Archives for April 2009

The WC asked the first question on its Facebook page and posted some of the answers on its blog.

John: When your sick of nit-picking at it.
Puppet Industries: When the cops catch ya.;)

Nick: You never do, that’s why it’s a piece of art.
James: When your mum calls you down for dinner. (Note from Wooster: Our favorite!)
Frank: When the check clears.
Josh: When it starts to piss me off.
Logan: When I ruin it.
Dan: When somebody loves it.
Angel: When you are scared about putting something else in it.
Victoria: 10 years later.

I especially like, “You never do, that’s why it’s a piece of art.”

It’s a fun list, but artists already know those answers. More useful is Edward Winkleman’s advice on how to secure gallery representation. Everybody says to approach only those galleries that show work on the same wavelength as your own. Winkleman adds the important footnote: You can’t play me-too to an artist already represented there, nor can your work appear to undermine the program.

Is what you do too close to
what someone already in the program is doing and/or does what you do
conceptually or aesthetically conflict with what someone else in the
program is already doing. For (a lame, but simple) example, if an
artist in the program is arguing that identity art is dead and you make
identity art, the odds are not good the gallery will want to undercut
all the work they’ve done to build a market for that other artist by
exhibiting your work.

This is good info to tuck away and use later. Trying to get a gallery right now is like taking a long walk off a short pier. The only reasonable move for the vast majority of the unrepresented is DIY, such as, in Seattle, Crawl Space, Punch Gallery and Soil Art Collective. Get a group of like-minded artists together, open a space and declare yourself something.

Nobody tackles the business end of art galleries with the insider depth and generosity of Mr. Winkleman. Here’s a topic I’d like him to address: What do artists do when their galleries don’t pay them? What recourse is there for artists who agreed to a 50/50 split and instead see a zero return, because the gallery (in trouble), is spending their money?

Before the wheel, the flute and tailored furs came the jar, the
jug, the pot and bowl. They are the oldest forms and the most diverse.
Contemporary vessels carry their utilitarian history. Even though many
have moved out of the craft ghetto, that ghetto remains a kind of roots
music, allowing artists who hear it to dig down to waken.

(Click images to enlarge)
First row: Susan Zoccola, Paul Marioni, Robbie Miller
Second row: William Morris, Akio Takamori, Marita Dingus
Third row: Jesse Edwards, Preston Singletary, Dale Chihuly
Fourth row: Jeffry Mitchell,  Charles Krafft , Joey Kirkpatrick & Flora C. Mace

As if his image had been pasted in an photo album tucked away on some obscure shelf and forgotten, Andrew Keating painted the main gallery at the Frye Art Museum in 1995: (Picture Gallery,
oil on linen, 60×72 inches).

From photographer Ari Kletzky, participant in CalArts Open Studio 2:

Since September 2007, Islands of LA has been exploring … traffic islands as public space.

It’s an absurd narrative in the guise of a social work.

Jeremy Deller, via Turner Prize:

Unlike most critics of my acquaintance, I like language with a cheap and gaudy gleam. When that gleam is gone, it’s easily replaced, especially by cliches of a bygone era. They rise from the dead as if they’d been to a spa and step up to serve a new age as shining examples of their time and place.

Pushing up daisies. Kick the bucket. Take the fall. Turn a blind eye. Hitch my wagon to your star. All over him like a cheap suit.
Stuffed in a phone booth.

(Image left, Helen Levitt, click to enlarge.)

What makes a cliche? Just use by the many? If everybody sang, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me” at once, would it be finished? Why doesn’t the same principle apply to prayers?

For Martin Amis (who wrote a book on the subject), cliches are empty husks.
In a Charlie Rose interview on YouTube, Amis objected to “moldering novelties” such as…

seen it, done it; got the T-shirt; he went ballistic; I don’t think so, and HELLO. These are dead words. These are herd words.

I don’t agree with Amis about cliches in language (depends on how they’re used, not what they are), but his reasoning is unarguably wrong in art. Art recycles the comatose into the lively. The visual equivalent of herd speak is interesting precisely because it’s herd speak.

(Joseph Mills right, click to enlarge.)

What could be more ordinary than a slide?

For several weeks, I’ve been posting Joseph Mills’ photos, here and here. I discovered him only recently. Using a cheap camera, he brings new meaning to concept of depth of field.

I owe the intro to Ambach & Rice, currently featuring an exhibit of Mills’ collaged and silkscreened unique book pages, titled Anarch. Unlike the photos, which are in Kafka’s famous phrase, “an ax for the frozen sea within us,” the prints (click to enlarge example) have a density that resists connection.

Plus, they’re small and require visual burrowing. It’s easier to keep walking and yet, certain I was heading out the door, I kept doubling back to see them again.

In each, a burning monk and a frog laid on its back, as if on a high-school biology dissection table, open into a changing collage of art history’s high points. Both frog and monk appear to be eating their way through the cannon, like moths in a closet full of matching skirts and sweater sets.

As quoted in the press release, Mills considers himself a latter day Surrealist:

Surrealism didn’t
resolve my concerns about meaning and meaninglessness, but it did address the infinite,
mysterious and subconscious; that was really enough.

Also at A&M are the figurative, colored pencil drawings of Christian Weibrauch. If Mills is corrosively reductive, Weibrauch (click image to enlarge) is dreamily additive.

Down on their luck, our forests have hit the road as homeless people. Their ankles are thick from bad food, and their shoes have no laces. In other drawings, a figure is a world within a world containing worlds – in the artist’s words, “moving on the edge of an osmosis.”

Weibrauch is dangerously close to cute, close to illustrations in children’s books. If that quality could be thought of as an edge, he doesn’t fall off it. Instead of whimsical, there’s a slow-motion, tidal pull inward. Art comes and goes, but by rooting fantasy in a tender, elegaic realism, these drawings have no real pull date.

Mills and Weibrauch continue through April 19.This is the first exhibit of Mills’ silkscreens and Weibrauch’s first exhibit in the U.S.

From Larry Reid, director of Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art during the Culture Wars, former curator at the Experience Music Project and currently running  Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery, an emailed response to this post about commentary on Christina Orr-Cahall, the next director of EMP:

You were wrong in your assessment of Jen Graves’ column about the new EMP director. Actually, Jen understated the case against this awful woman, and your excuses for her behavior are lame at best. In my opinion (Orr-Cahall) is the personification of evil …

 You might recall that I was briefly caught up in this hysteria at COCA in 1989 with my Modern Primitives exhibition (tattoo and body modification.) I was able to prove to the NEA that Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, et. al. were misinformed about the content of the show, which they based on viewing the book of the same title. I used discretion in selecting images for display, and no NEA funding was applied to the catalog.

So I escaped relatively unscathed. At the request of the NEA, I didn’t make a big issue of it in order to avoid further inflaming the passions of the wing nuts.
Years later, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for all correspondence related to Modern Primitives between the NEA, Helms, and others. Though heavily redacted, this file revealed an insane atmosphere and total capitulation on the part of NEA chair John Frohnmayer to the forces of evil.

He and Helms were identical to Hitler and Himmler. They even used the same vocabulary. I swear to gawd Helms referred to “degenerate art.” Without a hint of irony.
Leave it to EMP. I guess Heinrich Himmler was unavailable.

Graves answers my critique & updates her story here and here.

Reid added in a phone conversation that CoCA was audited by the IRA IRS the year following Modern Primitives and that:

We’re still dealing with the fallout from that time. Many misplaced their courage and haven’t found it yet. A decade later, when the (Seattle Art Museum) caved to pressure and canceled Mike Kelley, you and I were the only ones who objected. Where was the outrage?

Sample of objection here. Reid, quoted in my story, said,

Who needs Jesse Helms when we have the Seattle Art Museum? Did the museum make any effort to educate the public about this work? No. If the museum doesn’t have the guts to stand behind a strong work of art when the squeeze is on, then it should go on pretending the 20th century never happened. Seattle’s not ready for Mike Kelley? What are we, the wimp town of all time?

True, but I still think no one should play the Hitler card until there is murder on a massive scale. A rotten attitude toward art isn’t enough. And even on the subject of art, Helms wanted to deny public funding for art he found offensive, not to destroy it and hound its makers out of the country or into death camps. To make these comparisons is disrespectful to those who dealt with the real Nazis. Reid as an arts center director tap dancing to keep his funding is not in the same realm.

To call Christina Orr-Cahall the personification of evil makes a cartoon of the category, but I realize that that Reid works in a comic book store.

From Peripheral Vision, the return of Mr. Peanut, with a quote from William Burroughs to explain it all, via The Western Front:

Since the inexorable logic of reality has created nothing but insoluble
problems, it is now time for illusion to take over. And there can only
be one illogical candidate: Mr. Peanut.

University of Washington print technician Larry Sommers died last week in Chicago of a heart attack. With his major impact on generations of students, he certainly deserves but did not get an obituary in the Seattle PI (online only) or the Seattle Times.

This could be a piece about journalists stretched too thin to cover their communities, but instead, it’s a piece about Sommers’ name in lights across Seattle’s art blogosphere. Two of his former students have blogs and know how to use them.

Emily Podhast Pothast of Translinguistic Other offers great insights into how he did his job, followed by his view of heaven:

One time Larry told me if he could live in any place at any time, he’d
be a rich girl in the 19th century because they all had ponies.  I
tried to tell him that if having a pony was a big priority for him, he
could probably make it happen in his present life. He didn’t listen. He
was too busy chanting “PONY PONY PONY!”

Christina Olsen Burtner on Toys & Noise explains why he was the glue that held everything together.