Archives for August 2009

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker has much to recommend her as the new director of the Frye. She’s scholarly, curious, engaged and engaging. An international figure, she has strong local roots, first as curator then director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977-91. (Previous post, announcing the appointment, here.)

Her problem is exactly the same as the Frye’s. With nearly unlimited resources and the wide world from which to collect, Charles and Emma Frye chose to concentrate on the academic realists of the Munich Secession Movement. As members of a movement, its artists were forward thinkers. As painters, despite occasionally overheated subject matter, they are unspeakably dreary.

And they are the artists on whom Danzker has chosen to focus. After leaving the Vancouver Art Gallery, she was director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich from 1992 to 2005, devoted to Franz von Stuck. Villa Stuck. The name suits.

Art historian Meyer Schapiro usefully distinguished between a painting’s subject matter and object matter. Von Stuck and his associates painted with no strength in their object matter. They weren’t just past their pull date, they don’t have a date, being feeble in any era. While artists around the world surged forward, rocking the foundations of what art could be, these artists clung to overheated and underfed attempts at imagery.

For every painting that holds its own there are five that cry out for
the privacy of storage. Seen rarely and in small groups, they might be
able to charm as artifacts, like lion-footed tables,
heavy brocade curtains and corsets.
Thanks to the terms of the Frye will, however, these weak
vessels must continuously pour themselves out on the wall, cruelly
exposed to familiarity breeding contempt.

Jen Graves wrote today that she didn’t think the Frye could have hired someone better. True, if the museum insists on maintaining the delusion that its collection is tip top. I was looking for somebody who’d figure out a way to free the museum from the dead hand of the past, to move the Frye’s holdings into storage, deaccession and trade up.

(Graves also wrote Danzker’s exhibit, William Hogarth: Nationalism, Mass Media and the Artist, was “awesome-sounding.” Awesome? Hogarth is an illustrator in the worst sense of the word. He belongs in picture books accompanying stories.)

Danzker curated The Munich Secession and America at the Frye earlier this year. It was as meticulous and thoughtful as it was unconvincing.

Danzker is interested in creating closer ties between Northwest art communities, something she did while a curator at VAG in the late 1970s, working with Anne Focke’s and/or, an art center that closed by 1980 and has not been equaled in the NW since.

I’d got nothing against Danzker but her taste. Here’s hoping she can overcome it.
 

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker takes over at the Frye Oct. 1, replacing Midge Bowman, who served as director since 2004. 

From the press release:

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Birnie Danzker lived in the Pacific
Northwest from 1977 to 1991, during which time she served as curator
and then director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Birnie Danzker left
Vancouver for Munich, where she directed the Museum Villa Stuck for 15
years…Birnie Danzker has curated
exhibitions …at the International Center of
Photography in New York (1980), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
and P.S. 1 — MOMA (2002), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005).
No stranger to Seattle or the Frye, in 2008 Birnie Danzker undertook
extensive research on the history of the Frye’s Founding Collection curated The Munich Secession and America and Transatlantic:
American Artists in Germany, which opened at the Frye in January 2009.

There Goes the Neighborhood is the title of an mobile installation that went up in flames early this morning where it was parked in what functions as the sculpture court behind Lawrimore Project, scorching the gallery’s back wall and breaking out windows.

Created by SuttonBeresCuller, There Goes the Neighborhood was destroyed, but the gallery lost nothing else, said Scott Lawrimore, who got a call from the fire department at 6 a.m.

“They were amazing,” said Lawrimore about the fire department. “They broke into the gallery and physically removed the art that was threatened in storage.”

There Goes The Neighborhood is insured, he said. He speculated that someone climbed the fence and used the artwork as shelter while smoking.

A group show, Spite House, will open as planned tomorrow night at 6.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from…

 Philip Guston

Tracey Emin

Will Ryman

Shaun Kardinal

Mamie Tinkler (watercolor)

Jennifer Zwick

For the communal experience, there’s Alice Wheeler’s portrait of Peaches resting on a bed of her admirers. (Via) Wheeler’s Women are Beautiful is at the Greg Kucera Gallery through Aug. 15. My review here. Jen Graves’ podcast interview here.

Via

Fantagraphics has signed a deal to publish the first 24 years of the only comic strip heroine with existential hair, four years per volume, debuting next spring with the second volume, 1942-1945, as the earlier material is hard to come by. Dan Clowes will write the intro.

Somebody needs to publish a book of Nancy tributes, both written and drawn. Tom Robbins has done both, although I can’t find either essay or drawings online. I remember his Nancy with Medusa Hair, but it’s the essay that rocks and rolls.

Joe Brainard is essential.

Also, Brainard’s If Nancy Was A Da Vinci Sketch and If Nancy Was A Painting By De Kooning:

From the Storker Project. Image, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Have plastic baby, will travel.

Lawrimore Project Spite House curated by Yoko Ott & Jessica Powers, featuring Matt Browning (Seattle)
Andrew Dadson (Vancouver)
Eli Hansen with Herman Beans and Joey Piecuch (Tacoma)
Christian Kliegel (Vancouver)
Bert Rodriguez (Miami)
SuttonBeresCuller (Seattle)
Aaron Young (New York)

Opening night hours are 6-9 p.m, an hour later than openings, so go there last.

Theme: Andrew Alpern:

The physicists tell us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction….There is apparently an element of the human character that parallels that law of physics…Sometimes, the push-back becomes so counter-productive and even self-defeating that it appears to be generated merely by spite, rather than by rational thought.
This human element of spitefulness appears to come to its fullest flower when adjoining property owners disagree. Spite fences [houses] had a long tradition in urban America, at least until legal statutes and judicial decisions evolved as ammunition against them. Their builders have ranged across the social and economic spectrum, with the most spectacular barriers erected by people who possessed large amounts of both spite and money.

Howard House Robert Yoder, Send Me an Angel, a residency, workshop, collaboration, exhibition, and Carrie Marrill, Visual Aids

Punch Gallery Patricia Hagan Fullness Passing

Soil Land(e)scape with Julie Alpert, Lise Graham, Cable Griffith

Scottish artist Anthony Schrag exhibited the Bible as part of Made in God’s Image at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, inviting the audience, specifically gays and lesbians, to “write their way back” into the Word.
(Story here.)

Schrag:

Some artists make things – I think my creative urge comes from more destructive places..

When scrawled commentary proved to be (no surprise) robustly negative,
organizers bowed to complaints by putting the Bible behind glass and inviting spectators to participate by writing on blank sheets of paper.

Not close to the same thing, and not enough to reassure the Pope. He called Schrag’s project “offensive and disgusting” and added:

They would not think of doing it to the Koran.

If he’d stopped at offensive and disgusting, fair enough. He’s the Pope. It’s his job to defend the Bible. But the second sentence represents him better. He’s right, of course. Few would hazard open commentary on a Koran. Why? Pure fear. The radical fringe of the Muslim faith defends its orthodoxy with car bombs, guns and beheadings. Is the Pope jealous? Does he long for the days when popes silenced the critical with burnings at the stake?

Michael Kimmelman bemoans the moment: After spending what he called an idle morning watching people drift through the Louvre, seeing few stop to stare, Kimmelman contrasted our crude age with an educated one, long gone:

Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century
spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians,
philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and
paint — to record their memories and help them see better.

The fair comparison isn’t the one he makes, between the 18th century audience and the 21st’s. It’s between the most ratified upper crust and the middle classes who can and do go to art museums today. If he’d framed his essay in those terms, his point would have disappeared.

In the real world, more people are looking at art than ever. What do they think of it? I wouldn’t presume to guess, especially not after spending a morning watching them in the Louvre.

Kimmelman is a fine writer, flawlessly smooth, but frequently I find myself disagreeing with every sentence, every word, including the a’s and the the’s.

Kimmelman:

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement.

There he goes again, speaking for everybody. I go to get out of my skin, to hear my brain click, for pleasure and passion and connection. When I want to improve myself, I go to the gym.

Kimmelman’s story here. Edward Winkleman called the piece a “thoughtful reflection,” here, which is exactly what it is not.

Other links:

Chuck Berry and the homing instinct from Go Head On! here. Bob Hicks wrote nice profile of Oregon artist Rick Bartow, here. From Eyeteeth, rightwing street art, otherwise known as fat cats in the hood, here. Roberta Smith on the Rococo phase of street art, here.

I need to get a computer checkup, as the text begins to erase itself as I type. Maybe it’s my longed-for editor in disguise. Back soon.