Archives for April 2009

Jen Graves thinks Vancouver B.C.’s art scene tops Seattle’s, which is a very Seattle thing to maintain. As long as I’ve lived here, Seattle’s been expert at complaining about itself.

How real is the complaint this time? Are we San Jose to Vancouver’s San Francisco, or San Diego to Vancouver’s LA?

If cities could slouch down runways (their tallest buildings serving as hats) or duke it out in boxing rings (their criminals ready with sucker punches), then declaring a winner makes sense. I’d rather think about how Portland, Seattle and Vancouver complement each other than crown one queen for a day.

Since the issue is on the table, however, there are a few things Graves left out.

[Read more…] about Our Vancouver problem

From Tom Chambers and Aline Smithson, Rough Road, at Wall Space Gallery. (Click image to enlarge)

Glass in the Venetian style is as common in Seattle as coffee. Dante Marioni used to blow a few each morning, like a pianist warming up with c-scales. Because they are common, their elaborate beauty offers the same pleasure as eating a whole coconut cake. Somewhere between the third and fourth piece, disgust lays waste to desire.

Shari Mendelson‘s Venetians are a restorative. She makes them by collaging bits of plastic bottles together with a glue gun. Who wouldn’t belly up to the bar for a drink in one of them?

(Click to enlarge)

She’s also expert in more ancient forms. Drop one and it will bounce.

She’s featured in Tikkunim: Jewish roots/Ecological Art at Howard House through May 2.

Jeff Brouws,  Exit 24 off of I-90, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2005

There are other ways to have it all. Below, Alice Wheeler’s GenderFuck Courtney and Tess at WTO Anniversary.

Featured today on ArtsJournal  is Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy’s musings on the morality of the cinematic big bang – Why are movies killing our planet? I clicked on it because I thought it might be about poisonous gasses released by props, a movie set version of dumb bombs.

That story would be interesting, especially if they’d been made in China. But no. She’s upset about the morality of chaos narratives. Take it up with Homer, Ms. Kennedy. As long as the human race has told stories, we’ve entertained each other by imagining the worst.

She’s also miffed that the destruction is sometimes casual:

Only too often, the worst plays out like a blip in the screenplay.

Did she fail to read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Before the story gets properly underway, a bully vaporizes the earth, almost by accident. Arthur Dent is on the road in space because he has nowhere else to go. It’s a comedy.

Wake up, old media. The clock’s ticking. Don’t you want us to remember you fondly? I do not claim that my defunct piece of the old media pie – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – wowed its audience on a daily basis. However, this story would have been laughed off the computer screen before it got there.

I started running images of altered street signs on my former blog, Art to Go,  at the now demised Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which continues online as a shadow of itself. Here’s a sample of the best in those signs, both anonymous and name brand.

(Click to enlarge)

First row, left to right: Iain and Ingrid Baxter, Michael Brophy and anonymous (from ffffound).
Second row: Rick Lehl once, Dan Witz twice.
Third row: The fabulous Dan Witz three more times.
Fourth row: Christopher Martin Hoff, Margaretha Bootsma twice.
Fifth row: Mark Jenkins, Mark Wathieu (image no longer on flickr), Ann Duffy
Sixth row: Brad Downey, three times.
Seventh row: David Shrigley.

Reporting on quake damage in L’Aquila, in central Italy, the New York Times’ traveling art critic, Michael Kimmelman, steps out of the story to comment on why he’d rather live out of suitcases on the road than be part of the contemporary art world he once knew:

Italy is not like America. Art isn’t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It’s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don’t visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can’t live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble.

He could be Moses looking down from a mountain top at a party below. All he sees is the party he hates. He misses whatever else extends to the horizon line. Personally, I’m not looking for Old Testament from an art critic.

At the same paper, Holland Cotter is (as usual), open, generous and perceptive, this time in a review of Younger than Jesus at the New Museum. Towards the end of his essay, however, he raised a question the New Museum would do well to ponder:

“Younger Than Jesus” …is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic, with too much work, particularly photography, making too little impact. But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, (the show) raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.

Cotter’s last graph is perfect closer for an review on the latest in dewy fresh faces:

A small commercial gallery called BLT, on the Bowery across from the New Museum, has announced that its May exhibition will consist exclusively of artists born before 1927. Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud and Ellsworth Kelly will be among the participants. The show will be called “Wiser Than God.”

After Bootsy Holler’s grandmother Ruby died in 1978, her grandfather Willie lived alone there till his death in 2002, in the basement and kitchen and not touching any of the other rooms. For him, they were shrines to the life he had lost.

Holler began documenting the house in 2001. It’s all gone now, and these photos are the only evidence of how it looked in the 23 years between her grandparents’ deaths. Holler’s description of the project here, on her Web site.

(Click images to enlarge.)

Erika Langley:

Annie and Vera Piccola, my great-aunts, always lived in the same house
next to the railroad tracks in Chicora, Pennsylvania,
a place nicknamed “Goosetown” for the bleat of the oil wells. Neither
ever married or left, and the house remained perfectly intact.
The train would pass the house daily, at noon and at seven, marking the
sameness of another day, the sureness of time.
When they were in their eighties I began to document their vanishing
world.

The cutline for the photo below, from China View, reads:

A lion appreciates with pleasure an Easter gift in Buenos Aires Zoo, Argentina, April 9, 2009. (Xinhua Photo)

I see an old fellow contemplating his reduced circumstances; China View sees a celebration of the Easter bunny.

I grow old . . .I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, here.

Critics claim to decode images. What they decode is themselves.