Reputable art critics say yes, at least for the purposes of any kind of review. When all the smart cookies agree, who am I to dissent? And yet, I’m glad I saw this replicated shadow online, thanks to an email from Robert Massa, who saw it in the field: the intestines of the earth alive in New Zealand – Louise Purvis‘ Dispensary, made of galvanized wire nets filled with pine cones.

The SF Chronicle’s genial arts writer, Jesse Hamlin, took a stab at a top 10 SF public art list over the weekend, here. Hamlin stepped into a gap; public art coverage at the Chron is  spotty.

It’s easy to blame the paper’s art critic, Kenneth Baker, but the real culprit is the art itself. Forced to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the boutique city by the Bay, art arrives on the streets with a good back story to support its existence and very little forward momentum. Unless the artist is universally acclaimed and/or unlikely to offend any aging flower children, the chances of squeaking through the public process are slim.

Hamlin’s list includes what Hamlin admits to be kitsch – an awkward sculpture of Father Junipero Serra – because it “makes us smile.”

Kitsch makes the list? Seattle has a neon elephant that tops SF’s carved missionary, with the additional virtue of cleaning your car.

The roots of SF’s public art aversion here.