Makes pillows:
Archives for September 2009
Post cubist landscapes: both sides now
Jeff DeGolier, Two Skies with a Hole
Ford Gilbreath, Duwamish River
Kader Attia: Fate adds beauty to the world
Kader Attia, still from video Aftermath.
Attia opens Sept. 21 at Galerie Christian Nagel. On Nov. 3, Comedy of Change premieres in London, featuring the Rambert Dance Company. The piece is inspired by the thinking of Charles Dawrin, and Attia served as its artistic designer.
Attia denies that he is a provocateur.
The
word provocative has spectacular implications. I
believe only in poetry.
And I believe in him.
Old school movie night at G. Gibson Gallery
Boy genius Jacques-Henri
Lartigue, My Seaplane and Me in My Bath, Paris, 1906
G. Gibson Gallery: Along with its exhibit of Lartigue, Marion Post Wolcott and Imogen Cunningham, the gallery offers on Sept. 30 at 6:30 films by Lartigue, Wolcott, Roy Stryker, the FSA photographers and
Imogen Cunningham.
Cunningham is also at the Seattle Art Museum through Aug. 29, 2010. Email from SAM curator Marisa Sánchez:
In support of Everything Under the Sun: Photographs by Imogen Cunningham, Christina DePaolo worked with the Imogen Cunningham Trust and Aaron Bourget to create the following video excerpt from an award-nominated documentary on Imogen Cunningham made by her granddaughter Meg Partridge.
The dream of every art critic
From Studio Ephemeral:
Fate as a road sign
From Swamp File via This Isn’t Happiness
Will China sue Damien Hirst?
(Previous post on Hirst’s legal dispute with a teenage street artist here.)
The Chinese government hasn’t filed suit yet, but it could. Its sweatshops produced a jewel-crusted skull before Hirst did.
Expose of the China-to-Hirst link, such as it is, here.
Mexico has a better claim and could use the money.
I know a candy company that could sue Jim Riswold.
John LeKay thinks that Hirst got his skull idea from him (here, scroll down for image). LeKay says he in turn got the idea from a Mayan crystal skull. More about artists who say Hirst copied them here. (One won a settlement.)
Unless somebody’s making knock-offs of your work, artists suing each other is insane. Hirst, of course, has positioned himself in the insanity and death of contemporary economics. He’s the poet of poisoned individualism. Like Jeff Koons before him, he absorbs criticism as part of his strategy. His work both scrutinizes the art world and milks it dry. Will he manage to undermine not only the younger generation but the gallery system that offers free admission to art history’s ground floor? If he helps to bring the house down, his unregulated greed will be late capitalism’s cracked mirror.
Back to skulls. When human ones become aesthetic, their messages are indisputable, with a bottom line wide as a boardwalk.
1. Tick tick. Remember you must die.
2. Mourning. Alas, poor Yorick. (A subset of mourning is outrage, as in this map of Cambodia made of skulls.)
3. Party down, preferrably in the graveyard with your nearest and dearest, and then remember you must die.
By adding bling, Hirst was well within the formula. He peeled the familiarity
from No. 1 (memento mori) and sweetened it with No. 3 (a party kick)
for horror, which is back to No. 1.
Riswold skipped 1 and 2 to root himself in 3, and that’s the problem. He doesn’t have the depth to compete with
Mexican graveyard humor, even under the guise of a Hirst
tribute.
(For an excellent beyond-the-skull-but-dead-anyway image of Hirst satire, go here.)
4. Recycling. Matthew Day Jackson, I Like America and America Likes Me in The Violet Hour at the Henry Gallery, photo Richard Nichol. Jackson’s muscle car rides on our fossils. Will Hirst sue? Probably not, because Jackson is an adult and can afford a lawyer.
Sanford Robinson on Damien Hirst
In response to this post, Sanford Robinson wrote:
Hirst’s presumption is that he’s entitled to have it all. With meticulous craft and at astronomical expense, a human skull is encrusted with diamonds. This objet d’art, commissioned by Hirst, transforms the memento mori and invites us to see ourselves as creatures doomed to die, obsessed with money, and entranced by trinkets. It is intended to become his icon, his brand, his logo, like Warhol’s can of soup. But more than just a way to enhance his artistic reputation–such as it is–the diamond-studded skull is primarily an instrument by which to increase Hirst’s already considerable personal wealth.
And so,pouts the art star, how dare this upstart oik, this Cartrain person, appropriate the image of such a fabulously expensive, unique object–MY object!– for his own purposes? He dares, sir, he dares! He does it because the image itself has already been commodified, reproduced endlessly in the media and on the net, and it has, for better or worse, entered the culture.
Accordingly, Cartrain and for that matter anyone should be entitled to use it to make whatever statements they want, and Damien Hirst should have nothing to say about it. Does the estate of Walker Evans sue Sherrie Levine? Does the estate of Pablo Picasso sue every cartoonist who sends up Guernica? The court decision is breathtakingly stupid. Let street vendors in Shanghai hawk blatantly cheap copies of the diamond skull to anyone with a few yuan to spare. Let children make Christmas tree ornaments out of it. Let the ironies proliferate and beget more ironies, world without end, amen!
Saturday night – Lullaby Moon
…all thy passions, match’d with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine–
Tennyson
Tomorrow night, beginning around 6:30, Lucy Lucia Neare’s Theatrical Wonders presents the 12th edition of Lullaby Moon at Warren G. Magnuson Park. (Details here.)
While this event could easily fall into the dread category of a sprites-dancing, whimsical reverie, I know sane and sensible people following its once-monthly (on a full new moon) procession through Seattle who are ravished by its charms.
Wrote Josh Trujillo (his photo to the left) after last month’s edition:
Like Alice in her Wonderland, the streets of downtown Seattle appeared to be overtaken by a dream on Thursday evening.
Six-foot-tall rabbits danced with white cats while horses pushed carriages. Clocks skipped along the street and owls danced with their umbrellas.
Those who knew what was happening smiled as they watched the street performance. Those who stumbled upon it looked amazed.
The show, Lullaby Moon, was created by Lucia Neare and was the 11th in a yearlong series of magical shows that celebrate the lunar phase of the new moon. (more)
Funded by 4Culture.
Trujillo:
Kate Hailey, who went in May, took this photo:
Tomorrow night ends the cycle.
More on Damien Hirst’s pencils
Previous:
From C-Monster:
The graffiti artist who stole a buncha pencils from a Hirst installation at the Tate Modern is now threatening to sharpen them.
In response to my reposting C-Monster, an artist emailed me:
That’s cute, Regina, but you’re missing the point. One artist vandalized the work of another. The pencils aren’t just pencils, any more than Claes Oldenburg’s bat is just a bat. In a more rational world than the one shaping up online, art critics would support the artist, not the vandal.
I think it’s worth remembering that Damien Hirst started this fight when he took teenage street artist Cartrain to court for copyright infringement, and, in an astonishing miscarriage of justice, won.
Copyright? Cartrain’s collages are satires.
An example of what Cartrain was forced to hand over to Hirst’s lawyers, posted by Jonathan Jones:
I love Hirst’s work, but he’s in danger of becoming the Dick Cheney of the art world.
As Jones wrote:
Damien Hirst‘s feud with teenage street artist Cartrain could yet become the most controversial story of Hirst’s career.
It really is vile for a rich man to use his power to bully someone who,
after all, is just trying to emulate him by making art with found
materials.Presumably, what irks Hirst is that Cartrain used
Hirst’s diamond skull in a series of collaged portraits of the skull’s
creator. Hirst successfully demanded that all the young artist’s works
incorporating the diamond skull should be handed over, presumably to be destroyed. (more)
(That’s two presumablys in one paragraph. Doesn’t the Guardian employ editors?) Of course Cartrain should give Hirst back his dick pencils. But Hirst needs to stop being such a dick. One Cheney is more than enough.