Archives for June 2009

Taryn Simon, photo and text, from her American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: contaminated ground in watery blue light. Always nice to see how the Evergreen State strikes artists from elsewhere. (Bio from Gagosian.)


Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation
Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy
Southeastern Washington State.

Submerged
in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel
nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they
contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States.
The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the
electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off
energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The
temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The
pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing
one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of
radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

Takako Araki,  Bible in the Sand, ceramic, 1979:

(Another version)

Emily Pothast, The Holy Bible:New American Revision  (By crossing out everything that did not pertain, she found a text within the text devoted to violence and cruelty.)

Detail: (Click to enlarge:)

I like what Elie Wiesel told a man who boasted of keeping a Jewish friend’s Torah safe in Berlin during the war. Learning that the friend did not survive, Wiesel told the man he should have kept the Jew safe and let the Nazis have the Torah. There are always more where that Torah came from, but in the Jewish tradition, if you save a life, you save the world. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. It’s true: Jews are more sensible than Catholics.

Another accidental exhibit at Seattle artRESOURCE: 7 ceramic sculptures by Mutsuo Yanagihara, dating from 1966-67, when he taught at the University of Washington. By the time I was writing about art in Seattle, more than a decade later, his name didn’t come up in a local context. I hadn’t realized he lived in Seattle for a year and was featured in an exhibit at the Henry Gallery.

The opportunity to see in Seattle a sample of his early work is invaluable. (Click images to enlarge.)

An elderly man entering a hospital for tests is asked about his food
preferences. “I eat anything,” he responds, which turns out to be
untrue. He eats anything within the narrow range of what his wife
serves him.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it’s easier on the digestive tract.

Art
critics say they make aesthetic judgments about art, not about whatever
political content might serve as its subject matter. This stance is
easy for the typically leftist critic, because virtually all art with
overt political content comes from the left. It’s against the usual
negatives (war, racism, sexism, concentrated wealth, wasteful carbon
footprints) and in favor of the usual affirmatives (civil rights, human
rights, economic justice, social diversity and so forth.)

Happily I proceed, unchallenged, until considering the work of Charles Krafft. (Or, recently, nostalgic/romantic art
about Boy Scouts.) In both cases, I find that I am not as open-minded
as I think I am; that when it comes to political content, I am not
open-minded at all.

Krafft is having an accidental career survey at a resale gallery known as Seattle ARTresource, with a dozen paintings from the 1980s onward and 18 hand-painted ceramic plates from his Disasterware series.

Seeing
a fair sample of Krafft’s plates together for the first time in years,
I was struck by their secret narrative. They are an extended version of
the artist’s self-portrait, featuring the prickly ground of his
compulsion to offend. 

To a Nazi-loving skinhead who told the artist he was his hero, Krafft replied,

I can’t imagine why. I’m making fun of you people.

More accurately, Krafft is making fun of everybody, including himself.

In 1992, when he had his last exhibit in a mainstream Seattle gallery (Davidson), Sam Davidson told me he was troubled by his own insistence that one of Krafft’s Disasterware plates not be in the show. After taking a look at the censored plate, I said, “Good call.”

[Read more…] about Charles Krafft – the private meaning of public outrage

Via

From the admirable Brian Chin, a member of both the old PI and the new online-only, arts averse version:

Two-and-a-half months have elapsed since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication. Its passing has been commemorated through private parties, radio shows, documentary films and countless news stories.
(Photo via.)

This Wednesday night, the community gets its chance to say farewell. Journalism organizations from around the region are co-sponsoring a free public tribute to the newspaper and its contributions to Seattle.
The program will include a multimedia retrospective of the newspaper’s 146 years of publication, a musical performance by Heidi Muller and appearances by special guests including historian John Hughes and author Bruce Barcott. P-I favorites such as David Horsey, Art Thiel and Regina Hackett are scheduled to appear. Ken Schram will emcee.
The event will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 3, at Town Hall. Admission is free but reservations are required. Call 206-331-1276 or e-mail seattlepitribute@gmail.com.

I’ve been asked to read a couple of letters to the editor about arts coverage. Arts coverage? Let’s not bring up arts coverage. In the new PI, there isn’t any.

The Kirkland Arts Center
is a beacon in the comfortable wasteland of its locale. The KAC
mobilizes community with a wide range of courses and takes them
higher in its ambitious galleries.

On view through Wednesday is Dimensional Invention curated by KAC gallery director (and artist) Cable Griffith.

Claire Cowie:
Her pastels are shades not found in nature. Her mutant rodents grow
like vegetables in webbed ground, content to be what they are, isolated pause
points in .a mass of connection.

Patrick Holderfield heats minimalism to the point of implosion in order to turn time against itself.



Whiting Tennis slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Painter Tim Cross finds in three dimensions a mirror through which he sees darkly.

Ben Hirschkoff: His clouds explore the tragedy of the costume jewelry – all of the aspirations but none of the verisimilitude.

Patricia Hagen creates the material equivalent of ripe organics in their dying fall, leaking their lives away.

(Three exhibits at the Bellevue Arts Museum., all organized by the museum. Click images to enlarge.)

1. Lopez Island wood carver Michael Peterson begins with chunks of green fir, hemlock, cedar or madrone. He needs it to be wet, almost pulpy, so he can hollow it out with a chainsaw and shape the edges. As the piece dries, it shrinks and pulls, extending the marks of the chain into long gullies that the artist smooths by sandblasting and sometimes bleaching.

The natural world is putty in his hands, and the force he brings to bear is a kind of erosion.  When he presents them in layers, each is free, with nothing rooted or glued down.

To September 20. Peterson is represented by the Traver Gallery.

2. Portland’s Judy Hill is an artist who dares to repeat herself. For decades she has fashioned the same figures in colored glass and raku, which is not, in contemporary art, thought to be a good thing. For her, it is.

The glass looks like previously-licked lollipops, overheated and on the verge of melting. The clay is corrosive, grizzled and seamed. Her women have been through a lot, but their
confectionery, free-floating attire makes it impossible to sum them up or write them off.

Through January 3.

3.The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book : Using the Edward Ruscha rule, if Michael Peterson’s work is huh? wow!, then the artists in this show tend toward wow! huh.

Peter Schjeldahl explains:

Start anywhere. Look. Wonder why any given art is the way it is and not some other way. The artist made certain choices, producing certain effects. Walk back the cat, as they say in espionage. Perhaps read art historians and critics for clues–but not solutions. Your own pleasure must be your goal and guide. A great deal of art, of any period, is ridiculous. But you won’t be a fair judge unless you consent to regard each work as sincere and intelligent until proven otherwise. (Developing taste speeds up the process, but it’s still a process.) If you hate a work on first sight, fine. That’s an authentic response. But stick around. Keep looking. You will have further responses. You might end up hating the work even more, but with an enriched understanding of both it and yourself. Very often, our judgment evolves the other way: what we think we like, at first, disappoints upon contemplation. The artist Edward Ruscha promulgated a handy rule in this regard: “Bad art is ‘Wow! Huh?’ Good art is ‘Huh? Wow!’

About the Book Borrowers, I wouldn’t go so far as to say bad. No rule, no matter how catchy, works outside its own inevitability narrow framework. But thanks to their material invention, these artists have an immediate appeal, although there’s little in the way of a second punch.

That said, I’m extremely fond of Long-Bin Chen’s Guan Ying with Flower Crown (Ming Dynasty), 2007, carved from Manhattan white pages phone books. I do not believe that custom would stale its variety. Years from now, if I happen upon it, I’ll say, “From phone books. Wow.”

To June 14.

Vinchen via Wooster Collective.

Bingo at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

In 2005, when it reopened as a crafts center, BAM hosted Garth
Clark’s traveling show, The Artful Teapot, featuring the best in
contemporary pots. After that came a long, slow slide.

A craft museum has to take up its bed and walk. It has to assume the
burden of its niche, honor its legacy and cut a new path through the
thicket of material creation. Objects wandering between worlds, too
proud to be craft and too timid to be art, are not going to cut it.

By 2008, BAM had righted itself, although its difficult galleries were awkward hosts for the exhibits they housed. Good artists ended up looking at if they were waiting for their space to materialize and had unpacked their work in the hallway as a temporary measure.

Now, halfway through 2009, everything clicks: the art, the space, the flow, the light and the installations.

BAM is the ultimate come-from-behind institution. It’s surely the only art museum to have announced its own death, shut down and revived its own corpse a year later, in BAM’s case, with a craft-driven mission.

Like virtually every other culture institution in the country, money’s tight, but unlike so many others, attendance is a bright spot. According to Tanja Baumann, director of marketing, BAM’s first quarter numbers reveal a solid advance, from 6,338 in 2008 to 9,496 in 2009.

Next post, a review of the four three exhibits (time ran out on historic American quilts) currently on view. That leaves the lobby, where Seattle’s Paul Margolis’
I Imagined Myself as a Meter Maid (full-sized cart, 2002), made of quilted fabric (including lace), wood, metal and foam, dominates. He’s an artist/ bus driver who has previously quilted such objects as stop signs, none of which are online. He deserves a wider career.

Click images to enlarge.