Archives for August 2009

According to the BBC, two-thirds of all transplanted organs in China come from executed prisoners.

Remember Bodies…The Exhibition? When it was in Seattle in 2006, a PI reporter, gazing at a flayed corpse, noted that no one knew his individual identity.

What is known is that he was from China, and when he died his body went
unclaimed — unclaimed, that is, until the dissectors at a Chinese
university took him into their care and the show’s promoters took him
on the road.

What is known? Sorry, Charlie. How the government got hold of these bodies is not known. When it’s an exhibition of corpses out of China, all bets are off. If these corpses just happened to die from unnamed causes, it’s lucky for the show’s promoters that so many young and fit keel over in China’s streets. The old and infirm wouldn’t look nearly as good in the spotlight.

Experiences vibrating on the same frequency tend to fuse. Below, the mystical, mad end of 21st-century Medievalism.

The heart has its reasons which reason does not know. Pascal

Roberto Kusterle

Odd Nerdrum

Roger Ballen

A few years ago, Seattle’s Robert Zverina papered the floor, ceiling
and walls of a small space with snapshots of his life. Walking inside was
like walking into Zverina’s brain and looking around.

It was a great place to be. For Zverina, reality is an exalted state. Because he focuses his praises of it with the deceptively casual force of his economy, he makes videos the way John Ashbery Ashberry writes poems: free associating within a theme, one image suggesting a variation on the next.

Six of his three-minute pocket videos here, funded by 4Culture. Below, three-mind minute Bird. The blackouts serve as line breaks.

Leeman, via My Love for You is a Stampede of Horses, a fabulous face.

Amy Pruzan: Signs stripped of their authority and distorted into service.

Each panel of an Anne Appleby painting is covered in primer and as many as 40
coats of oil paint, with wax paste worked into the final layer. Color shimmers at the edges and across the field in a range of astringent shades, nearly but not quite identical.

Years went by before I could see her paintings as anything but early Brice Marden
also-rans. Maybe she just wore me down. Today I appreciate their specific evocations of the natural world.
A grouping of small paintings, for instance, explores a dogwood in her parents’
backyard. It’s all there, reduced to color: leaf in one square, furry
bud in another followed by pod, bark and bloom.

It’s a good back story. What’s in the forefront? The same lovely thing over and over.

A suite of her prints from 2008 are at the Greg Kucera Gallery.
Each panel consists of two sheets of handmade paper printed front and
back and fused to bleed into each other. The edges are frayed, as if
color had chewed on them.

Above, Sweet Pea: brown for the seed to leaf green and yellow, and pink for the flower.

If I’m not plunked down in front of her work, the thought of it does not quicken the heart. Only when locked into the delicate minuet of her color relationships does interest grow. Is there enough there for her to keep doing it? On a generous day, I’d say yes.

Through Sept. 26. Reception for artist, Sept. 3, 6-8. Artist talk Sept. 5, noon.

Via

Speaking at The Drawing Center last July, Boris Groys claimed that the contemporary situation is the opposite of the one described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle.

There are no longer any spectators, or even an audience. ‘We are all on stage’, he argued from the stage, as we watched from the audience, and wrote down what he said. Reflecting on the profusion of the blogs and the mysteries of the readership, Groys mused, ‘I am convinced they are being written for God,’ later clarifying, ‘who, of course, is dead.’

Via

Everything Mark Calderon makes, no matter how odd, has a languid
beauty. Although drawn to Christian symbols of sacrifice, in his
hands the final product is gorgeous. He puts a top hat on his influences, which he describes as:

African sculpture, Japanese aesthetics, Mexican folk
arts, nature, personal experience and relationships, family, music,
Christian art (both Gothic and Medieval) and other artist’s creations,
are some major influences I draw from. I do not like to create images
that read as only one thing, but try to create works that have both
power and mystery.

The tension that runs through the cast lead and bronze sculptures at Greg Kucera Gallery appears to come from a source close to hand who is not specifically on his list: the slippery, dark-moon-and-muck sensibility of Morris Graves.

(Graves, Waning Moon, #3, 1943, Seattle Art Museum, via)

(Calderon Untitled, skink twins, 2009, cast lead)

[Read more…] about Mark Calderon – dark moon and muck

Jamel Shabazz‘s Shabezz’s image of a leaping dog, teeth bared, has ambiguous roots. It evokes Andy Warhol’s many permutations of Race Riot,
after Charles Moore, but might reveal no more than a man playing
Frisbee with a tough competitor in the middle of a New York street, bracketed by stop signs.

Warhol: