Archives for March 2009

From an email from Seattle arts writer Tim Appelo, lamenting the fact that the new, online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer has virtually no arts coverage:

Culture doesn’t seem on these people’s radar. They never seemed to
notice that in the coffee shop, nobody steals the sports section or
the editorial page or the business section — it’s always the arts
section that’s missing.

True, but let’s give the PI a couple of weeks to shake out and dig in. The final day for the print version (and the vast majority of the staff, including the entire arts staff), was Tuesday.

A dog limped into a bar
and said, I’m looking for the man
who shot my paw.

The Dalai Lama would let it go,
but the dog being dog

wanted to know
who sold him a seat
in a sink hole.

I’m with the dog and with the pig
who leapt after leaning
on the electric fence,
her lardy self landing on little feet.

Let other bless what bounty brings
(not felled by fracture).
She replied with a toothy rake
across the rear
of the swine beside her,

believing, like Burroughs,
there are no innocent bystanders.

From Gary Faigin on Artdish:

Lucinda Parker
speaks of taking her inspiration from nature, but Thoreau would have
had her thrown out of Walden Pond for disturbing the peace.  Her big, noisy paintings are celebrations of energy, movement, and conflict.  To the extent that they are inspired by the natural world, it is the realm of tsunamis, windstorms, icebergs, and waterfalls  – force colliding with force. 

Go, Gary. I love that lead.

Based in Portland, Oregon, the painter in question is well into the third decade of her career. Across time it’s easy to see relationships that weren’t
clear in the beginning.

Although Parker had a brief flirtation with decorative effects,
her strength is power painting: broad arcs of form crashing, folding or
curving into each other, cutting through space like knives through
thick batter.

Her work bears a relationship to the late Portland
painter Carl Morris: his sweeping arcs without his muddy color. And
like the paintings of Howard Hodgkin, hers
continue over the frame, refusing to acknowledge a beginning or end.

But Parker is blunter than either Morris or Hodgkin. At the
core of her abstraction is an interest in generative life processes,
which she presents in all their sour, messy glory.

When yellow hits black in a Hodgkin painting, the effect can be delicate. When the same colors meet in Parker’s spaces, that
convergence has a blunt and battering force.

She had a solo show last month at Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle. In Portland, she’s represented by Laura Russo.

Working with his childhood friend, chemist and botanist Joe Piecuch, Elias Hansen celebrates the cheesy weirdness of Tacoma.

Tacoma is the kind of town artists flee from. Art Chantry, who left and came back, refers to it as a “little piece of New Jersey that broke off.” The term flying saucer was coined there in 1947, when a Tacoma man reported seeing silver discs flying over Mount Rainier and along the crest of the Cascade Range. When asked what they looked like, he said, “Like saucers without cups.”

Chantry also claims that the term new age was invented in Tacoma by a splinter group of a flying saucer church. Add the town’s reputation for organized crime, gangs and heavy-industry polluting the waterfront, it’s easy to see why Tacoma had no hope of becoming a city known for art.

Except it has. (Story here.)

Back to Hansen, a glass blower from Pilchuck who never had a decorative thought in his life. He looks at a flourish and wonders how it could be put to use.

He and his older brother Oscar Tuazon come from the Buster Simpson school of handyman poetics. Because Hansen is best known for his collaborations with Tuazon (review here), Hansen’s exhibit at a suitably tacky little Tacoma storefront gallery was a test for him. Has he hitched his wagon to his brother’s star or has he his own forward momentum?

Clearly the latter. With Truths We Forgot To Lie About, he and Piecuch delivered an exhibit of staggering greatness.

They treated Tacoma like a science experiment, taking core samples of the place distilled into gruesome forms of theoretically drinkable beverages.
In all manner of glass test tubes (blown by Hansen), they mixed an alcohol base with Western red cedar, brick fragments from Ted Bundy’s childhood home and soil from Port Madison; coyote blood, beard hair, beeswax and butterfly wings; blackberries, club moss from the Hoh rain forest and hydrogen cyanide; soil from Lewis and Clark’s Cape Disappointment camp site, concrete from the Boeing plant in Everett flavored with hobo urine, and brick chips from Francis Farmer’s childhood home with paint flecks from Curt Cobain’s final abode on Lake Washington.

Beauty, for Hansen, breathes in the forest.

How to keep–is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?

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

If the beauty of the forest is a commodity in a threatened industry, how can Hansen & Piecuch make use of it in an old loggers’ town?

By turning it into a memory preserved in alcohol. In the hopes of not setting their house on fire, they took a large, Venetian-style glass vase out to the backyard at night and poured hot urethane into it, over the root bulb of a datura plant, from the Nightshade family. The glass cracked, and the pieces fused in layers as the urethane cooled. With that base, they added the ingredients of peach home brew.

From the website of The Helm, the terrific makeshift gallery that sponsored this installation:

Why are bootleggers romanticized? Why are meth cooks ostracized? Why is the Northwest home to so many bootleggers, meth cooks, serial killers and craftspeople? Does the geography of this area create a space for this kind of activity? Or do we create these stories and myths to fit the geography?

Through garage chemistry, traditional craftsmanship, backyard naturopathy and a limited budget, Hansen and Piecuch attempt to assemble a collection of stories, distillations and reactions to the geography and history of the Northwest.

I don’t want to oversell the good news here. The Helm is going out of business after its April show. It’s tough for galleries to stay in business. For a gallery that’s off-the-edge adventurous in Tacoma, it might be near to impossible. RIP, Helm, and come back in another form soon.

I hail from a newspaper, now gone, although it continues online. I wish it well, although I wouldn’t want to be part of it. The job is to do everything at once – 20 people (give or take) on a 24-hour news cycle.

The pace of the old PI, which I considered brisk, now looks plodding. Three editors looked at everything on its day-long journey toward print. Blogs at the paper were a different story. One editor took a fast look, usually after the item was printed.

When I started blogging a couple of years ago, the prospect of that fast read intimidated me. As I like to say, misquoting Sir Thomas Wyatt, facts flee from me. Everybody benefits from another set of eyes evaluating the product, I more than most.

What I discovered online was reassuring. I’d traded three editors for many more. If something’s wrong, readers say so in the comments, email me or call. I hope on this blog, they will continue the practice, even though comments are not immediately posted. I have to look at them first, and I’m already behind.

Doug McLennan, AJ editor, told me to start Another Bouncing Ball with a piece about the transition from the PI to freelance art critic. This is it. It’s not the start, but it’s close enough. Those who want more from me on the PI’s demise can find it in The Stranger (here and here) and the Columbia Journalism Review.  The CJR quote has the virtue of being brief:

The Hearst Corporation has always treated the P-I like a
placeholder. When there was money to be spent, they didn’t spend it
here. This is the time to invent the template for the transition from
newsprint to online only, and once again, the Hearst Corporation is
doing it bare bones. A skeleton looks plump compared to poorly-paid
online crew. I wish it well, but those people have a near-impossible
task. The future according to the Hearst Corporation seems to be,
journalism without journalists.

I should have added that Hearst has always treated me and mine well. The PI was a great place to work.

Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik emailed yesterday to say he was the victim of a drive-by Twitter post. Somebody’s impersonating him in the department of Tweet Tweet.
I saw the item about his Twitter post on MAN. Note Tyler Green’s question mark, which I ignored:

Look who’s Twittering?
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik? Here’s a sample — and one which manages to miss many points at once: “I, for one, won’t miss the Rose Art Museum. It was always a second-rate collection in a city full of first-rate art.”

I responded with this post, unfortunately titled, A Washington Post twit on Twitter, which includes:

A man who tosses off irresponsible one-liners but builds paragraphs into essays with the reliable if unexciting skill of a bricklayer is not best served by Twitter. All his worst faults are on view, his best suppressed.

Gopnik, who says the offending item was not by him, wrote me:

I thought you might like to know that I have never Twittered, and am not even signed onto the service as a user. Someone is impersonating me. I am surprised that you didn’t suspect such a thing. The Twitterer’s voice and opinions are clearly not mine, and many of the issues addressed are not ones that I have ever expressed an interest in. I am even more surprised that, as a professional journalist, you didn’t take the basic step of calling or emailing me to fact-check this.

He’s right. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to set him up. I should have spent a small fraction of that time checking it out before responding.

An exhibit that meant little to me when it was on view won’t go away now that it’s gone – Bas Louter‘s Dust (Asphalt) at Ambach & Rice. Paintings fanned out across the walls like pages of a book riffling in the wind.

The images in black and white were muted and deliberately vague. A
woman stood beside a car in a pose familiar from advertising: Buy this car and get the girl.
But car and girl were a myopic blur drained of color. Clowns gazed
into the middle distance, where no performance takes place. A portrait
of a humanoid ape lifted the corner of its thick lip, either to greet or
growl. She’s from Planet of the Apes but can’t be found in any frame of the movie.

Dust (Asphalt) was neither here nor there. I thought when I saw it that Louter’s efforts would make a good stage set for an absurdist drama, but lacking the drama, lacked visual momentum. Louter is one of those artist who appears to paint on a whim. He could just as easily take photos, make videos or pile empty suitcases in a corner. HIs paintings neither catch nor kill. Teflon, engagement slides off them, and I think, in retrospective, that is the point. 

You found me. I’m the art critic for the Seattle PI, which is breathing its last in intensive care. When the Hearst Corp. pulls the plug, look in this space for my next post. Until then, you can still catch me at Art To Go. My PI email will soon expire. My new email is anotherbb(at)gmail.com.

EDITOR’s NOTE: Today (March 16) is the last day of the P-I. This blog will begin tomorrow.

With photography, painting, interactive installation and video, Claudia X. Valdes considers a nuclear explosion at a point of its impact, the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the atom bomb was tested in 1945. Her exhibit at Lawrimore Project, titled Ten Million Degrees, runs through March 14.
In 1983, Jacob Lawrence completed a series titled Hiroshima.

Several years ago I was invited by the Limited Editions Club of New York to illustrate a book of my choosing from a list of the club’s many titles. I selected the book Hiroshima, written by the brilliant writer John Hersey This work was selected because of its power, insight, scope, and sensitivity as well as for its overall content My intent was to illustrate a series of events that were taking place at the moment of the dropping of the bomb… August 6, 1945. The challenge for me was to execute eight works: a marketplace, a playground, a street scene, a park, farmers, a family scene, a man with birds, and a boy with a kite. Not a particular country, not a particular city and not a particular people.

Valdez marshals her media to create a series of moments. As if fearful the attention of the audience might wander, she changes her approach like a nervous suitor changing clothes for a big date.
Lawrence’s series is not interactive except in the traditional sense, that it catches the eye and holds it. Valdez’s work is technically astute. Lawrence’s isn’t, but next to his, hers looks simple-minded, too caught up in the toys of its time and place to make any one thing matter.

Recurring Dream, Nine, 2002 (Detail) Digital print on board, video monitor, 10 minute video 48″ x 60″ Unique
Image via Lawrimore Project

Jacob Lawrence, Farmers from the Hiroshima series