Archives for July 2009

Stephen Hilyard is a meticulous and inventive technician with a tendency to think his work into the ground. His eight large digitally manipulated landscape images titled Rapture of the Deep at Platform  Gallery are something else again.

Shot in Iceland and reconfigured till what’s underwater becomes dry against the sky, the images feature the artist striking various poses associated with the grandiose sublime. He’s as tricky as ever, but this time his results move beyond craft into the inevitable.

Calvin Tomkins’ The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde recounts the story of a woman who asked Rauschenberg why he put, say, beds in his paintings or maybe goats. He asked her in return why she wore birds or maybe cherries on her hat.

Maybe she looked like this, in a painting by Noah Davis:

If Rauchenberg was a shock, the adornments of Reid Peppard would have been unimaginable. (Via Jena Scott)

Opening at the Lee Center in Seattle last night, the TM Sisters’ interactive dance pads – (((sparks))) – can’t compete with high style games available in the lobby of any upscale multiplex.

The distinction of their project is its frail claim to powder-puff eco-relevance. Participants can move a TM sister around the screen and try to protect her from getting struck by lighting or overwhelmed by trash.

Even so, the score is lopsided: multiplex 2, TM Sisters zero. Instead of critiques, TM offers awkward imitations of the corporate industrial game complex, with shadows that quiver on the screen.

But wait, I said to self. TM Sisters Monica and Tasha Lopez De Victoria are performing in person later in the evening. Maybe they’ll redeem the false start of their doppelgangers.

Alas. They are dancers who can’t dance and video artists who appear to be taking a break from decorating the gym for their high school prom. Next to them, assume vivid astrol focus is Bruce Nauman, and Tiny Tim is Baryshnikov.

To say they are trivial doesn’t cover it. They’re trivial with moxie. Their self-confidence inspires others desperately seeking a girlie-girl version of the new, such as the long-ago great ARTnews, which put them on the cover of its 2007 Trendsetters issue.

Had the evening’s festivities been limited to the sisters, their brevity would have been a virtue, but no. They were preceded by Hooliganship and Extreme Animals.

Hooliganship’s Peter Burr and Christopher Doulgeris are slight but adorable. As they exercised (not danced) to tame techo-pop in funny suits in front of their candy-colored Kool-Aid videos (mountains and seas of light-hearted dump sites), they were charming for a few minutes. The 10 or so that they played felt longer and wore out whatever good will I had managed to muster.

Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman) offer a different set of problems: substance sandwiched between long stretches of the physically painful. When Ciocci asked the audience to remember its favorite heavy metal moments, I stiffened. I have no favorite heavy metal moments.

Those whose idea of music is the equivalent of beating themselves over the head with a mallet in a volume that threatens immediate sensory neural hearing loss are fodder for the war. Building a bridge between them and and the visual art community is laudable, but a bridge is not a capitulation. (Anne Mathern did it with better art and better music in 2007.)

Wightman’s guitar operates in the upper registers of cat torture. On the video, flickering images of people tossing their hair around went on and on. And yet, in there somewhere, greatness kept trying to rise to the surface. Ciocci shops for images on the Internet and rolls familiar fragments into a fascinating (if exhausting) collage. In another context, he might easily be brilliant.

TM’s dance pads continue at through Oct. 3, curated by the ordinarily reliable Yoko Ott.  (TM Sisters on YouTube here.)

William Cumming, in a style he developed 40 years ago and stuck with:

In response to this post, David Ross wrote:

Kind of a mean-spirited post, Regina. Yoko is an extraordinary
artist, and though you seem to object to sincerity, she is a sincere
peace activist. Her sincerity seems impossible to you, and perhaps you
are more comfortable with the attitude of cynics who inspire apathy and
a world of Sara Palin supporters.

But here is a 76 year-old woman who has worked as an outsider all of
her life, whose poetic response to life in the late 20th-century is
profoundly moving, and who is interested in making art that reaches
outside of the stuffy confines of the art world, and you dismiss it.

She was “lucky” to marry Lennon? Well, yes you can say anyone who
find the love of their life is lucky, as that relationship transformed
her (and him). He was lucky to marry her, as it opened him up in ways
he would have never predicted (or imagined).

I object to sincerity? I love Billy Budd, Prince Myshkin, Jesus and John Lennon, sincerity’s fictional and fictionalized emblems, but yes, in real life, sincerity frequently strikes me as the dead zone where the ball won’t bounce.

Add to sincerity the intolerable aura of one who knows, the wise thing in the cave, the keeper of cryptic secrets, and yes again, my skin crawls, possibly in part because I grew up in California, awash at the time in self-actualizing delusions.

P.S. David: Sara Palin supporters are sincere. They believe in simplicities with all their hearts, and that’s why there’s no point in talking to them. If we’re going to have delusions, let them be grand delusions with corkscrew twists and frightening depths. A yes at the top of a ladder doesn’t qualify and neither does a billboard telling me that I can end a war by wishing it away.

Ono is in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-1978 at the Seattle Art Museum.

Merdardo Rosso, Ecce Peur (Behold the Boy), 1906

Oliver Michaels, undated and untitled as listed on phillips ART expert forum.

Born 18 years after Rodin, in 1858, Rosso never approached the significance of his French peer during his lifetime. After it is another story. While Rosso’s impressionistic version of the abject is everywhere, Rodin gathers dust in museums, awaiting his comeback. 

Not long ago, the meaning of Melanie Bonajo‘s series of women encased in possessions was clear – here stand victims of white, middle-class, Western-world sex-role stereotypes. A few  observers might have seen the series as a consumerist-glut trope, but most saw diary-of-a-mad-housewife feminism.

That was then.

From Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch:

First mournful voice: We never had a house. We lived in a corridor.
Second voice: Oh, we used to dream of a corridor. We lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road.

Hard to pity the self-pitying, especially if they are financially safe. The travails of those comfortable enough to purchase extra stuff tend to leave today’s audience dry-eyed.

On the other hand, Bonajo’s Monday Morning means more now. Even if the princess of the pea-under-her-mattress fame has lost her stock portfolio, she’s as thin-skinned as ever. Grudging respect goes to the resilient down-and-out who still have the confidence to be their fussy selves.

The princess needs multiple mattresses beneath her to soften the horror of contact with the world, with several more on top to muffle its sound. Criticize if you will. She gets the job done and is dead out.

Turquoise trees? Go left. Via

Via

If its title were Art Baloney/Art Brilliance Blog, I’d be such a fan. (Previous post here.)

Well, a fan, anyway. The site’s obsession with critic Karen Archey seems wide of the mark.

Recently posted under the category, Critics Gone Wild is a sentence from Archey’s review of Rebecca Morris:

Violette’s drawings are always coming together and falling apart in the eye of the spectator. Soft edges, hardened into image through cognition, vanish into nothingness and slip from legibility. Violette’s work, sometimes crushingly monumental and brutally hard-edged, always so present, is actually, delicately, about the ‘after’ of things.”

The after of things? Were it not for his unfortunate encounter with a laundry truck that took him out of this world, Roland Barthes would surely take this press release writer out to lunch. I read these two sentences, and Banks Violette clicked in my head.

In response to my first post about the site, Art Baloney quoted Wittgenstein:

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. (our emphasis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, introduction to Tractatus logico-philosophicus)

I wrote back:

Ludwig is a tough act to follow. I can’t imagine him being much of a fan of any art critic, unless maybe Meyer Schapiro, especially if Ludwig went to the lectures at Columbia or happened to catch Schapiro on Cezanne’s apples.

Way downhill from that is where most of us work. Writing for us is practicing, over and over, trying to get something right. A rhythm, a coherent thought, an image. Only by doing it again and again and seeing it printed or published somewhere and having people react one way or another is there any chance of getting close to the clarity you seem to demand first time out.

In other words, I’m typing this in my sack of flesh with my fingers stiffening at the knuckles, past several deadlines that haunt me like bill collectors and with no confidence that any minute now I’ll solve the writing problems that beset me. When I turn in my essays, will they be perfect?
Hell no.