Archives for August 2009

Dance critic Apollinaire Scherr responds to my criticism (here) of dance criticism:

In defense of Macaulay and me, a couple of thoughts: I do think there’s
a difference between Croce’s not going at all (though if it were the
time and I had the time, I would defend that action, given her reasons)
and Macaulay not watching the bulk of these two dance competition
shows.

Don’t TV critics, even, review a show after having watched only
the pilot and a few shows in? I don’t think a critic is obliged to
watch every show to weigh in on the gist of it. Of course there are
going to be exceptions to the general rule of terrible choreography
that makes even good dancers dreadful, but that’s not his or my point.
And haven’t you walked into a gallery, given a good look at a few
paintings/installations/videos and then scanned the rest? I mean, do
you study every single inch of canvass to give it the benefit of the
doubt?

I think Macaulay is very careful, in all of his reviews, to
report exactly how much he has seen and not seen. Probably other
critics wouldn’t even mention it if they hadn’t seen every single show.

As for the whole high/low distinction, I agree that dance critics–or
rather, ballet critics–can be snobs. On the other hand, we’ve reached
a point in the culture where to condemn a popular and populist art is
suspect from the get-go. I think it’s refreshing, not tiresome, that he
would dare do it in the Times.

Also, how often do art critics even
bother with this kind of commercial work: say, Thomas Kinkade? Let me
know what you think when they do. Sure, Dave Hickey has done Rockwell,
but that’s so far after the fact, it hardly counts.

Finally, this video
above: I agree he’s a fine dancer–particularly his hips and
footwork–but the choreography and the way it works with its music
doesn’t allow him to be musical. Every one of his phrases ends with the
same sort of ta-da, and the feel of the music runs exactly counter to
the spirit of the dancing. It’s a ludicrous piece, and that’s the
problem with So You Think You Can Dance –the show reduces even the
best dancers to dreck. ~Apollinaire

Kenneth Koch

Something there is that doesn’t hump a stump.

Brian Tolle, on the campus of the University of Washington:

David Ellis

Steven Heino

Linda Beaumont, installation, Sea-Tac International Airport

Jeffry Mitchell

At Greg Kucera Gallery, 6-8 p.m. Opening today, but reception for artists will be Sept. 3., 6-8.

Mark Calderon:

Anne Appleby

Mapplethorpe once called photography a “perfect way to make a sculpture.”

(Apollo, 1988)

He was always about perfection. The thing about Polaroids: Mapplethorpe, opening Oct. 24 at the Henry, is that he found it early and on the fly. Curated by Henry director Sylvia Wolf, it opened last year at the Whitney.

Gottfried Helnwein: order overwhelmed inside a chaos…

Seattle’s Scott Lawrimore opened Lawrimore Project two four years ago in an understated piece of anonymous modernism updated by Lead Pencil’s Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo. They added nothing to the outside except a steel-coated front door and a ribbon of hot pink paint, like wrapping on a gift.

Inside, the first room sports a stained, concrete floor, four skylights and wallboard. Past the raw, there’s elegance: a series of galleries with bamboo floors, including a video room, a parlor and a sculpture garden, bounded by chain link. Lawrimore’s office is an inside joke. Because he grew up in a trailer park, Lead Pencil gave him a trailer-park office on concrete blocks with a hot-pink exterior.

Hot pink is the gallery’s signature, which is why, when asked to participate in an exhibit titled Spite House, Matt Browning attacked the pink.

Lawrimore showed up at his gallery to find his pink gone. For the price of a gallon of black house paint, Browning spited his dealer and fellow artists Han and Mihalyo. Because pink is the gallery’s calling card, he replaced it with his own hue. His color and his gallery, inside and out.

In corporate boardrooms, you eat what you kill. You don’t kill, you don’t eat. As curators Yoko Ott and Jessica Powers noted in the catalog, group exhibitions arrive with a similar kind of built-in hostility, the art version of “land grabs and property disputes.”

Spite houses exist across the country, usually dwellings built on small strips of land the owner of an adjoining parcel felt was too small to use and refused to purchase. I’ll show him, says the owner of the tiny parcel, building a structure on the thin slice aimed at destroying the peace of mind and window views of the neighbor.

The most famous spite exhibition entry is Duchamp’s Mile of String from 1942. After surrealists had hung their paintings, he turned the gallery into a spider’s web, making anything but his work impossible to see.

Again, from the catalog:

Spite houses…may as well be shaped like a hand giving you the middle finger with a pair of testicles hanging off the wrist…

Unless they appear in the early architecture of Frank Gehry, chain-link fences denote prisons, construction sites or industrial wastelands. Aaron Young dipped his chain-link Tumbleweed (above) in 24-kt gold, and also his chain-link fence blocking entry to the video gallery. (What the artist touches turns to gold.)  A bent corner makes it theoretically possible for someone who weighs less than 40 pounds to slip through. Everyone else has to stand outside, watching Andrew Dadson‘s two-channel video projection, Roof Gap, at a remove.

Bert Rodriguez built a white wall with his father, a repeat of a performance in Miami where the two at long last learn to work together and incidentally partially block entry. SuttonBeresCuller built a wall that completely blocks entry to the gallery containing the group’s sculpture. All that’s visible from the crack is the shadow of a sculpture stand.

Back to Dadson: He painted his neighbor’s lawn black and photographed it, oddly affecting. A vase of white roses standing in black in are slowly through their veins turning black. Titled Should Love Come First, it refers to a piece Robert Rauschenberg made for Jasper Johns, the answer being, apparently, no.

Elias Hansen (with Herman Beans) built a coffin that functions as a rough/ready shelter, image above. One person could live there, awaiting the demise of the other. The Place I Used To Live is a bum’s camp equipped with survivalist’s essentials but located high on a wall, making it inaccessible.

Christian Kliegel reconfigured the gallery’s spaces from the roof, marking them out in duct tape. The rubble he found there now rests against indoor pillars, bringing the outside in.

Through Sept. 12. Lawrimore invited four writers to consider the theme. From those essays:

Joel Felix:

The spite house exposes the natural hostility buried in cooperation. Once I understand your motives to inhabit (own a) space, I will block them with a small, useless building on my grounds..,.These are the darker rights of my sovereignty.

Robert Mittenthal:

The aggressive artist marks his territory, carefully pissing away time – sitting on the egg with the hope that it will begin to resemble himself. Even the faint possibiity of being spited, the possibility that some heathen may transgress his invisible or intagible boundaries, invites negative ease.

Will Owen:

Spite homes lie in the collapsing human space of a house as it unveils the intentions of its development: a contortion, obstruction, repulsion and cast of our disembodied fecundity.

Tabitha Brown:

Placing things where they’re not meant to be reflects a kind of striving. Fueled by the habit of outdoing one’s limitations, the restrictive order of these modules makes waste and economic struggle inevitable. But it also makes possible the limitless permutations of surprise. ..

The function of the object obstructing our view is apocryphal. Contrary to all appperances, though, it serves one. It’s obviously not here to resolve conflict. But id does solve a problem. It answers the question of what we do now.

Like art, it begins to appreciate.

Mike Urban took this photo while on staff of the Seattle PI, before the photo staff was downsized to one and the PI moved to an online-only ghost of itself, no arts staff at all:

It’s a great shot, which is why it has proved popular on the Web. The only thing missing from this happy story is credit. Neither Urban’s nor the PI’s name appears here and here. Ruby Montana did the right thing here. As an art critic who relies on the Web, I’m constantly urging artists, galleries and museums to make their images reproducible. The prospect of being ripped off hinders free flow.

Web site heights and depths: Seattle happens to have starring entries in the museum Web site heights and depths department. The Henry Gallery is the height: easy to use, rich in institutional depth, generous with images, beautiful and fun. The Seattle Art Museum is its opposite. Not only does it skimp on info/imagery, its graphics are hideously annoying.

Web life matters. Here are the region’s top 10 museums arranged in order of Web merit.

1. Henry. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, or at least until the update. Credit goes to Betsey Brock and her team.

2. Frye Art Museum. Useful, practical and informative. Lacks the Henry’s excitement and drive, but good job.

3. Vancouver Art Gallery. Nearly as good as the Frye’s, but needs more images.

4. Tacoma Art Museum. Dull design but in the game. Again, more images. Art museums are visual storehouses.

5. Bellevue Arts Museum: Considering the resources of this institution, tip top.

6. Portland Art Museum.
Clean design, but not nearly enough information on current shows, never
mind past and future, and flash prevents the site from releasing any
images. Let your images roam free on the Internets!

7. Museum of Contemporary Craft. Competent. Well done.

8. Museum of Northwest Art. Not bad but skimpy. Build it out.

9. Whatcom Museum of History and Art. A placeholder. A shadow of a shadow.

10.
Seattle Art Museum. It’s only last because as the premier art museum on
the West Coast south north of Los Angeles, it should be first. Instead, it’s
dull, unhelpful and withholding to the point of audience hostility.

A strain of malicious, hysterical crazy continues to assert itself in American politics, threatening progressive change. Is the heartland missing its heart? After 8 years of Bush, haven’t these people done enough damage to the world? Obama’s come-let-us-reason-together stance does not appear to be cutting it.

Walter Robinson (not the painter) diagnoses the problem with Cracker:
Time’s running out. Via

Garde Rail moving to Austin: Story here. The folk/outsider gallery owned by Karen Light and Marcus Pina opened in 1998, after the boom in that field had come and gone. Gradually, Light and Pina found a core of artists who are more than me-too and established themselves nationally.

Light, from the South, has been talking about moving to Austin for months. Her husband Pina is from Seattle and, she said, dreaded the heat. Moving in August is not going to assuage his fears. They close in Seattle Aug. 22.

Among the more singular artists they discovered and will continue to represent are Seattle’s Gregory Blackstock and Southern California’s John Taylor. (Click images to enlarge.)

Despite the recession or whatever the country’s economic ruin is currently called, Seattle has lost not a single significant gallery till now, and this one’s a move, not a closure.

Portland, on the other hand, has been hit hard. (See D.K. Row, who wonders if it’s too late to save the Portland gallery scene, here.) Recent closures include Quality Pictures, Pulliam Deffenbaugh and Mark Wooley.

Planned for 2012, Jeff Koons’ life-sized replica of a motorized train will be suspended from a construction crane at the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Christopher Knight, LA Times, here)

The price tag for “Train” is $25 million.
I’d assume that’s a ballpark guesstimate, because engineering and
fabrication costs have a way of evolving over time. The
steel-and-aluminum “Train” is a 70-foot replica of a 1943 Baldwin
2900-series steam locomotive, and the aim is to suspend it vertically
from an actual 161-foot-tall construction crane. The wheels will
rotate, smoke will puff from the smokestack and the whistle will blow,
all at as-yet-unspecified intervals.
At LACMA’s blog Unframed, John Bowsher, director of special art
installations, was quoted in October describing the design-process as
“reverse-engineering.” An actual 1943 machine is being digitally
scanned, piece by piece, so that the new parts then can be fabricated
and assembled to create a shiny doppelgänger.

In an earthquake zone, the hubris of the project is notable, but if any artist can make it work, it’s Koons. Unlike Damien Hirst, whose shark continues to rot in its tank, sagging against its supports despite interventions, Koons places a premium on fabrication exactitude.

Despite its size, Train is reduced to an absurdity. If constructed, it will steam to no purpose in the heart of car culture. That’s what art continues to say about trains, that they are an echo of an echo, a memory to cling to in sentimental song, the ultimate road not taken.

Makes sense that American artists would see it this way, but European? Christoph Draeger is Swiss. We’re a long way from Sleeping Car Murder. 

Christoph Draeger

Glenn Rudolph (and here)

Eirik Johnson: Scrapped train, Arlington, Washington

Erika Langley

Alastair Macaulay’s essay about the kind of ballroom dance found on TV shows – Ballroom: More Sexily, Less Strictly – speaks to the radical divide between high dance and low:

Not So Strictly On TV — the British reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” which began
in 2004, and the American “So You Think You Can Dance,” which started
in 2005 — we see all the good-humored hard work that both sexes put
into performing ballroom.
In such a context I only occasionally pause to consider that their
endeavor itself is gross….

The little I see of “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Strictly Come
Dancing” tends to put me off watching more; the camera angles seldom
help you judge footwork; the whole climate feels manipulative; and the
dances themselves aren’t those I’d want good performers to learn…

What makes me wretched is that all these stunts, acrobatics,
point-scoring and flashy displays of sexual availability are what
matter. Musicality, phrasing, intimacy and actual sensuousness are what
don’t.

The little he sees of it. Ordinarily, admitting that you haven’t seen what you’re attacking is not thought of as good form.

And yet Apollinaire Scherr rushed to agree, here.

I’ve been wanting to write this piece forever, and probably because I
knew it would seem hopelessly snobby–I can’t tell you how many people
whose only exposure to dance are these shows ask me eagerly what I
think of them–somehow haven’t. I just say I haven’t watched them much,
which is true enough, but the reason is that they give me a
stomachache.

I just say I haven’t watched them much, which is true enough…

I’m not going to defend Dancing With the Stars. It’s amateur hour with coaches. But So You Think You Can Dance? There are dancers on that show qualified to be in any contemporary company in existence. Some of the choreography is corny and over-the-top, but far from all of it.

Alastair Macaulay is not only a good writer. He’s the only full-time dance critic employed at a newspaper in the United States. He has weight. I can’t imagine why he wants to swing it at a target he hasn’t seen.

What is it with dance critics? Do they dream of divine forms they can’t bear to see sullied by daily life?

When Arlene Croce attacked Bill T. Jones’ Still/Here in 1995, with an (unlinkable) essay that began, “I have not seen Bill T Jones’ Still/Here and have no plans to review it,” she besmirched her career, not his, because what followed was a review of Jones’ meanings as she misunderstood them. (Her piece discussed here.)

Macaulay more recently wrote a lovely piece about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, here. Had he been watching So You Think You Can Dance, however, he’d have known that Benji Schwimmer, dancing below with his cousin, Heidi Groskreutz, won first place on the show in 2006. Instead of maintaining that its dancers lack “musicality, phrasing, intimacy and actual sensuousness,” Macaulay would have seen a genuine heir to Astaire.