Archives for July 2009

Siegel’s Squeeze 2, from 1998-99. What does it look like now? Earth to earth, dust to dust, newspaper wall to soil.

Wrote John Perreault:

Steven Siegel elected to start with a grove of trees. A seemingly solid mound or wall of newspapers interacts with the trees and slumps to fit the slope; the newsprint stratum is topped by turf, further uniting the piece with the environment. This, the most unusual artwork in the exhibition, makes gravity, geology, and even time visible.

Time visible indeed, especially for those of us who thought we had forever.

Today from The Independent, via AJ:

In her coronation robes, Elizabeth I looks formidable and stately – the Virgin Queen in her pomp, an image to propel rivals into battle. Some 400 years after her portrait was painted, that is precisely what she has done.

Hers is one of more than 3,000 images from the National Portrait Gallery uploaded onto the free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia in April by Seattle-based Derrick Coetzee. The gallery, founded in 1856, responded last week by threatening legal proceedings against the PhD student.

That action unleashed outrage in cyberspace and quickly led to a stand-off between the proponents of free information and cultural institutions wanting to protect one of their few revenue streams – licence fees for reproducing images of their artworks. The row also goes to the heart of an internet revolution which does not recognise borders or national laws.

Image in question here.

Brian Sewell calls the National Gallery’s legal team fools, which seems apt.

The National Portrait Gallery has
always been managed by fools and this is another example of their folly. I’m
on Wikipedia’s side. The only thing the gallery has to preserve are the
pictures themselves. The images must, in some sense, be public property
already.

About the global pastime of suing people: Saul Bellow summed it up in Humboldt’s Gift.

Humboldt: I’ll be rich some day.
His friend: How?
Humboldt: Someone will wrong me.

More on the case here.

Tom Phillips began by finding his own lyrical poetry inside obscure Victorian text in 1970. (The Humument)

Tim Rollins & Kids of Survival, founded in 1982 (MoMA image), engaged text in a battle.

Christopher Wool (Apocalypse Now 1988) amplified the impact of a classic line.

Glenn Ligon  (Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored), 1990), amplified it by obscuring it.
Ann Hamilton turned the rudiments of text into a floor at the Seattle Central Library in 2004.

Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow from 2006 (Wave Books) circles back around to Phillips but with simplicity. Instead of elaborate painting on a Victorian story, she used white out.

Birk is in West Coast Drawing VIII at Davidson Galleries, through Aug. 1. Below, A View of the Ruins of the City of Chicago, 2001
Acrylic and ink on canvas.
44 x 66 inches.

Previous posts here and here.

Missed Rachel Maxi‘s one-day show July 11 at the Carport Gallery (her car port), featuring hand-sized oil paintings of Seattle’s terrain. (Sorry, Rachel. If I didn’t know where I was right now, I’d lose me.)

Still have a chance to see Rick Araluce is at Traver through Aug. 2. Below, The Very Last Breath, 3 x12 x 2.5 inches.

In the looks-intriguing-online category:

Kevin Yates, who was at Ditch Projects in Eugene till July 2. (Matt Browning and Anne Mathern are there now.) Below, Yates’ Garbage Bags, image via. Bronze/cardboard, 12.5 x 34.5 x 35 cm.

Also, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Seated Man, Venice at LA Louver. Painted bronze, wood, concrete, asphalt 14 x 36 9/16 x 48 9/16 inches

Seattle painter Alden Mason, almost 90, leads an urban life without having acquired an urban viewpoint. His work is full of the things that moved him as a child, including the sparrows that flew around his head as he offered them carrots on his parents dairy farm in the Skagit Valley.
While realizing that his art owes a lot to his early environment, he also credits a mail-order cartoon class. He earned the tuition by trapping muskrats.

I feel guilty about those muskrats, but I loved cartoons, with figures jumping, hopping and smooching. They were having more fun than I was. They lived in a brighter world.

Foster/White Gallery hosts a birthday party for him July 25, 2-4 p.m. RSVP

W. Scott Trimble

Brent Sommerhauser

Linda Beaumont

Leo Saul Berk:

Previous plinth post here.

Go here for live Web stream coverage.

On July 24, 1 a.m. Seattle time, Seattle’s Ellen Ziegler takes her turn.

Says Ziegler:

I may regret this, but everyone might as well see me do it…
And give the Web site a check from time to time. You absolutely never
know what you’re going to see. Some of it is unbelievably lame, some is
brilliant, and most of it is a collage on a grand scale.

The project reminds her of what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about musical composition:

Hide what you compose in what you hear.
Cover what you hear.
Place something next to what you hear.
Place something far away from what you hear.
Support what you hear.
Continue for a long time an event you hear.
Transform an event until it becomes unrecognizable.
Transform an event that you hear into the one you composed last.
Compose what you expect to come next.
Compose often, but also listen for long periods to what is already
composed, without composing.
Mix all these instructions.
Increasingly accelerate the current of your intuition.

Anthony Gormley responds to the question, Is it art?, with, Who cares? Here.

Via

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell is a murderous evangelical who stalks through Night of the Hunter muttering about love and hate, which are tattooed on his knuckles.

Powell:

Lord, I am tired.
Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin’s.
Yore Book is full of killin’s. But there are things you do hate
Lord: perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

John Currin:
Currin is our Fragonard. For rougher trade, go to Grant Barnhart and scroll till you get to Midnight Special, 100 percent not safe for work.

Marcus Martenson contemplates the problem of good and evil by looking at his feet (Good and bad clog).

[Read more…] about Night of the Hunter: love and hate (good and evil) warring together