Archives for July 2009

In response to this post, Henry Art Gallery director Sylvia Wolf writes:

As a response to the concern voiced above, I am pleased to report that the Henry Art Gallery is strong. Managing and thriving in this economic recession calls for bold steps from Henry leadership.

As Washington State’s oldest art museum (founded in 1927), the Henry has been through tough times before. What has sustained the organization through past highs and lows is the pioneering spirit that has made the Henry a cultural leader and model of innovation in the Pacific Northwest. Those distinguishing characteristics have never been stronger.

Like all arts organizations, our revenues have dropped significantly, endowment earnings are down, and state cuts have significantly reduced our funding. To that end, between January and May, we developed a long-range plan for operating under significantly different economic conditions. Measures taken included a reduction in force and in gallery hours. In addition, effective June 1, all Henry staff work hours and pay were reduced by 20%. All of us at the Henry–staff and Board alike–have worked hard in the past six months to determine how best to serve the community during a period of diminishing resources.

Although the fiscal crisis greatly challenged us and called for sacrifices, we made our changes and ended the fiscal year, June 31, 2009, with a balanced budget. For the year ahead, we have a vigorous plan for providing access to art and artists at this time when the need for inspiration from the arts is more acute than ever.

[Read more…] about Henry Gallery director Sylvia Wolf responds

Photographers sneak up on people or catch them on the fly.
Walker Evans went so far as to rig his camera so it appeared to be
focused elsewhere for his Subway series, Many Are Called.

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection at the Henry Art Gallery concentrates on portraits that are collaborative. The subject understands the scrutiny and has prepared a face to meet it.

Edward Curtis: Among others, Bill Holm defended Curtis against Christopher Lyman’s 1982 debunking study, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions. which accused him of racism, sexism, nostalgic romanticism and intentional fraud. Lyman’s harsh view has not prevailed. Yes, Curtis traveled with costumes and used them interchangeably when subjects presented themselves as insufficiently colorful. He wanted to reconstruct the past, not document the present.

Like Curtis, Marsha Burns believes in engaged contact. In the 1980s and ’90s, she worked in gelatin silver prints or enlarged Polaroids, with subjects
standing against a folded, gray backdrop. Her prints are are an orchestration of
grays, blacks and whites, with the edges from the
contact sheet and sprocket-marks from the film serving  as decorative
borders and a homage to the means of her production.

Also like Curtis, her photos are theatrical presentations, sum points of edifice. They are visual stories whose internal construction delivers meaning. One thinks of Irving Penn’s studio shots of tribal peoples around the globe, not in this show. Burns’ are more intimate than Penn’s, but just as crisp and elegant.

In Burns’ view, style is substance, attire is destiny. Seeking to be a medium through which people could tell their own stories, she sought subjects whose bodies speak for them and (unlike Curtis) told them to compose themselves as they wished to be seen. Her lack of cynicism, her belief that portraiture can reveal essential truth, even the idea that there is something called essential truth, put Burns at odds with many of her contemporaries. While they were busy exposing reality as a series of selected fictions, she was after soul, the grace in character.

Her approach has more in common with Thomas Eakins than Cindy Sherman.

Also in the exhibit, curated by Sylvia Wolf, Henry director: Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, Frank A. Rinehart, Benjamin J. Falk, Samuel Montague Fassett, Jim Goldberg, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Deborah Luster, Fred E. Miller, Nicholas Nixon, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Andy Warhol.

Through Oct. 25.

Dominated by the Christianity for more than 1,500 years, art in the West continues to be seeded with its signs and symbols. They exert a magnetic pull over imagery that may or may not have been created to declare them.

Lauren Grossman’s use is intentional, if not reverential. (Below, Clear Christ and Behold, via Howard House)

From his literal youth, Michael Lucero from 1978, via Howard House:

Folkert De Jong‘s could be accidental, but it’s real in any case, a crucified figure who has become his cross.

Extended arms can be enough. (Damien Hirst)

A body made of Duct Tape slumping as if dead is a descent from the Cross. (Dan Webb, Mr. Fixit )

Speaking of a descent from the Cross: (Tom Otterness, Untitled)

Another descent. (Mark Kang O’Higgins)

Even a configuration of a (less than) heavenly host rings the old bell. (John Feodorov – Office Deity)

For Emily Duffy, the old bell is an alarm. In Constitutional Doublecross, she laments the blurring of the line between church and state. (Via Sandra)

As befits the iconography, the fallen continue to fall. (Maurizio Cattelan)

Faulkner:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Jasper Johns’ light bulbs came from comic strips. They remain a constant that pops up in his sculpture, prints, paintings and drawings. Jasper Johns: Light Bulbs is a survey of their appearance from 1957 to 1976, in 17 prints and six sculptures, at the Henry Gallery.

Johns, who also has a starring role in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78
at the Seattle Art Museum, likes his bulbs burnt out, which is possibly
a joke on his status as the idea man of contemporary art.

I love this survey, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Limited to one idea, the range of the artist’s material invention becomes evident.

Some light bulbs flicker before they go out, and some just go out.The world it is the old world yet.

At the Henry through Oct. 25.

In a good economy with a sold middle class, factory work seems dreary. Is this all there is? What about my hopes and dreams? In a bad economy with an eroded middle class, whatever factory work remains is an enviable a safe haven. As Bob Dylan put it in Tangled Up in Blue, “lucky just to be employed.”

Cao Fei’s My Future Is Not A Dream has a human-clog-in-the-machine feeling without the usual rage or desperation, because in this video, each clog is conscious of his/her contribution. Then there’s the magic: A ballerina appears en pointe as a dying swan and, in the next scene, as a sorter of light bulbs. A man with a clip board takes up the dance, and so does a women in jeans.

My Future Is Not A Dream is not the alienated surreal of  Doug Aitken or the worker advocacy of Allan Sekula. It is a homage to those who make things with their hands and dream with their hearts, in Mark Twain’s words, those  “valuable personages; the
workers, they that make the bread the soft-handed and ide eat.”

As Jacob Lawrence said about his Builders series:

There is always an effort to express the universal beauty
of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add
dimension to his spiritual being.

Yang Fudong’s City Lights is a madcap improvisation of the classy noir mood of French gangster films.

Men in dark suits peer around the edge of buildings, guns raised. They hold umbrellas and dance in office buildings in the shaded light of venetian blinds. Some hold guns, umbrellas and partners, others pretend the props are in their hands, that they’re not alone and ridiculous. 

Multiple short films by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong are at the Henry through Oct. 4.

Panda is a quivering mass of sexualized ectoplasm that in video time contorts from vaginal to floral to a closeup of a dragonfly in heat and back again.

As it collapses under its own metaphoric weight, the image reemerges as something else. Panda is a survey of the fluids that make life possible, created by dripping shaving cream onto a lit and transparent surface.

Drawing (in shaving cream) by Jeffry Mitchell. Video by Tivon Rice. At the Henry through September 27.

Previous post, none too flattering to gnomes, here.

Ries Niemi comes to their defense:

“Gnomes are always vulgar and almost always in the wrong.”
You ought to hear what gnomes have to say about Art Critics!
British PM John Major’s Father was a professional maker of Garden Gnomes, and Phillipe Starck’s gnomes are friendly and lovable.

Personally, besides being a member of the Troll liberation front, I like gnomes quite a lot, and find them neither vulgar nor in the wrong. However, I take a very dim view of poetry.

In February there were layoffs (Jen Graves’ story here). After that the Henry Art Gallery curtailed its hours (closed on Tuesdays as well as Mondays.) Now nobody on staff is working full-time. From director to curators, education and development heads, everybody’s hours have been cut to 32. Soon: Why the Henry is worth a visit right this minute.

PS: Although the Henry is in no danger of closing or even starving itself into insignificance, it’s useful to remember the rule that applies to democracy too: Use it or lose it. 

Seattle, Olympic Sculpture Park, Louise Bourgeois – Eyeball Benches (Image via)