Archives for July 2009

Before Yinka Shonibare appeared at the Brooklyn Museum as part of Sensation, he was at the Seattle Art Museum with a gallery devoted to him, a rare case of Seattle being in the lead on the work of a fast-rising, international force.

Trevor Fairbrother, at the time SAM’s Deputy director of art and curator of modern art, had seen Shonibare’s work in London and bought an installation titled Nuclear Family more or less on the spot.

Back in Brooklyn once again with his own exhibit I plan to see before it closes September 20, Shonibare has become ubiquitous. It’s a dangerous position. Only an artist who is really hot can tumble in a season to tedious. So many write and talk about the star of the moment that the audience tires of itself and blames the artist for its boredom.

By taking longer to emerge and (in all senses) on a far smaller scale, Toronto’s Shary Boyle might end up with something resembling an advantage. Before she reaches international acclaim, she’ll have a back story to fuel her forward momentum and the ability to fail big without it costing her everything.

The gift in Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) remains one, despite legitimate criticism: Its message to Bible Belt literalists who thump others with their version of morality. Florida told them their principles are costing them money. Because nobody wants to live nearby, their towns deteriorate and die.

Florida has continued to expand his notion of whose presence is desirable, but it’s still not broad enough.

It needs to includes janitors (via)

who dance in Antarctica, not just artists who focus on an appreciation of menial labor, most importantly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

Claude Zervas:

Sadamasa Motonaga

Cars are common in galleries and museums, beginning with Ed Kienholtz’s Back Seat Dodge, 1964. (Post here.)

Rarely, however, is there an installation that puts viewers inside the experience of life in a broken-down, barely-running van.

The pure products of America go crazy:

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

Created by Eric Thompson and Aubrey Birdwell, the front room installation at OHGE Ltd has an air of inevitability. You’re where you never wanted to be but knew you were going, slipping fast from middle class to teeter on the edge of dependent or maybe homeless. What you’ve got is the van.

Video screens serve as the outside world. They’re blurry, as if you’ve been drinking. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were driving underwater. Sound seals the deal. It gurgles with a slap-happy lurch and dull roar.

OHGE Ltd is a tiny gallery, but this show gives it a sense of scale. In the backroom (really a closet) are Stephan Moore’s power-of-postive thinking videos, playing simultaneously. As people beam and chuckle, a voice drones nonsense about unlocking the door to brain chemistry happiness.

Although separate shows, the ads and the van are collectively titled, ENLIGHTEN ENCOURAGE EMPOWER.

From van men Thompson and Birdwell:

In travel and as a form of rogue property we often carry with us a semblance of the familiar den.

The box with a locked door full of comforts for us alone. We carry this capsule to contain our individual and separate existences…We reject and embrace that we are free-floating and disconnected from everything around us. 

In space and temporal media, these pieces attempt to re-stage our memories of American life. Through cultural quotation we attempt to pry open the locked box and articulate the immense void of American culture. 

I asked Yahoo! Answers for the key to becoming successful. Here is my favorite reply by user “dagmar”.

I think you need talent but you also need drive and determination. Set your mind to what you are trying to accomplish and keep at it. Of course a lot of it depends on what you are trying to be successful in. If it is an artistic pursuit that can be a lot more difficult to succeed in than say, being a Dr. or an accountant. No matter what your goal, do the best you can and do it with joy and love. Make the best of whatever success you find and don’t be discouraged. If you try to enjoy life and not get too caught up in ‘success’ you can be very happy and satisfied.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if this piece by Alison Brady from I Want You (Magazine) via Pilot Books (here)

were labeled a tribute to the late Hannah Wilke, whose S.O.S. Starification Object Series in the 1970s featured her body and chewing gum?

Rebecca Shapiro to the rescue, with embroideries on muslin, via.

If You Held My Breath, You’d Know What It Felt Like

After the war

Tyler Green on Bruce Nauman and the reality of torture, here. In the future, if we manage to climb back up the cliff we fell off during the Bush years, people will look to art for evidence that we grasped the horror of our situation. Green’s writing serves as an affirmative:

Nauman’s sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman
couldn’t have had any idea that America would become a kind of
modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and
Afghanistan. He couldn’t know that 20 years on America would become a
nation that engaged in extra-legal detention, a country that stuffed
detainees into private jets so as to whisk them around the world to
places where they could be brutally confined, tortured and, in several
cases, killed. In 1981 Nauman’s sculptures were about what happened to
other people, people such as the Trinidadians, Argentinans, or
Uruguayans in Naipaul and Timmerman. Today I look at Nauman’s two 1981
artworks and I think about what the United States did in its fanatical,
unprincipled pursuit of terrorism suspects and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the things that makes art imperative is this: During its
lifetime it can jump beyond its inspiration to become about us.

911 Media Arts Center moves in with Jack Straw Productions, story Jen Graves. Money quote:

It’s becoming more cloud-like.

911 and Jack Straw have a lot in common. Both are multi-media populist with aesthetic ambition. What they won’t have is any room (or good location or parking). 911’s Steven Vroom, who with Jonh Schwartz constitutes the only 911 Media staff left, has a down-not-out message on his site, here.

Bravo casting call for artists: Here’s the opening paragraph from application instructions:

How do you go from struggling, emerging or even semi-established artist
to selling a complete show for $198 million? It’s a big art world out
there, but maybe this is one place to start!

Far be it from me to piss on anyone’s parade, but people, read those sentences again. Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint has the best response:

I’m urging older artists, particularly mothers, to take a shot at it. Bring the kids to the audition, change a diaper or two while waiting in line, and show the dirty ones as work samples. Seriously. At the very least, document the whole experience, upload it to YouTube, and don’t forget to send Two Coats a link.

Good Target Practice: Reviews from Emily Pothast, Jen Graves, Art Knowledge News, e-bourne and Publicola.

From Graves:

(Curator Michael) Darling is not restating a
canon, he’s refining it, bringing together artists from several
continents and pairing lesser-knowns with household names. The arch
sensibility of Pop, the communalism and performance of Brazilian art of
the period, the sunny California renegades, the anarchic Viennese
Actionists, Japanese postatomic hysteria and despair, the quotational
impulse of the pre-Pictures generation, hippie-style madness, the
chilly conceptualists, the early feminists, highly codified and
organized German pain–all these come together in a grouping
that’s different from the classic (and overly cerebral) New
York-centric story of minimalism-and-after. This version of the
story is deliberately visceral.

Choice, but I don’t agree with what followed in the same review:

The first two galleries feel crowded and awkward; the last few, plodding. By the end, at Warhol’s sidelined Oxidation (piss) Painting and Lynda Benglis’s poured-paint piece (did it have to be mounted on a pedestal rather than lying on the floor?), the exhibition has run out of energy.

That’s what diversity of critical voices is all about. Not long ago, Seattle exhibits would be lucky to see one review. If there were two, they either failed to spark discussion or there was no place to air it. As an arts editor at the former Seattle PI once told me, responding is beneath your dignity. (That version of dignity remains in place for most critics who still have jobs at newspapers.)

The outer limits of what constitutes a photograph do not include spray paint on a spider’s web, unless its shape minicks a Polaroid gone to seed. By asserting itself outside the definition, Josh Tonsfeldt‘s web expands the category to include it.

Curated by Bob Nickas for Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery, phot(o)objects made a seamless leap from nonprofit to commercial space, setting up shop at Lawrimore Project.

If the audience were frequently in motion from Portland to Seattle and Vancouver, a Seattle stop for a Vancouver exhibit wouldn’t make sense. Everyone inclined to see it would have.

Alas. Not the case. Determined not to wait for a bullet train, Scott Lawrimore is doing what he can to strengthen the links between cities that have everything in common except the reality of free exchange. Exhibits important in one city rarely register in another, which makes phot(o)object a welcome exception.

Jennifer Bolande transformed the mass-produced visible with a curtain that bears a photographic image and impersonates carved wood.

Wolfgang Tillmans inserts a false memory of a classic photography moment.

Joseph Park, L’evier, 2008, oil/panel Via

Isaac Layman Sink with Lettuce, 2008, Archival ink jet print  Via

Veteran of Helter Skelter at MOCA in 1992 and the 1999 Venice Biennale, Los Angeles painter Richard Jackson participates in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 at the Seattle Art Museum (review here) by pouring paint on canvases and smearing them in arcs on a museum wall. They comprise something like a painting tornado, with a passage of dead white calm at their center.

SAM documented the process on YouTube.

Jackson explains, via:

It is my idea to try to expand painting, not just in size but to see how far it could be extended or pushed. I don’t feel my work as a criticism of painting but an optimistic view of what it could be. I felt then and I still feel that painting doesn’t need to be an area of art described by the materials that are used …My work doesn’t edit anything, it’s evidence of a work performed…

Jackson began by emulating the Action Painters of the New York School and kept on working in that vein, which took him other places. He works with the accidental but is absolutely in charge of the process. I’ll think of his painting whenever I see a younger generation’s paint leaking into space with vigor and intention.

Ed Templeton

Jim Lambie