Archives for November 2009

Karen Sargsyan would rather sing than be a visual artist, thrilling opera houses with his baritone, or maybe dance, leaping across stages as if his body were spring loaded. Were he given the chance, he’d have checked actor before artist, imagining himself staggering across simulated moors in Lear’s mad scene.

Alas. His theatrical heart can find expression only through the work of his hand. In that hand is a scissors.

The queen flings her arms out in a slow-motion, dying fall, ignored by her rotund consort in the corner who prefers the company of his jester.

Now at Ambach & Rice, Sargsyan’s Abroad Understanding was created at the Hat Factory in upstate New York and exhibited earlier this year at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

Sargsyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1973 and lives in Amsterdam. At a time in which young artists are increasingly disinclined to commit to a single medium, Sargsyan has thrown his all behind heavy-stock paper, which he cuts into frenzied form and hangs on metal armatures, just as his Netherlands colleague, Folkert de Jong, focuses on painted Styrofoam.

What Boccioni achieved in 1913 with bronze, Sargsyan updates and transforms with flimsier materials. Motionless, each of his figures is in motion, layered into a series of messy tableaus. As his figures are nothing more than large paper dolls, they should be trivial, but the elusive themes they sound are profound.

Through November 28. Ambach & Rice is expanding the idea of what a gallery can be in Seattle, not just a commercial space but an art center with a global reach.

Nina Simon specializes in advising museums on how to deal with Internets and their audience spawn. (Her blog, Museum 2.0, here, via Betsey Brock.)

Simon’s post about why museums should allow their audiences to take photographs is so obviously right it’s remarkable that she wrote it down, except, most museums don’t. Whip out a camera at the Seattle Art Museum only if you long to be chastised by a guard or two. Ditto the Henry.

Here’s the first point of her 5-point argument.

As long as it does not promote unsafe conditions for artifacts or people or illegal behavior, museums should prioritize providing opportunities for visitors to engage in ways that are familiar and comfortable to them. Yes, some people (especially vocal museum staff!) hate the sight of people taking photos in museums. But what about visitors? If your argument is based on visitor comfort and distraction, it should be backed up by visitor research, not personal impressions.

Would staff members who hate photography be comparably disturbed by visitors sketching in the galleries? Sketching takes up more space and is more distracting than photo-taking (and pencils could be used to damage objects!), and yet many museum professionals look benevolently upon that activity as a positive meaning-making visitor experience. This is prejudicial treatment. I know that many people are uncomfortable with the growing culture of self-documentation, but no one should let their own aesthetic preferences dictate others’ behavior without good reason.

I’m happy to report that SAM doesn’t engage in the prejudicial treatment Simon describes, allowing people to draw but not take photos. SAM won’t let people draw either, except with pencil.

Simon wants museums to give visitors more freedom. Half a century ago, Frank O’Hara had something similar to say to mothers:

AVE MARIA  
  

   Mothers of America
                                   let your kids go to the movies!
   get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
   it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                                 but what about the soul
   that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
   and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                   they won’t hate you
   they won’t criticize you they won’t know
                                                                they’ll be in some glamorous country
   they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

   they may even be grateful to you
                                                     for their first sexual experience
   which only cost you a quarter
                                                 and didn’t upset the peaceful home
   they will know where candy bars come from
                                                                       and gratuitous bags of popcorn
   as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over
   with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
   near the Williamsburg Bridge
                                                oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
   so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
   they won’t know the difference
                                                  and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy
   and they’ll have been truly entertained either way
   instead of hanging around the yard
                                                        or up in their room
                                                                                      hating you
   prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet
   except keeping them from the darker joys
                                                                   it’s unforgivable the latter
   so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice
                                                                          and the family breaks up
   and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
                                                                                         seeing
   movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young

Jean Shin, Sound Wave, 2007

Brent Sommerhauser, Curl, 2009

All I need is a room somewhere…

Some people don’t aspire to spacious. Even if they had the funds to expand, they’d still  wrap themselves in a home as if they were pulling on a sweater or wriggling into a shell. The inanimate becomes a layer of self with no room for another. Below, where solitaries go, both stationary and on wheels.

Scott Peterman

Amir Zaki

Andrea Zittel

Kevincyr, suggested by Jennifer Zwick

Buddy Bunting

John Divola

Justin Colt Beckman

SuttonBeresCuller

Drew Daly, who is exhibiting at the Greg Kucera Gallery through Nov. 14, received an MFA from the University of Washington in 2004. Timothy Brown graduated with the same degree from the UW two years later.

About the impression Daly made in the MFA exhibit at the Henry, I wrote:

Just inside the galleries are two chairs by Drew Daley that aren’t
chairs at all. Keep looking at them, and they turn into rarified
paintings, all scraped down and burnished to a soft green glow. They
impersonate the useful as tribute to the uselessly beautiful.

Later I learned that the two chairs started as one chair. By carving it, Daly doubled its presence. That piece:

About Brown I wrote:

Timothy Brown’s massive chunk of yellowing resin has four (schoolroom) chairs painted inside it. I love their spindly legs. With their platter tops and the ghostly contrivance of the resin layering, they are memories frozen in time.

That piece:

And more recently:

These artists were familiar with each other’s work, at least
peripherally, as their studios in the time their schooling overlapped after graduating were in the same
building. Only Brown was working with resin.

As part of Daly’s current exhibit, he too has turned to resin.

Circulating around town are rumors that Daly plagiarized Brown. About Daly’s current show, I wrote:

The dropped ball never hits the floor in Drew Daly’s resin sculptures, which are surely a tribute to Jeff Koons’ Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank from 1985 in particular and to Lucas Samaras in general…Daly makes art as if the world were a bellows, breathing in and out. On the exhale, faces, furniture and (most recently) sports equipment pull apart in fragments. On the inhale, they reform, but not necessarily in their original shapes. Two chairs become one, or one becomes two. Twelve fuse as if through an electrical current. A chest of drawers bends and flares. (more)

Brown’s work didn’t come to mind when writing that review. If it had, I would have been unlikely to mention it. There’s a material similarity, but the focus is entirely different, Daly honing in on fracture and Brown on floating sense world memories.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Daly might well have borrowed the idea of resin casts from Brown, but he might also have been thinking of Rachel Whiteread. Art comes from art. What matters is not the what of materials but the how of their use.

In regard to who did what when and thinking strictly of subject matter, don’t both artists owe Jack Daws?

Daws’ Hollow Reed from 2001:

No.

Does Daly need to acknolwedge Daws’ Basketball Watermelon from 2002?

No. Brown deserves a far larger career than he has had to date. Daly did not, however, steal his play or render it invalid.

Previous here and here.

Today in the New York Times: Brooklyn Woman Finds Counterfeit Penny Made of Gold, here. Also, Jen Graves logs in here. The story has legs. Now that Jack Daws is going to be known as Midas of Small Things, he’s going to see his work reflected back at him from halls of crazy media mirrors.

One distortion is already in play: Daws shelled out $1,000 for the gold in 10 counterfeit pennies. My math has never risen to the status of elementary, but that means $100 per penny. It doesn’t mean that each penny is worth $100. Each of his penny-shaped sculptures is currently worth $1,000. To say it’s worth $100 is like saying a Brice Marden is worth the cost of its oil paint and canvas.

In an essay in Art and Culture published in 1961, Clement Greenberg observed that gold is art’s umbilical chord.

Daws’ pennies are the disinherited kin of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God. Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull cost $14 million to produce but is worth whatever the market roller coaster says it is, at least $50 million.

Artists from Gary Hill to Chris Burden
have been working gold into their installations. Only Daws uses what is valuable to impersonate the valueless. If gold is the umbilical chord of art, Daws suggests it is wrapped around the throat of the baby. On that most basic level of their meanings, both Daws and Hirst are on the same page.

“What I
believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to
photography is the addition of lyricism….[this quality] is
usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally
by the cameraman.”

-Walker Evans,
lecture, Yale University, 1964

Via

Walker Evans, from Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, 1941

Roger Ballen, Encroachment, 2001

More than a year into a recession that still has its slenderizing grip on art galleries, November offers a strong showing all around.

Thursday night, 6-8 p.m.

Rabbits dress better than you do: Fay Jones at Grover/Thurston Gallery.

Now hear this: Ken Kelly at Howard House.

[Read more…] about Seattle galleries: November openings

You think it’s over. It’s not over. (via)

(Previous)

Kelly Mark