Archives for July 2009

Target Practice review here. Previous post (Yoko Ono) here.

Below,  from Target Practice, Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting, 1965

Second-wave feminism had just begun when Kubota contributed her version of change the joke, slip the yoke. Using women as paint brushes in performance begun with Yves Klein (The Monotone Symphony, 1949, restaged March 9, 1960). Unlike the bar antics of certain talented strippers, Kubota did not paint with an intimate body part. The brush is attached to her underwear. Proving that her performance was an all-star event, George Maciunas took the photograph.

Review of Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 (here).

Included in the exhibit is Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail from 1961. What she knows about painting could fit in a can with room left over for the paint.

Target Practice makes a terrific case for the artists who cut, stomped, burned, melted and made fun of painting in the middle of the 20th century. Lest we get carried away by the thrill of it all, however, curator Michael Darling also included the self-righteously smug, always a big part of this movement.

And when it comes to smug passing itself off as deep, nobody tops Ono.  With her Fluxus credentials and her weird luck of marrying John Lennon, her knack for engaging banalities gave her a major career.

The list of critics who’ve fallen for it is long. Here’s Kenneth Baker discussing a billboard that accompanied Yes Yoko Ono in 2002 and bore the legend, War Is Over! If You Want It — Love and peace from John and Yoko.

Ono’s conceptual works are thought experiments. Performing them — or
even thinking about performing, which often amounts to the same thing — can
alter one’s sense of the power of inner reorientation. Do we want war to be
over or merely think we do?

Be the ball, Kenneth. Visualize world peace. Up with people. We are the world.

The problem with the world is, it continues to be the world.

Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Back to Ono. Painting to Hammer a Nail invites the audience to pick up a nail and pound it into a wood panel painted white. Why this exercise qualifies as an attack on painting is beyond me. It has nothing to do with painting. It’s all about Ono telling people what to do.

But over the weekend, this oft-seen piece took a weird turn. In Seattle, people didn’t follow her instructions. They started to, but then they gave up.

Here’s the piece on Friday:

Here it is Tuesday:

Instead of a place for pounding out the artist’s message, it became a community bulletin board. (Anybody seen my puppy?) Credit for inspiring it goes to Ono, as all of it qualifies as a homage.

Since Western Bridge opened five years ago, singular visions of the soggy have served as exhibition mainstays. Its current exhibit, Underwater, is a salon-style greatest hits. The new shares space with work in play from earlier efforts, such as 19 Rainstorms and River Styx, both from 2005; Insubstantial Pageant Faded from 2007, and You Complete Me from 2008.

It rains in Seattle. Why has no other exhibition space made note of the city’s interest in the subject?

As part of You Complete Me, Jeppe Hein‘s 20-inch square Ice Cube
melted around the clock a few feet north of the front door, watering the plants and
staying out of everybody’s way. Taken inside, however, the cube takes
advantage of being in the wrong. Ordinarily, art doesn’t leak on a
gallery floor.

Ice Cube
is Minimalism in a confessional mode, spilling everything it knows.
Every day it opts to change formal rigor into an inconsequential mess.
Outdoors, Ice Cube was an ice cube. Indoors, it’s a metaphor.
As it disappears, even optimists find themselves thinking of what else
is melting and what else is rising in its wake.

Underwater not
only confronts the real world, it offers a chance for change in both senses of the word. Paul
Ramirez Jonas‘ Well is open and ready for business. Drop coins into its
cup, and the job of well-wishing is well done.

Mark Shetabi‘s oil/panel painting, November
from 2005, is a historic narrative impersonating a random moment.  After the second Bush/Cheney victory, we were well and
truly underwater.

Roberta Smith laments the slow death of the gallery card announcement here. Personally, I’m just as happy to get mine online.

Jeffry Mitchell:

Mitchell’s studio, via Facebook:

From Vital 5, a continuation of its awards to anybody at all who can follow a few simple instructions and happens to get lucky. Each time out, one person (or group) walks away with $500. (More here.)

Till July 10, all who post on YouTube demonstrations of themselves (or others) dancing as if they’d been shot will go into a pool from which the winner will be selected at random. Inevitably (and unnecessarily), the great participate, such as (below) Jessica Jobaris in Germany. Film by Luke Allen; score, I’mma Shine by Youngbloodz.

Previous posts: Arbitrary awards in performance art and sculpture here and here. All entries in all fields will be exhibited in Seattle in the fall. The project is an attack on the idea that experts know what quality is and panels full of them are doing a heck of a job, Brownie, at finding and/or supporting it.

Denver’s Dan Ericson (Dunn) is the Johnny Appleseed of heavy metal street instructions. What is barren he makes bloom. (Via)

May we suggest a Charles Ray with that? (Idea, Robert Mittenthal. Image via)

Law Abiding Shopping Cart, via Retail Hell Underground (Related: Not Always Right, via Slog)

Red (Ketchup)

White (Tara Donovan)

Blue (John Grade)

Those are good, but I also like:

Red (Jeff Weinstein, kosher edition)

White (Jack Daws, Serf’s Up! – Chromogenic print of artist-made construction from sand from Florida, 2004)

Blue (Sherry Markovitz, Mortimer and Friends, detail)

Joseph Anthony Velazquez (Via Vermillion)

Dan Webb (Via Greg Kucera)

Elizabeth Sandvig

Jenny Zoe Casey (detail)

Andrew Keating

Tip Toland