Archives for June 2009

In the catalog for The Puppet Show at the Frye (organized by the ICA), John Bell claims that a puppeteer frustrated by his unachievable desire to control people (Being John Malkovich) the “way he controls marionettes…has nothing to do with real puppetry and is instead a misdirected metaphor about puppets: the idea that the goal of puppet performance is complete control of the object.”

The word “complete” saves the sentence, but not by much. Subtle undercurrents are not the ocean. A bottom is not a top, and a puppet directs nobody’s action, not even its own, especially not its own. One person peels the grape, the other eats it: When I say do it, hop to it.

But rules of puppetry are not rules of art. Art is not limited to the taking and/or giving of orders. It’s about doing what you can defend, which is, in this show, to muddy the waters.

Bruce Nauman’s Violent Incident (Man/Woman Segment) is puppet tennis, with actors. If violence is the ball, they bat it back and forth; both victims and aggressors.

Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija use puppets as art world stand-ins. Once artists establish a brand, can’t they disappear inside it, letting their puppets do the interviews? Who’s the puppet in this case, the figure sustained by strings or the journalist taking the interview seriously?

In Guy Ben Ner’s Elia: A Story of an Ostrich Chick (2003), the artist, his wife and two children descend the evolutionary latter to enact a drama that accurately portrays their lives – evolution as a slide guitar.

In Kara Walker’s Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, whites are slaves whom blacks generously claim, only to be exhausted by the whites’ inability to rise to the rudiments of civilized behavior. It’s a shadow play in video, but not a simple exchange of roles. The whites are burdened by white stereotypes. In the end, power does not corrupt, and oppression does not ennoble.

Nayland Blake’s Tabletop Production of the Philosophy in the Bedroom is a history of the old world, its decadence and freedom preserved in fragments. Annette Messager’s Faire Paradeis a pair of child’s pajamas riddled with colored pencils – St Sebastian for preschoolers.

If Pierre Huyghe’s “This is not a time for Dreaming” (with Puppet Heap) were the entire show, it would be worth seeing, even though the narrative cannot be gleaned without explanation. The narrative doesn’t matter. What does is the clear, haunting beauty of each scene as it slides from present to past. Art can break your heart.

That leaves, among a host of other terrific entries, the obvious one, reproduced on the cover of the catalog and with nearly every review: Dennis Oppenheim’s Theme for a Major Hit (1974).

To answer his own question – how to make performance art without being there? – he created a cadre of his own mini-me’s. Dressed in hip suits, they assume various unruffled positions till a timer goes off and they dance.

Puppets are rarely cool. They’re fall guys who are beat on the head but rise again, bits of their stuffing clinging to the cugel. Oppenheim’s make Andre Benjamin look awkward. They’re light on their feet, with a heavy-metal gleam in their gun-gray eyes.

Jaymi Durate, a Frye guard who’s spent weeks with them, winces when the bell sounds and they thunder into action. She says their charm wears out, and she could be right. Give them five minutes and leave, on the other hand, they’re hot forever. Her best-of-show is Pierre Huyghe.’s. The more you see it, she said, the better it gets.

(Previous here and here.)

Because he and his girlfriend just broke up and he remains broken up about it, a guard at the Frye cannot force himself to rotate through the gallery in which Cindy Loehr‘s two-channel video, Colloquy, runs on two monitors.

The Frye has a tight crew. Other guards are covering for him.

He’s not the only one who backs away as if the gallery’s a gun. Loehr’s pair of talking hands with rhinestone eyes and mouths that move in the crack between thumb and palm recite a text that anybody who’s not extraordinarily lucky has already heard and/or spoken.

Only one hand talks, and it’s a massive utterance.

In their search for closure, the garrulous cover their targets in wounded projections. They lay out what the other did wrong and how (even now) the rift can be healed (baby, don’t go), if only the silent would speak in confessional detail and profess revived devotion.

Loehr’s silent, soon-to-be ex expresses misery with small, downcast quivers. No frog spreadeagled in a high school biology lab suffers more. The text tells itself through hands manipulated into expression, which makes those hands puppets. The videos that feature them are in The Puppet Show, a traveling exhibit from the ICA.

At the Frye through Sept. 13. Previous here, more to come.

I did not hustle to see The Puppet Show from the ICA when it opened at the Frye last month, partly because (already been chewed) puppets are everywhere. Pretty sure the exhibit plucked a few stringed bodies from the contemporary image stream as easy-to-chew crowd pleasers and sorry more compelling explorations tend not to travel, I filed it under an ever-receding-into-the-future to-do list.

I should have listened to Jen Graves, review here. (Mine in multiples soon to follow.)

The Puppet Show is killer good, and so is its catalog. Catalogs for crowd pleasers are either too jolly or too academic, good for their show lists, images and quotes from artists. This one, like Poussin, can truly claim to have thought of everything.

Below, jewels plucked from its various crowns, otherwise known as quotes from essays, beginning with the anchor piece by ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner, which provides an essential history of.

The art of bringing dead things to life is how Kiki Smith, who was once a busker with a Punch and Judy show, relates her work as a sculptor to puppetry. Or half-life, since part of what makes puppets so compelling – and, to many minds, creepy – as objects is that they always appear to be as much dead as alive.

The puppet that opens its eyes after everyone has gone to sleep…

(About Calder’s Circus, from 1961:) The sight of a big old bear of a man playing with tiny childish objects … encapsulates a lifetime’s effort to make art as gratifying as a toy.

fingers tangled in strings…

In the creation of art, it is the puppet one makes of oneself that is most important. (Harold Rosenberg)

Jane Taylor: Big points for resuscitation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which was always too big-idea for me, and whose virtues have receded through
the lens of nephews and nieces, who unanimously reject it.

‘Stop.
Will you. Stop Dave. Will you stop Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid Dave.‘ 
These are not questions, nor are they appeals. They are chains of
signifiers.

[Read more…] about Prelude to a puppet: the catalog (Hello Dave)

Via

Theodore Roethke, images Charles LeDray. From Sperone Westwater except portrait of the artist.

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

After Chase Bank bought the failed Washington Mutual in 2008, Chase found itself with more art than it had space for, as Chase’s Washington Mutual is a slimmed-down version of the disgraced original.

What happens to roughly two-dozen paintings, drawings and sculptures by veterans of the Northwest mainstream that Chase decided not to keep? (Including Alden Mason, Joseph Goldberg, Jeffry Mitchell, Robert Sperry, Frank Okada, Doris Chase and Gaylen Hansen.)

Earlier this week, Chase staged a give-away. Museums were invited to choose what they wanted, followed by other selected nonprofits. The Seattle Art Museum confirmed that it participated but declined to say what it picked, as those choices are dependent upon approval from an acquisitions committee.

Rumor has it SAM chose the Sperry and nothing else. Other museums didn’t want to confirm the giveaway at all, as they believe Chase wants to remain anonymous.

Chase could have sold everything anonymously and cashed the check, although the gap between the work’s appraised value and current market value could be large, making tax deductions a better financial option. Whatever the motive, there are worse things that could happen to art than landing in a museum.

Arts patron and irrepressible character Max Gurvich died at home in Seattle at age 94. (Seattle Times obit here.)

Board member and donor (with his wife Helen) to a variety of Seattle arts groups, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Gallery and Cornish College of the Arts, Gurvich’s lasting legacy might be a hideous pair of woven, window-blind style metal sculptures that rise 22-feet out of the water at the west end of the Evergreen Point Bridge, which connects Seattle to its  Eastside suburbs.

I wrote a story for the PI when they were installed in 2002. Here’s a recap:

Seattle’s rules for who can place what art in what part of the public sphere are rigorous, and yet Gurvich triumphed over all that to install his creations in a prominent spot, where 130,000 cars drive by them each day.

Here’s the good part: He didn’t say he was the artist to anybody who needed to approve the placement. Instead, he spent a year getting a permit from the Department of Transportation and the go-ahead from the majority of nine community clubs and six cities on Lake Washington.

They didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell.

Tom Lentz, Department of Transportation assistant regional manager for maintenance and traffic:

I thought Max was the
patron, and he had an artist working with him. I guess I should have
asked, but I’m an engineer. I looked into the engineering issues.
Rarely do people offer to give us something. I found it refreshing. Max
got support from the city’s art commission, and the state’s, too.

Actually, he didn’t. The state, King County and Seattle arts
commissions all said they had nothing to do with it.

When Lentz went back to his files to figure out what happened, he found that the DOT contacted both city and state arts commissions, and was told by
each it wasn’t their baby. Not on city property, said the city. Not
through our funding sources, said the state. 

The
sculptures, titled Aurora Borealis, look like early ’60s room dividers from a suburban den
joined to make inverted pyramids. Seven years after their installation, their kitsch exuberance has run its course.

Seattle curator Vicki Halper:

You have to hand it to him. He did it all. He should have been
stopped, but he did it all. 

Via

Via

Everybody’s got something to hide ‘cept for me and my monkey.
– John Lennon

Andrew Miksys:

Miksys won his first bingo game at 11, collecting $280. In high school he delivered a newspaper his father published, Bingo
Today, to veterans halls, fraternal associations, churches and sports
clubs in Seattle.

He knows the people he photographs in bingo halls, most of whom are dead and don’t know it. The routine of the game keeps them in a pretense of motion. They
stare are their cards the way the empty eye sockets of skeletons stare
into eternity.

Below, their stash.

Matt Browning:

Politicians infantilize the audience by reducing its members to first
names and jobs, as if everybody is a waiter in a cheap restaurant,
always on duty.
(Joe the Plumber.) Artists do the reverse. Instead of gassing up a stereotype till it
rises like a parade float, they use absurdist intensity to bring it to ground where it can be examined, ridiculed, celebrated and/or fractured into
the particular.

Take Matt Browning, who explained himself in his debut exhibit at Seattle’s Crawl Space late last year:

Men typically engage in bizarre competitions and intrepid
behavior during their lives as a means of bolstering machismo and
camaraderie. Instituting male pedagogy, identity and peer acceptance in
suburban America can, for example, take the form of climbing the
tallest tree as a child, asserting athletic prowess in adolescence, and
winning reckless drinking competitions in early adulthood. My work
illustrates the simultaneous presence of lunacy and beauty in these
types of testosterone-laden behaviors.

He digs to the root of male desire and
finds it wrapped in baseball, beer, pot, skate boarding and the blunt end of taking things
apart:

Leave no trace, review here.

Liz Magor:

When she was a child, she liked to slip into a forest near her
home in search of a kid-size weasel hole. She thought if she lived
there with a dog and a bag of potatoes, the silence of the natural
world would replace the ruckus in her head. Her work is about the folly of aspiring to be in a hole, and the cultures that become one.

Hollow

Laura Fritz:

Fritz thinks inside the box, where she finds fragments of your inner life. When you were otherwise engaged, what was private became public and subject to experiment. Her merger of science and art involves video, mechanical contraptions, cast-polyester molds and a tendency to surround images with thick slabs of silence.

Like Larry Bell, her boxes are all about light, but unlike his spare volumes that trap light on their surfaces through a variety of coated films, her light needs the light in the larger room shut off to be seen at all.
In the dark, when her fuzzy and uncertain pulses are the only illumination, they slide around you and take you in. In Section 4, a cat’s shadow appears inside a box, lit by the milky glow of her video screen. The cat hesitates at the locked door and bows its head.

Section 4