Archives for July 2009

Anyone heading to Seattle to see highlights of the Seattle Art Museum‘s Asian collections will land in the wrong country. Luminous Jewels: Masterpieces of Asian Art
from the Seattle Art Museum (100 objects) opens Saturday at the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo and will tour in Japan through July 19, 2010. SAM’s Asian art holdings are usually cited among the top five in the U.S.

Included in the exhibit:

Deer Scroll (Poem Scroll with Deer) 1610s 13 1/2 x 410 3/16 inches

Crow Screen, one of two, both are in the show. Early 1700s. Each 61 9/16 x 139 5/16 inches.

Press release here. Checklist here.

Obama’s in the White House and the sun is shining, but money continues scarce for art museums, which are all (nearly all) engaged in serious cost-cutting.  The question is not, who’s cutting back, it’s how they’re doing it.

AJ blogger Judith H. Dobrzynski exhibited a fine grasp of this issue in her post, Museum Hours: Time for a Change.

Cutting back on evening hours seems clueless, and self-defeating.

A few museums do seem to get this basic fact. When Seattle Art
Museum recently cut hours, it announced that it will be closed on
Tuesdays, beginning the week of Sept. 7 — but according to its
website, SAM remains open on Thursday and Friday nights until 9 p.m.

Who else is on this honor roll?  

Addressing the same issue, Jen Graves at the Stranger takes a harsher approach:

After Labor Day, Seattle Art Museum will be on a five-day rather
than a six-day schedule, meaning it will be closed not only Mondays but
Tuesdays as well.

This is an attempt to cut costs, said spokeswoman Nicole Griffin,
but also an effort to focus more on late-night activities at the museum
on Thursdays and Fridays, when SAM is open until 9. “The feedback we’ve
gotten is that people want these late-night hours, but we’re not seeing
the traffic,” she said. “Right now we’re going to be trying to promote
those Thursday and Friday nights till 9.”

Hmm. At least some of that is spin, since it requires a logical
contortion to need to save money so that it can be spent convincing
people to want something they’ve already said they want. But what do I
know about marketing?

I suppose missing Tuesdays isn’t that bad, but what about adding just a few hours on the other end, say on Saturday nights?

Only in sports do hometown writers appreciate the home team.

The Bellevue Arts Museum’s artsfair. Old. Big. In a parking lot. For the first time, missing its capital letter. 

New and relatively new. Under Michael Darling, the modern and contemporary galleries at the Seattle Art Museum are in frequent motion. New at SAM is an occasional series that will highlight what slips into the museum’s galleries without a lot of fanfare.

Virginia and Bagley Wright own Living Room, Scene 2 (below) from his 2003 Krefeld Project, plus a set of the final photos of the series, promised gifts.

Never has the divide between classically cool modernist architecture and the people who inhabit it been as decisively painted as in this series, which grew out the Museum Haus Esters‘ invitation to Fischl to create paintings using the museum as backdrop.

Designed in 1928 by Mies van der Rohe, the museum was once a residence, and Fischl decided to treat it as one again. He hired two actors, shot thousands of photos, manipulated the most promising and painted 12 canvases inspired by the results.

Living Room, Scene 2 is all about psychic, social, sexual, aesthetic and financial power. The male figure owns all he surveys, including  woman curled in a submissive pose on a chair, the sleek interior and the art it houses.

Behind him is the man’s Gerhard Richter (the artist’s wife descending a staircase), his Warhol and Bruce Nauman. Some have speculated that these artists must be important to Fischl, which is why he included their representations, as homage.

Surely not. Fischl is a society painter in the tradition of John Singer Sargent and more recently (and to a lesser extent) Lucian Freud. His work has nothing to do with Richter, Warhol and/or Nauman. Those three are what he isn’t, dominant. By featuring them, he’s signaling that his fictional titan of industry owns the best, takes it for granted and doesn’t bother to look at it.

Before the economic meltdown, while free market traders were still riding high, Fischl painted the character of Capitalism’s favorite sons.  His painting reveals the pleasure he took in it. Rest of the series here.

High (Will Ryman via)

Low (Ellensburg Muffler Men, via)

Steve Davis photographs the marginalized, imprisoned and down on their luck.

The 2007 flood in Washington State drew him outdoors.

Currently at James Harris his series of landscapes titled The Western Lands. The photo above is lit and framed as if a body of brown water bordered by drowned trees were a face.

Familiar but strange, each scene is devoid of humans but imbued with
evidence of their presence.

Richard Misrach comes of mind, naturally. His series, On the Beach, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and has been touring ever since, at the Henry last November till February and currently at the High Museum, where it closes Aug. 16.

Misrach’s career has been distorted by the demand for his work. If 75 percent of it magically disappeared, leaving only his peak moments, he’d be magnificent instead of what he is, overexposed and underfed. On the Beach is a disgrace of an exhibit. It isn’t curated, it’s packaged to please, with 10 photos undoing what a well-chosen one would have accomplished.

Just because repetition works for Bernd and Hilla Becher doesn’t mean it works for everybody.

With The Western Lands, Davis is in Misrach territory without being in Misrach’s kind of trouble. Each photo is a distinct experience, with a formidable calm that opens into further reaches of calm the longer you look at it.

From Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum, Yoko Ono’s  Painting to Hammer a Nail invites the audience to pick up a nail and pound it into a wood panel painted white.

Two weeks ago, the audience decided to up the ante. (Story here.) Instead of continuing to pound nails as per the artist’s request, they turned her piece into a community bulletin board.

Two photos from yesterday, from SAM’s Nicole Griffin.

In 1998 or 1999, I reviewed the major survey of performance art at LA MoCA for the Wall Street Journal (I don’t have the catalogue with me in DC). Yoko Ono’s “Painting to Hammer a Nail” was on display there too – with one key difference. There was a small sign next to the piece saying “Please Don’t Touch.” I’m glad to see that the piece has now been re-activated (and/or re-hammered).

In the catalog for Dirt On Delight: Impulses That Form Clay now at the Walker, co-curator Jennelle Porter wrote about Jeffry Mitchell:

The repetitive labor required to make such works is apparent, and one of the many themes in Mitchell’s work along with redemption, transcendence, sex, death and hope.

She refers to Mitchell’s high style featured in Dirt, such as his rococo fortress of a pickle jar from 2005. (Click to enlarge.)

Currently at the James Harris Gallery, 49 pots serve as examples of his low.

They include Green Peony, 2009, Lead-glazed earthenware.

Thirteen delicate yet fluid drawings of flowers in colored pencil accompany them. If a soap bubble could draw, it would aspire to create them. Barely there, they are their own de Koonings erased by their own Rauschenbergs.

Mitchell is, in the primary sense, a maker. In the middle of a description, he might unconsciously begin to draw it in the air, thinking with his hands. The history of the world he remembers through its colors, lines and densities. When he thinks of Alfred Sisley, he sees the sky reflected in Sisley’s fish scales. When he thinks of Dickens, he mentally toys with the sagging mass of Miss Haversham’s cake.

What Whitney Balliett wrote about gut bucket jazz applies to Mitchell: His feet are in the mud, but his head is full of celestial things. He owes his casual grace to bountiful skill. He drapes the shaggy world in silks and puts a top hat on the tawdry.

He likes alphabet drawings and Betty Crocker bake-offs; Chinese pots and Renaissance porcelain as well as Pop art and back-to-future Futurism. He casts a fond eye on country potters, Mickey Mouse, Babar and Curious George. He loves comic books and the militantly upbeat graphics of the Russian Constructivists. His gift is his ability to turn a chaos of sources into a coherent visual stream.

Low for him is not the same as plain. His 49 pots emerged from the rich terrain of his concerns. Incised into the surface of the clay are flowers, animals (especially birds, butterflies, bears, bunnies, monkeys and elephants from children’s books), sentries, auspicious charms (horseshoe, 4-leaf clover) and messages, such as HELLO HELLO, from the Beatles’ song, and JM for himself. He was here. He made this.

As in the Tang Dynasty, his figures are awash in colored glazes that run down the round shape or vase or jug, but he also dips into the traditions of English cream ware, the salt glazes of American South and Ming blue, into which he tends to float scribbles of white clouds.

In Mitchell’s low style, his pots lack their foot, a sign that they are for the people.

When artists consider the early 20th-century divide between Picasso and Duchamp, many who are currently prominent side with Duchamp. Not Mitchell.

Picasso, via.

Mitchell, below. Note the stigmata. Although his work has a Chinese Buddhist heart that expresses the cycle of suffering leading to enlightenment, he was raised Catholic, and its imagery is a constant.

Like David Hockney, Mitchell can draw, paint or sculpt anything he wants, whatever occurs to him to make in clay, latex, glass, wood and various plastics; on canvas, paper, old metals and on the surface of notes, restaurant bills and books.

While Hockney increasingly distracts himself with technology, Mitchell sticks to the flesh, to life and death, to youth and beauty, to sex as joy (exuberant and excessive) and as a kind of death swoon (barely there).

Gerald Gerard Manley Hopkins, from The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo:

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,/ Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks,/ lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace/ — Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,/ And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver/ Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death/ Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver./ See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair/ Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Artist Ottmar Hoerl was startled last month when prosecutors in Nuremberg threatened to charge him with violating Germany’s ban on Nazi symbols.
After extensive news coverage, the state announced Wednesday that it had decided to drop the charges, as his gnomes were intended to deride Nazis rather than promote them.

Story here.

Anselm Kiefer began his career in the 1970s with photos of himself giving the salute at sites of atrocities. However confusing such imagery is in contemporary Germany, the Nazis would have surely detected the mockery and ordered both artists shot.

Gnomes are always vulgar and almost always in the wrong.

Paul McCarthy, Santa Claus (Buttplug Gnome). Via

Dan Webb, Plop. Via

Webb, Gnome Installation (detail) Via

In Berlin a few years ago, I saw street carts selling Stalin kitsch. A cart with Hitler kitsch wouldn’t have had the chance to roll into place. What’s the difference? Not body count. Stalin’s might have been higher. Could it be because the Nazis lost the war and Stalin died in his bed (maybe with help from a few heroic individuals)? Only history’s losers (not necessarily history’s thugs) become real outcasts.

With good news for gnomes, maybe Charles Krafft can take his Hitler Teapot through German customs without getting arrested. Via

 Debra Baxter You Turn Me Inside Out (glove) Carved alabaster

Baxter again, carved alabaster

Cynthia Camlin,
Melted 6, These drawings are of icebergs, but they bring to mind the pudding-under-crust collapse of the aging body. Had Hamlet lived longer he’d have seen his flesh melt. Camlin is in Return to Departure at the Kirkland Arts Center till Aug. 6. She has a solo show at Monarch Studios till Aug. 26.