Archives for August 2009

 Amanda Mae was fired as a security guard at the Seattle Art Museum last week. Story here. I doubt there’s a museum in the country who would embrace her interventions, especially if said museum employed her.

On the other hand, I think it’s possible in the future she’ll be esteemed for other reasons.

Below, her restaging of an Egon Schiele drawing. What is out-of-control in the drawing becomes self-possession in her girl-in-charge self-portrait. Schiele’s figure wears her nerves on the outside of her body. Mae is solid. If she were a boat, no iceberg could sink her.

Via

Note: Seattle artist Matthew Offenbacher publishes a quarterly newsletter titled, La Especial Norte, now at issue #4, featuring essays by Seattle artists and reprinted essays from artists from elsewhere. It’s free but not online. Offenbacher likes print, although by the next issue, he promises to have an article archive on the Web.

His essay titled Green Gothic is in the current issue, reprinted by permission. Emily Carr’s and Gretchen Bennett’s images from the article. Other images (and the links) added by me.

I saw Twilight the other day, the teen vampire movie set in Forks. Local vampire Edward falls for the new kid at school, a pretty transplant from Arizona with the unlikely name Bella Swan. Edward is an unusually urbane vampire. He lives with his family in a Northwest modernist dream house in the woods. He drinks only non-human blood. Deer, mostly. He is sort of like a vegetarian in the vampire world. Oregon scenery (standing in for the Peninsula) co-stars. Whenever the camera can tear itself away from the lovers’ tortured faces, the screen is lit by a million shades of green.

(Glenn Rudolph, Via)

In Gothic stories landscape is destiny. A character’s inner life is reflected by their surroundings. In one scene, the young lovers go on a field trip with their biology class to a greenhouse and gaze into a wormy bin of compost. This is an everyday lesson in the damp, decaying, riotously fecund Northwest: the decomposition of dead things is what allows new life to grow. Why is Edward and Bella’s romance accompanied by the lush Northwest landscape? Maybe it is because Edward is a different sort of monster. Vampires are undead, a death which feeds on life in order to obtain a semblance of life, an anti-ecology, a reversal of the nitrogen cycle. Edward struggles to reconcile this existential horribleness with his sense of morality. Bella, meanwhile, is attracted to his dark, freakish, supernatural strangeness. The dilemmas Edward and Bella face echo those of much of the art which engages the history and ecology of the Northwest landscape.

What do you do if you love a monster? What if you are a monster, an ethical and moral creature who happens to be an abomination?

(Glenn Rudolph, Via)

Perhaps the most obvious example is Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium, a massive decomposing hemlock log parked inside a green-glass building at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

In an interview for PBS, Dion had this to say about it:

In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking…an ecosystem–a dead tree, but a living system–and we are re-contextualizing it….We’re pumping it up with a life-support system. So this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

 The Vivarium log is like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, imprisoned in a magic castle, waiting for Belle to fall in love with him. How do you deal with an abomination? You imprison it (and it will become an abomination partly as a result of the imprisonment) and wait for love to redeem it.

If the Vivarium applies a wishful strain of romantic thought to the problems caused by the destruction of natural systems–a monster in a glass cage to prick our consciences–Gas Works Park, the park designed by Richard Haag for the north end of Lake Union, is more pragmatic.

[Read more…] about Matthew Offenbacher’s Green Gothic

(Note: The image after the jump is not safe for work.)

Some things are certain. Night follows day, summer gives way to fall and Tyler Green will disapprove of art collections owned by banks on view at art museums. (New York Times’ story, And Now, An Exhibition From Our Sponsor, here. Green’s well-reasoned enlargements on the theme here.)

Green also disapproves of museum’s hosting exhibitions featuring work from a single private collector, arguing that such displays give too much of a market boost to their owner as well as undercutting curators on staff. (How about if curators select work from a single collector, which is nearly always the case?)

In any event, with big budget cuts in virtually all art museums, curators are likely to appreciate the breathing room a packaged exhibit provides. Even where curators remain in full force, their support staff is a shadow of what it was. The work load increases as resources erode.

Ideally, curators would be able to borrow important art from banks just as they do from individuals without ceding control to either. But given a choice between empty galleries and first-rate work presented by Bank of America, I’ll take the latter.

Anyone out there who still thinks the Brooklyn Museum shouldn’t have taken Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection?

Yes, museum authentication boosted Saatchi’s bottom line. And yes, if anyone deserves disapproval for his ethics, it’s him. Talk to artists whose work he has bought and sold. He’s not Santa.

And yet Sensation was an important exhibit to bring to the U.S. Exhibitions are about art. Where it comes matters less than what it is.

When art exhibits are little more than a pretext for trustees or favored patrons to pad their bottom line, it’s great that watchdogs like Green are on the job. Before I get interested in writing those stories, wrong-doing has to stink like a corpse in a closet.

Moral judgments continued: From Art Fag City:

Good morning misogyny! This week in poorly executed photography projects, Chad States discusses his series Men at Their Most Masculine at the Morning News.
The project is simple. The photographer places an ad on Craigslist
reading, “I am doing a photography project on masculinity. If you
identify as being masculine, please get back to me.” Then he
photographs selected respondents in their homes, and places a quote
from the session alongside the work.
The results from the banal solicitation are pretty much exactly what
you’d expect–a cross section of various misogynistic statements,
peppered with a few other predictable interpretations of masculinity.

Why the attitude? Because some of States’ models are dicks. Dear Art Fag City: They’re not people you’re sorry to have invited to dinner. They’re part of an art project.

And your point about States’ project being simple, and its initial contact with subjects a “banal solicitation”? To paraphrase Robert Morris, simplicity of design does not equate with simplicity of result.

Besides selecting themselves, States’ subjects posed themselves in the attire and setting of their choice. They are strangers who dispensed with the conventions of their anonymity to tell all to an artist with a camera and recording device, the 21st century’s version of a priest’s confessional. 

I saw a portion of Men at Their Most Masculine earlier this year and was fascinated by its deadpan Surrealism.

[Read more…] about Links – a roundup

Double yellow don’t-cross blooms on a wall. Via

Robert Yoder‘s exhibition at Howard House is a declaration of a frustrated sense of disconnection, both with his work and what he’s seeing from others.

“I’m not feeling it,” he said last Saturday, cleaning up after a workshop in the gallery.

By the late 1990s, Yoder’s calligraphic collages made of wood scraps, appropriated street signs and/or Legos were a certifiable hit in the region and beyond. From clunky materials he created magisterial abstractions, visual symphonies whose sheet music came from castoffs.

(Union Bridge, 2000, wood/road signs, 48″x48″x2″)

(Aluminum Management, painted found wood, 2004, 24″x24″x2″)

(Sunset, 2005, Lego on wood panel, 24″x24)

Such beginnings lead to substantial careers. Once Yoder had established the form, however, he found he didn’t want to continue to explore variations on its theme.

Is he another victim of the Pound imperative, make it new serving as an excuse for Attention Deficit Disorder? What if Dan Flavin hadn’t stuck with florescent light, Elizabeth Peyton abandoned portraits and Gary Hill walked away from video?

Not all artists can be as successfully chameleon as Bruce Nauman. Many best serve themselves by mining a single vein. Life is short. Art’s best chance of being long is internal coherence.

Other Seattle artists have done well improvising off the base Yoder created, including, below, painters Alfred Harris….

[Read more…] about Robert Yoder – more than an exhibition

Elizabeth Sandvig

Rita Ackermann

– Alan Ginsberg

Seattle crime, the artists

Chris Crites

Grant Barnhart

Jack Daws, CECI N’EST PAS UNE BONG

New York crime, the singer

Roy Zimmerman, Dick Cheney
 
Sample lyrics:

“When it’s late at night we can go back to my place,
where he can tap my phone and shoot me in the face …
Dick Cheney, ain’t he, the sexiest man alive ….”

Via

The compressed space of the surveillance society, with barren implications extending past the frame.

Via

Susana Raab, The Unfortunate Result of the Demise of the Public Phone Booth, Metropolis, Illinois, at Dean Jensen Gallery through Aug. 29.

Gilles Barbier, The Hospice, (detail)

Mark Newport, Batman

Dan Webb, Knight in (non-shiny) duct tape armour. No rescues on the horizon.