Archives for April 2009

1. Josiah McElheny, Model for Total Reflective Abstraction, 2003. Photo via Bay Area Art Quake)
2. Subodh Gupta, The Silk Route, 2007. Photo via The Guardian
3. Zhan Wang, On Gold Mountain: Sculptures from the Sierra, 2008. Photo via San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

(Click to enlarge)

About Jeremy Deller’s photo of a street sign warning of a church ahead (noted in this post), a reader observed,

It beats the heck out of the kind of silhouettes they put on school crossing signs.

Speaking of those silhouettes, here’s Vanessa Renwick’s altered version ( The Jesus Crosswalk) from her blog, The Oregon Department of Kick Ass.

Say amen, somebody.

There’s also, from Playing for Change, the musical version.

Victoria Haven, subject of the previous post, is a member of a large family – artists interested in grids inspired and/or undermined by the organic, the decorative, the home crafts (like quilts) and the musical. If I could play the piano, I’d use Haven’s work as sheet music.

A group show on this theme would be nice. Here’s a start on whom I’d put in it, besides, of course, Haven. Click images to enlarge.

(Left to right)
First row: Chauney Peck, Emily Pothast, Harold Hollingsworth and Jen Liu
Second row: Martin Puryear, Peter Millett, Eric Eley and Noah Grussgott

The landscape is not what it once was, a solidly rooted construct. Victoria Haven’s version cuts to the bone. She uses a scalpel to draw a relief pattern of its outlines in paper, Mylar and cut steel with polished nickel plate. The results hang an inch or so from the wall, casting shadows. (Click images to enlarge.)

In her drawings, abstracted shapes dig into the paper, wrinkling the seam between positive and negative spaces, the wrinkles serving as shadows.

The ecstasy of geometry: Ellsworth Kelly meets Robert Irwin. Haven finds new music in the old bones of their ideas. In her current exhibit at Greg Kucera, a new wrinkle. Haven stretched rubber bands into patterns and photographed the results. The silky slide between form and space, between object and its shadow, blurs the boundaries she so carefully articulates and challenges.

Vancouver B.C.’s Isabelle Pauwels won the Brink, a Northwest artist award debuting at the Henry Gallery, sponsored by John and Shari Behnke.

Jen Graves’ reaction here. Emily Pothast here. I’m still thinking about it, but congratulations to Pauwels. Party at the Henry April 17.

When the Seattle Times eliminated its art critic, Seattle shrugged. The art critic the paper had employed (Sheila Farr) was visible mostly in her absence. Only the truly out of it bemoaned the nonexistent loss.

I despise the Seattle Times, partly because of its right wing editorial page but largely because of its we-know-what’s-good-for-you tone and its ability to take good writers (such as Farr) and turn their work into drivel.

As long as I’ve been in Seattle, the ST has been certain it represents the best of all newspaper worlds. In visual art, it had no reason to think so. I resented it as a missed opportunity. Why should the largest paper in the state so poorly serve the art interests of its community? Newspaper-to-newspaper competition would have been nice.

As the art critic at the now defunct version of the Seattle PI, I had none, save, for a brief period, from Robin Updike, who’s smart and willing to look around.

A funny thing happened after the position was axed. The paper, now fighting for its life, has
given visual art a prominence previously unimaginable in its pages. Credit must go to ST’s A&E editor Lynn Jacobson, who turned Gayle Clemans and Michael Upchurch loose to cover the field.

Both are alert, awake, aware and willing to tackle art that requires work to produce even a semi-adequate response. Their reviews are not placeholders. They are evidence of engagement.

Because of them, my anti-ST rancor is toning itself down. If they keep it up and publisher Frank Blethen steps aside ( assuming he is not replaced by an equally weird family member), I might eventually let bygones be bygones and subscribe.

From Josh Poehlein’s Borderlands, via To Fear It Is To Know It – Keep on keeping on. We can live anywhere.

Invited to participate in Andre Breton’s exhibit titled First Papers of Surrealism in 1942, Marcel Duchamp waited till others installed their work and then draped it with his. His Mile of String reduced all other art to background.

Checkmate.

Art is full of bitchy moments, but rarely do they become historical. Hats off to the man whose disdain made him a beloved and influential figure to this day.

He’s the art world’s Bartley the Scrivener. Just like Bartley, who’d prefer not to, Duchamp indicted the system in which he refused to participate. His reason was solid, and it was about reason: If art were no more than the metronomic production of visual niceties, it was nothing at all.

More than 60 years later, Vik Muniz followed Duchamp’s lead with an unintended, boomerang effect. In obscuring the work of others, Muniz is the one whose product is a thoughtless pleasantry, a parlor trick.

Three examples from his Pictures of Pigment series were recently at the James Harris Gallery. He piled up layers of colored pigment and photographed the results for a final product, attaching his dead weight to the memory of other artists.

Thanks to him, Gustave Courbet, Frederic E. Church and Grandma
Moses all come out the same. What’s really the same is him, not them.

(Click to enlarge)
1. The Oak at Flagey, after Gustave Courbet, 2007
2. Evening in the Woods, after Grandma Moses, 2006
3. The Icebergs, after Frederic E. Church, 2007 

When business writers say things are looking up, they mean for banks. If there’s a trickle down effect in the art world, I haven’t seen it yet. (Image, on the wall at The Hideout. )

Rough, tough times continue for artists and everybody who relies on them (dealers, critics, museums, art centers). In Seattle, however, there’s the comfort of knowing that our local art bar is not just a hide out but an engaging correspondent.

Last week’s letter to customers – Does your bar write you letters? – here. This week’s is equally robust:

On Tuesday our ice machine stopped working. One day everything is fine,
the next it is broken. Just like that. It was only four years old and
had worked like a dream – not a hitch.

Every time we lifted the flap,
it was to the brim with sparkling, clear ice – hundreds of pounds – it was
like opening a treasure chest. If you ever felt down, you could just
lift up the lid and smile at all the dazzle, the technology, the purity
of it all. Have you seen 400 pounds of ice cubes, all at once?

Tuesday it all came to an end. The fan stopped spinning. Drips of cold
water leaked from the throat of this marvel. We gathered around,
pointed flashlights, plugged and unplugged, unscrewed panels and poked
around. When things are working great you just don’t ask questions, it’s
only when they break that you investigate.

Justin noticed the intake screen on the back. He saw a thick
fur of dust with bellybutton lint and eyelashes that stuck to the screen
like a sweater. We had killed it. All it ever asked was for someone to
clean the screen and let it breath. We killed it out of our own neglect.

There
is a price to pay for killing. When you kill a machine the price is
clearly written on a handwritten invoice with parts that you’ve never
heard of and labor rates that rival a doctor’s. It was a bitter pill.

We
encourage you to look at the things that are working so perfectly
around you and pay closer attention. Get your oil changed. Fix that
funky extension cord. There are batteries to
replace, filters to change, chimneys to sweep and letters to write. There
is nothing worse than realizing something died because of simple
neglect. We are just lucky that it was an ice machine.

Fondly, The Hideout

When I make a go of the freelance writing biz, hiring an editor will be at the top of my to-do list. I have him picked out already: Mark Matassa. I forget his exact title, but until he left several years ago to take a very early semi-retirement, he was a big deal at the Seattle PI. I gather he now plays a lot of poker.

While we were still working at the same paper, I could never figure out a way to score his editorial attention, but I’ve seen the dried pig’s ears he transformed into a living animal. He’s good at the nitpick, but he’s great at tone, rhythm, word choice, fairness, flow and logic.

Till that happy day when he is in my employ, I count on the audience
for after-the-fact editing and pay it in gratitude. This is a shout out to my most
loyal online editors: Tyler Green, Betsey Brock, Eric Fredericksen, Doug McLennan and
Tim Appelo.