Archives for August 2009

His Web site.

Crossing the Fremont Bridge:

The Space Needle seen from Belltown:

Anthony Gormley’s fascinating Fourth Plinth project (live on the link One & Other) features 2,400 randomly selected volunteers who each take the pedestal for an hour to do what they want: eat, lecture, dance, sunbathe, sit on a (portable) toilet, text friends, play music, strip, jog, paint, draw, read, clip their toenails, wave to friends, giggle, sing and do yoga. I saw a woman who yelled at anyone who looked at her, feeling, she said, stalked.

Asked another, rhetorically:

What am I symbolizing? Artist? Sex machine? Muppet?

Seattle’s Ellen Ziegler used her hour to enlarge the idea of the project. Holding a mirror, she directed it at those gazing up at her. In looking at her, they were looking at themselves.

Watch Ziegler on the Plinth here. (The tape starts with a minute or two of the final performance of toilet guy wearing a kind of ribbon-like diaper.)

Participating (including travel expenses) cost her about $2,000, which she didn’t have.

Wrote Ziegler:

More than 120 donors contributed almost $2000 toward my travel and expenses, mostly in $10 donations. Why? I believe it’s because of the Quilting Bee Theory of Artist Funding. As artists, we need short-term funding from time to time. You give me $10 when I need it now, then when you have an urgent funding need, I’ll give you $10.
Community support is essential in these times. I’m thrilled that it worked, not only for my sake, but to know that it’s a method to support each other, just like a quilting bee or a barn raising. 

Following is a (long) list of donors to date:

[Read more…] about Ellen Ziegler shares the Plinth

What the Los Angeles County Art Museum’s threatened film program is to LA, the Northwest Film Forum is to Seattle. 

With a 30 percent drop in income, on July 30 NFF asked everybody with a
stake to send $10 by Aug. 15. Sub Pop responded with a matching grant
of $10,000. To date, NFF has raised more than $33,000.

NFF was looking at a $70,000 deficit for the current year (on a $700,000 annual budget) and hopes to close with less than $35,000 in the minus column.

In the meantime, NFF has laid off its
excellent managing director Susie Purves, whose background covers a wide variety of
Seattle’s arts institutions, including as curator and/or director of the
Center on Contemporary Art, Kirkland Arts Center, On the Boards and the
Seattle International Children’s Festival.

Two more staff have been cut from full time to 24 hours a week. Again, an arts institution will try to do what it does with less money and important staff missing. Director Lyall said he hopes to be full strength by the end of the year.

What NFF does, from its Web site:

[Read more…] about Northwest Film Forum cuts staff

From the Royal Academy of Arts, birds as a good thing:

John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) was born the year the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) delivered their manifesto challenging official art rules promoted by the Academy. Waterhouse revived the literary and mythological inspiration of his predecessors, often staging, with crisp brushwork, dramatic confrontations of a single figure and a group. An active member of the Academy in the 1880s and 90s, Waterhouse nevertheless fell into oblivion in the early 20th century. Left, “St. Eulalia, 1885.” (Tate, London) The saint was martyred in Rome at age 12. According to Prudentius, a Christian poet who also lived in the 4th century, a white dove flew out of her mouth and snow suddenly fell at the moment of her death.

Yael Mer, 2 Evacuation Dresses (2006) Image Katonah Museum of Art via C-Monster.

Sami Ben Larbi, Shirt ( 2003) Via Lawrimore Project

The artist modeling his work:

If you climbed John Grade‘s wall, your footholds would be mouths.

Grade (pronounced Grotty for no good reason) is part of UberPortrait at the Bellevue Arts Museum, curated by Stefano Catalani and featuring more than 40 artworks from 11 artists.

[Read more…] about Bellevue Arts Museum redefines the portrait

Greg Kucera responds to this:

Regina, your comment about Dailey’s work is an interesting, if not highly arguable, one. You wrote that “Once he found his style he didn’t change it until forced by health reasons.” I think that Dailey is, instead, one of those subtle, but still convincing artists who changed, not just because of his health issues, but because his mind expanded continuously.

In 30 years or so, Dailey’s work progressed from horizontally banded works about palpable landscape in the 1960s, to vaporously open paintings about light and sky in the 1970s and into the 1980s, to complicated color studies in vertically banded works suggesting differing times and atmospheres into the 1990s, to the complex, nearly Baroque, works about framing space and color and mood in the last 15 years or so.

[Read more…] about Greg Kucera on Michael Dailey

It exists only in fiction. From Thomas Perry’s Death Benefits:

Stillman turned his head to stare at Walker critically then waved off the valet parking attendant.

“We’ll have to stop and get you some clothes and stuff.”

He turned and walked west on Wilshire Blvd. Stillman stopped to look into the Neiman Marcus window, and Walker pointedly kept moving.

Stillman called, “Hold it,” and Walker came back.

“I know you can’t afford this, but don’t worry about it. We’re on an expense account.”

“You may be,” said Walker, “but I doubt it includes me and I’m sure it doesn’t include clothes.”

Stillman glanced at his watch and said affably, “It includes anything I say it includes. I don’t itemize.”

Walker cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

“My clients know I’m not wasting their time on that sort of thing. If they want my services they pay what I cost and don’t get on my nerves. I don’t bid. I don’t give estimates, and I don’t account for things. “

Here’s a photo inflected with dots that owes nothing to John Baldessari.

In Braille, the black dots spell out the title: The Meadow. Braille functions as a coded cloud, a darkness that inserts itself into the clarity of daylight. Mafford‘s Braille series at the Virginia Inn through Aug. 31.