Archives for November 2009

In art, meth lab imagery tends to engage the DIY spirit of the outlaws. In an art context, before they are outlaws, they are makers. Claiming them is radical, but possibly no more radical than artists’ interest (now fading) in Project Runway. From high fashion to low crimes, enterprises that require the skill of the hand attract artists, even those whose practice calls for them to delegate fabrication to others.

As installations, meth labs fascinate, which can’t be said of PR. The problem with the current season is not the move to LA, although it didn’t help. It’s not the sporadic appearance of the New York judges, who are disinclined to make the trip. That didn’t help either. And it’s not the goofy challenges. There have always been goofy challenges.

It’s the poor quality of the contestants. Where did PR get these people? Of the final three, only Carol Hannah Whitfield has possibilities, and they dim compared to finalists in previous years. As for Irina Shabayeva, she projects shallow luxury, while Althea Harper projects not much of anything.

Meth labs, however, always have possibilities, being made and wrecked at the same time.

Meth kills, but so does moralism. Think of where we might be if the U.S. government had paid Afghan farmers for their poppy crops instead of burning their fields. Once in control of the product, we could have used it for medical pain relief in the Third World, where surgeries without anesthetics are too common. For a fraction of the cost of killing them, we could have helped the poorest of the poor raise their standard of living.

And if, in the U.S., drug abuse were a medical and not a criminal problem, those who construct the labs would be reduced to making something else. Art, for instance.

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh
Hello Meth Lab in the Sun #1, 2008
custom pigment print

Eli Hansen, I’m not paranoid because I’m high, 2009

Davis Langlois Meth Lab, 2003, oil/canvas

Vija Celmins is known for her small output interrupted by long silences. To admire her work is to lose one’s taste for charm. Her early still lifes are full of an understated yet powerful dread. Her later seascapes, desert floors and night skies look like the world seen through the eyes of the dead.

From 1977 to 1982, she paired rocks she had picked up and saved with painted bronze replicas. Eleven pairs are at the Museum of Modern Art.

I got the idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I’d bring them home and I kept the good ones. I noticed that I kept a lot that had galaxies on them. I carried them around in the trunk of my car. I put them on window sills. I lined them up. And, finally, they formed a set, a kind of constellation. I developed this desire to try and put them into an art context. Sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making: the act of looking and making as a primal act of art. (more)

Fourteen years later, Andrew Witkin crafted his own pile of stones. Like Celmins’, his assortment is full of ringers. Unlike Clemins, he created his bleached bone pile for beauty’s sake. While hers is a challenge to the eye, his is a reassurance. All of it, from table tennis balls and bits of cork to stones and ceramic orbs, vibrates on the same visual frequency in order to fuse.

Jen Graves on Jeffry Mitchell, a breathtaking  piece of writing, here.

Jeffry Mitchell’s art is ejaculatory, in
every good and holy and dirty and wrong sense of the word. We are
discussing this at church. Actually, we are outside church; we’ve just
come from the pews of St. Ignatius at Seattle University, where we
lifted our eyes up to the half-naked, tortured, and dead Christ, and
kept quiet.

Seattle could be entering its golden age of art criticism. There are more good writers covering visual art than ever before.

A psychotic need to deny: the Michael Jackson School of Art, here.

Beautiful math in architecture from Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, here.

Douglas Britt on Tilda Swinton, the actress most closely associated with the art world, here.

The best art is meaningless (Bob Dylan: “Walk tall and always carry a light bulb”) here.

In what way did Margarete Heymann differ from other Bauhaus pioneers? She was a woman unattached to a powerful male. Hence, her invisibility. Story here.

Real Clear Arts praises the new Whitney Web site, here.

Two Coats of Paint rejoices: “In the hierarchy of art, painting has always been at the top of the heap …,” here.

Jeff Weinstein on Our Great-Grandfather’s Butts, here.

Translinguistic Other salutes artist and art enthusiast Joey Veltkamp, here. If every town had a Joey Veltkamp, it would be a (much) better world.

Why is this piece from 2003 in The Guardian so much better than anything Sebastian Smee has written in the Globe?

Sample:

Sex has traditionally been the easiest way to distinguish between them:
where art nouveau had been feminine, art deco, the style that succeeded
it, was masculine. Feminine meant curves and organic forms, an orgy of
ornament; masculine meant straight lines, vitality, speed and
streamlining. When art deco kicked in before the first world war,
around 1910, the fine arts were still giddy from the revolutions of
fauvism, primitivism and cubism. But it really blossomed in the roaring
20s, the age of the flapper: in the collective imagination art deco
means women smoking, drinking cocktails and dressing like men.

He’s too young to have gone slack. I’d hate to conclude it’s a difference in editors. The Globe is famous for its editors.

The European Dark Ages do not haunt a hearty strain of the contemporary imagination for its wars, famines, dreads and superstitions, but for its irrational certainties. Good and evil were as concrete in the world as a horse in a pasture, a baby crying in a house or a woman drowned in a well. By casting its shadow on the brightest of days, evil affirmed its presence. The struggle against it was constant, and risks extended into eternity.

What did that world look like?

Claire Cowie‘s The Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth continues at Gage Academy through Saturday.

Jen Graves:

Death has always stalked Claire Cowie’s paintings and sculptures, but lately she’s taken it in and given it a furnished room in the parallel universe she’s been building for years.

is trapped in the past.

Hannah Lamar Simmons, from the series, Have You Read The News Today.

are an illusion to me now.

David Dupuis – Lost on the Frontiers of Heaven and Hell

Tracey Emin – Everyone I have ever slept with, 1963-1995

William Powhida’s cartoon attacking the New Museum is terrific as a cartoon. As he points out in his blog, in case the audience is too dim to see the connection, it derives from the slashing wit of Ad Reinhardt, who terrorized reactionaries in the late 1940s.

Cartoons are supposed to be unfair, one-sided and vehement. Powhida delivers on all counts. Less successful is the journalism that has risen like a surface to air missile to share in the attack. I’d like to propose the Dick Cheney rule for art writers. Is the subject under investigation poisoning the waterways, stealing from the poor to serve the rich, starting wars and trampling the Constitution? In short, is that person Dick Cheney?

If not, wouldn’t it be a good idea to explore the issue with a little more dispassion? In spite of what a handful of art bloggers insist, there are many sides to the so-called ethical questions raised by the museum’s decision to feature the collection of one of its trustees, curated by Jeff Koons. (Good overview from the New York Times here.) 

Purity police chief Tyler Green would prefer that we not see this show. I don’t know Dakis Joannou and am not likely to be invited to his house. I do know about his collection and am grateful it will be on view to the public.

About those ethical problems: I have them with museums featuring trustee collections only when the collections are mediocre. In that case, the exhibit is just flattery. Joannou’s collection is remarkable. I want to see it and don’t care whose board he’s on.

The hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone. O, the horror. Trustees know collectors who know artists who know dealers who know museum curators. Some of them sleep together. Some of them are married. Rather than slamming Elizabeth Peyton and Urs Fischer for being connected, how about looking at the work? Both of them are extraordinary artists. I saw the New Museum’s Peyton show. Like almost everything else at the the new version of the New Museum, it was badly installed (tough space), but I welcomed the chance to see that much of her work in one place.

There is no rule against museums devoting shows to the work of a single collector. If there were, that rule would be made to be broken. Yes, the rich and powerful are involved in museums. Those for whom this information is a shock and an outrage are too pure (and rigid) to live in the world. If New Museum founder Marcia Tucker did not have them on her team, her enterprise wouldn’t have launched or lasted.

Bill Finger spent 16 years working as a movie-set cameraman before packing it in to become an artist. He can run, but he cannot hide. In every way, the career that he ditched informs the one he moved into.

He builds models that he photographs as full-scale environments. After Thomas Demand, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere and Ross Sawyers,
it’s a popular strategy, but Finger’s are unlike anyone else’s. They were born worn out and anonymous, as if endless actors had been interrogated inside his police station…

stared out his window …

or glanced at the extra sleeping on a mattress that had been distressed by the special effects department.

Although he tends to avoid the particular, when he engages it, he goes all the way to iconic.

The stage sets Finger filmed and later recreated to photograph and dispose of resonate with moments of his childhood. They are memories potent enough to register outside his head and generalized enough to connect with similar memories of others. The only fox holes he dug, for instance, were in his childhood, playing war while Vietnam was ablaze on the nightly news. He was both bored and transfixed by what looked like his future. The ladder he made is missing a few rungs, giving its user a reason to continue to hide in his hole.

At Punch Gallery through Nov. 28.

Cake:

Oil: (Claude Zervas)

Except for Ambach & Rice, which this year is part NADA, Seattle galleries will be largely absent this year in Miami.

Each year since 2005, when Seattle artist Jaq Chartier and her husband, Dirk Park, rented a sweet little motel on Ocean Beach and invited 35 galleries to join them, Aqua Art Miami was a real contender among what were known as the hotel fairs, satellites to the main event, Art/Basel/Miami Beach. Not only was Aqua’s lineup strong, the hotel itself was a draw: open, airy and full of light. Wandering through too many of the other hotel fairs felt like being transported to the hallway fire scene in Barton Fink minus John Goodman, tour guide to  the life of the mind.

Scott Lawrimore, who hadn’t yet opened his gallery in 2005 but was invited thanks to the quality of his lineup, called Aqua the “single most important event for Seattle artists since Life magazine published The Mystic Painters of the Northwest. “

(Photo, Adam L. Weintraub, 2005: Ben Beres sleeping off a late night of partying on Aqua’s open-air second floor.)

That was then. Lawrimore (who represents Beres) won’t be at Aqua this year and wasn’t in 2008. Thanks to the economy, turnovers in Miami are the rule this year, including at the main fair, with a 24 percent turnover. (Story here.) At Aqua, turnover is 75 percent.

Of the 8 Seattle galleries in the original Aqua lineup, none is returning, although Howard House will have its name on an artist project room featuring Robert Yoder, and Francine Seders has the same relation to a room featuring Juan Alonso.

Chartier said the issue this year was filling the space. She and Park called 40 galleries to reach one that was “even remotely interested.” Attending Aqua for the first time from Seattle is La Familia Gallery.  The chances of La Familia being previously accepted into Aqua hover around zero.

In 2007, just in time for the first inklings of the crash-to-come, Aqua split in two to expand, occupying the hotel and opening a warehouse space in Wynwood. While the hotel version of Aqua was inspired, the Wynwood space was easy to lose track of in the overall Miami glut. This year, there is no hotel fair for Aqua, and Wynwood, such as it is, will carry on.

The lease on the Wynwood space runs through this year. Dirk and Chartier had to participate. If they continue next year, they face a steep climb back to hotness.

At Nada, Ambach & Rice will feature Jeffry Mitchell and Karen Sargsyan, with a couple of drawings by Eric Yahnker.

Aqua coverage in the PI from 2005, 2006 and 2007. I didn’t go in 2008 and (alas) won’t be going this year.