Archives for December 2009

Those people who make lists of the three or four artists who matter amid the multitude who don’t? Few include Bruce Nauman,
whose nonchalant profundity continues to be pioneering.  List elitists
are almost invariably thinking of the market, as if art were just
another stock.

Roberta Smith’s review of Nauman’s current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is splendid:

Even
after four and a half decades, Mr. Nauman still turns out videos,
sculptures, installation works and sound pieces that tend to be
stripped to the bone, no-frills, unfamiliar and even alien in form.
They don’t “present” as art, yet they lodge in the mind and won’t let
go, disorienting, irritating, inundating and exhilarating the senses.
And with time, the best Naumans make clear their art-ness, laying bare
life’s basic experiences, distilled and compressed.

(Small
gripe about the NYT: Its links policy is absurd. NYT links lead only to NYT stories. There’s no way to click through to something else, as if once
you’re in, you need nothing else. Yes, NYT, you are the best, but you’re not the only.)

More on Roberta Smith: John Perreault is absolutely right about her review
of Roni Horn. Smith missed Horn’s meaning by miles. Perreault is also
convincing on his thoughts about museum installations in general. (In
short: go lean.)

Horn – Pink Tons

I’d
love to see the above 5 tons of pink glass in Seattle. That girly-girl
hit of  Minimalism would be the elephant in our living room.We might stumble upon it and learn something.

Home team: Jen Graves’ essay on Miami topped anyone else’s.

But the annual art-world migration to Miami is not really about art.
It’s about the art world. About money, people-watching, and tropical
escape (the water is so salty off Miami Beach that a body floats
uncomfortably high in the cool December air). About rich people trying
to look smarter and vice versa. About, as Ben Davis has written, the
endless asking of the question “How are sales?” It almost feels beside
the point, like a bonus, that this is pretty much the only way to get
this much contemporary art in one place at one time–a painting in the
shape of a trench coat, a bin of musical garbage, a sculpture
consisting of an endless supply of white wrapped candies, fireworks
momentarily spelling the word “RECESSION” in the night sky, documentary
photographs of Texas prison lifers, a New York Times dipped in 24-karat gold, a video in which a young Iranian prostitute is tormented by men without faces (Shirin Neshat’s Zarin:
unforgettable), electronic billboards with messages such as “Confusing
yourself is a way to stay honest,” mesmerizing three-dimensional mirror
mosaics by an 85-year-old Iranian woman (Monir Shahroudy
Farmanfarmaian), a male mannequin with a lifelike crotch, a performance
in memory of the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico, graffiti on the
streets and in the galleries, drippy ceramics (by Seattle’s Jeffry
Mitchell), droopy textiles (by Josh Faught, based in Eugene, Oregon,
and recent Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award winner), shoe-shine
stations painted like shrines, geometric abstractions made in thick,
silvery pencil. That and Picassos, Warhols, Duchamps, Ruschas, Flavins,
Richters, and even, this year, a religious painting by the
turn-of-the-20th-century Belgian James Ensor, whose retrospective this
year at the Museum of Modern Art was a sleeper hit. And paintings
(primary-colored, splashy) by Sylvester Stallone.

I hope the male mannequin with a lifelike crotch is Charles Ray’s. Otherwise, do your own work, anonymous artist mentioned in passing by Jen Graves.

What artists read: This month Tyler Green began a series on what featured artists read. Great idea, but sometimes I don’t want to know. Reading that Kate Shepard values most a book by Mary Baker Eddy handed me a problem that I don’t need. When looking at Shepard’s work, I’m going to have to force myself to forget that she’s a fall-for-anything fool. If artists I admire vote Republican, drive a Hummer, believe that civil rights need not include gays and lesbians or that the faithful can pray away cancer, I don’t want to know it. Jackson Pollock had the right idea. He kept what he was reading locked away, lest visitors drawn from that information conclusions that distract them from the work.

Hey Hey We’re the Monkeys: On a hopeful note, Terry Pratchett, wine glass in hand, held forth on stage about the state of things:

We
are shaped by the universe to be its consciousness. We tell the
universe what it is. …I find it more interesting (than religion) that
a bunch of monkeys climbed down from their trees to build this and
build that, to build everything. We’re monkeys. Our heritage is (when)
in difficulties to climb a tree and throw shit at other trees. That’s
so much more interesting than being a fallen angel…The story of
evolution is more interesting than anything in the Bible. It teaches us
that stars are not important. Street lamps are important. As far as we
know, there are only a few million of them in the universe. And they
were built by monkeys. Admittedly, we do err, as when we made Tony
Blair prime minster. But given where we started from, crawling up some
beach somewhere, we actually haven’t done that badly.

Very
nice about street lamps, but Pratchett might want to reread Milton.
Christianity doesn’t claim that we are fallen angels. The fallen angels
are devils, the greatest being Satan, the hero of Paradise Lost. Landing in the abyss, he asked, “What do mine eyes with grief behold?” A monkey wrote that. Impressive, for a monkey.

Back to street lamps. Sheila Klein’s Vermonica.

Installed in 1992, it predates by 16 years a similar piece in the same town by the great Chris Burden. (Story here.) Monkeys have the unfortunate habit of copying each other and giving the more famous monkey all the credit. Los Angeles has room for both, but for LA critics to treat hers as if it doesn’t exist is weird.

Via

At the edges of art, energy moves inward. It clears plaque from arteries and makes way for new images to hit us in the heart. Two exhibits roto-rootering into the new year in Seattle are Rattle My Cage at Vermillion and This Is The Future The Rest Is History at TARL.

Rattle

All the artists in Rattle (curated by Sierra Stinson) were students of the dazzling Gretchen Bennett when she taught at Cornish. Rattle has no duds although possibly a few too many toenails. The artists include: Amelia Layton who paints the unraveling world (geometries that trail off into recycling, birds who’ve wandered out of their forests, hipsters who’ve forgotten their lines in the play);  Michael Rioux, who has a fresh appreciation of decay, and Brett Walker , who is hilarious. (Also, Morgan Johnson, Joel Kvernmo, Rosa Lazzarini, and Mckenzie Porritt, along with a sculpture and colored drawing from Bennett, both worth the trip all on their own.

Rioux:

(Taking over from Chris Crites, Stinson will be curator of Joe Bar starting in January. That’ll be fun.)

The Future

TARL is the underground version of the recently demised Crawl Space, which, as its title suggests, knew its way around the back entrances to things. TARL currently exists basement of Jessica Powers and Matt Browning‘s Capitol Hill home but looks forward to a nomadic existence.(TARL organizers are Powers, Browning, Rebar Niemi, Anne Mathern and Brendan Jansen.)

First up at TARL are Raymond Boisjoly and Ryan Peter. Their charmingly insufficient back-to-the-future installation starts with a musical question: How else to build a future but from a child’s version of the past? It features a plywood dinosaur with a tape playing the sound of a garbled human voice freely impersonating a dionosaur’s as a tribute to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) at Seattle Art Museum.

I’m in love with their wood-grain prints of similar ancestor figures, some of which are sliding off the wall.

Now that Yoko Ott is winding up her tenure at the Hedreen Gallery (She left to direct Open Satellite), Seattle University needs a Hedreen Gallery director. I nominate Powers. She’d be perfect.

Via

The phrase emerging artist means what people want it to mean, but only for them. Like a couple  who enter a revolving door together but wind up on different streets, we each summon to mind different images.

Does it mean an artist who scores her first gallery show? (Tell it to Carmen Herrera.) How about someone who after years of toiling in a regional setting breaks onto a global stage? Maybe it’s someone who finally connects meaning to matter after a prelude of dilly-dallying. Is it someone  whose sales tip over into something close to a living wage or someone who can pass as a discovery for critics?

Artists who find a style and stick with it for decades can still be called emerging when they manage to attract an audience. In other minds, however, those same artists might never rise to the level of emerging. They’ve broken through nothing.

Brett Walker takes his lead from the brown burrowing mole. If he emerges into your yard, you’ll know it. Walker is part of Rattle My Cage at Vermillion Gallery, through Jan. 3.

The Emerging Artist, 2009

In addition to the usual financial problems facing art museums around the country, the Seattle Art Museum had its own special burden. To fund its 2007 downtown expansion, SAM made a deal with a bank, renting out 240,000 square feet of office space in its new wing.

(Image of the ground floor of the museum’s expansion via. Suspended from the ceiling, Cai Guo-Qiang‘s Inopportune: Stage One, 2004)

What could go wrong? A bank is where the money is. But SAM got clobbered anyway, because the bank in question was Washington Mutual. At Washington Mutual, deals were backed by hot air instead of cold cash. When WaMu was seized by federal regulators on September 26, 2008, SAM was left holding an empty bag that used to contain
$4.6 million annually in rental income (closer to $5.8 million, when operating costs are included).

Into that gap rides Nordstrom. The retail giant has signed a letter of intent to lease 182,000 square feet from the museum, which leaves vacant 58,000 square feet, or two floors. SAM might end up making money on the deal, as JPMorgan Chase agreed to give SAM $10 million spread out over five years after Chase took over WaMu.

Nah. SAM will be lucky if the money turns out to be wash.

SAM and WaMu shared the block bounded by First and Second avenues and
Union and University streets downtown. Each occupied and owned a
separate building designed by different architects (NBBJ for the
defunct WaMu; Brad Cloepfil for SAM, an expansion on Robert Venturi’s
original building).
WaMu owned the top four floors and rented eight floors in Cloepfil’s
16-floor-high museum expansion, which is next door to WaMu’s own tower.
SAM occupies four floors in its new building. Eventually, it will
occupy 12 floors, which, including Venturi’s original 150,00 square
feet, will add up to 450,000 square feet.

That expansion is in the distant future. For more than a year, 240,000 square feet have been vacant. Filling 75 percent of that space in today’s real estate market is nothing short of amazing. No word yet on the specifics of the deal. What was a fair market rent in 2007 might not be one in 2010.

Art can’t fix what’s broken, but hats off to artists who try. They turn the wheel or at least remind us that there is a wheel to be turned.

HIGH FIVE TO FIVE:

1. Shepard Fairey. This single image inspired a tipping point.

Andy Warhol wasn’t above a similar ploy in 1968 1972. His bests Fairey’s, although not in voting booth results.

Other Warhol contributions: He gave interviews.

When that didn’t work, he personalized shock and shame, as if all the blood had drained from our faces (White Flag).
4. Sam Durant. Tell the truth.  When it comes to history, an attempt to essay the thing that actually occurred is better than a make-nice Thanksgiving fable.

5. Grant Barnhart. Seeing ourselves as others see us, with rhythm. If this painting had a backup band, it would be Queen.

Via

1. Michael Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-79 at the Seattle Art Museum. From my review in Modern Painters:

“Target Practice” focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40 talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.

2. The Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, curated by Toby Kamps for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, had its last stop at the Frye Art Museum and continues through Jan. 3. From my reviews on this blog:

Also
terrific in this show are Jeremy Blake’s cloudy mixtures of memory,
guilt and loss; Matthew Day Jackson’s post-Rauschenberg book of
photographic imagery trailing across a wall like a diagrammed sentence,
and Brad Kahlhamer’s rush of signs and symbols hurtling across the
paper like a river intent on a flood.

3. Roger Shimomura at the Wing Luke Museum. From my review:

Dapper white boys and comely white girls enjoyed themselves in the
comic-strip version of college life until the late ’60s generation
popped the bubble. In Frat Rats, Roger Shimomura painted the
prelapsarian experience but added another icon dear to the hearts of
the greatest generation: Racism.

4. Dan Webb, Jeffry Mitchell, Claude Zervas and Joseph Park in From Whence the Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice. From my review, Seattle’s gang of four:

What is constructed, found and constructed again is the theme of From Whence The Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice, featuring four of the Northwest’s top artists: Claude Zervas, Joseph Park, Dan Webb and Jeffry Mitchell. It’s the best group show in a Seattle gallery in years, proposed and shaped by the artists themselves.

5. Heide Hinrichs and Debra Baxter at Howard House  (also, Hinrichs at the Seattle Art Museum)

[Read more…] about Top 11 exhibits in Seattle & one in Tacoma

Nothing like confidence. For his exhibition announcement photo, Grant Barnhart coded the theme onto a mug in his Rat Pack impersonation of a cool guy: Beg For It.

In spite of its self-mocking arrogance, his
pose is a comic acknowledgment of reality: He is a young painter
in Seattle at the edge of even the Seattle experience, overlooked as a
matter of course. With this image, he tells not only his nearly nonexistent audience but the wider world that it
will have to work to keep up with him.

Which is true. Those who know him expect attitude, and yet his paintings are all heart.

The old horse whose ragged breath congests in a clotted stream is wrapped in the consolations of color, fall trees behind her
and flowers at her feet. Blooms surge as she recedes. For all her
weight, she’s drifting like a hair or a feather on a cloudy mixture of
memory.

Killing Time With Sleeping Pills, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sympathy for the devil: A killing machine leans its hammer head on a pier to die as gulls scream overhead.

Private Thoughts Are Lost, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 18 x 24

Foam and froth and dirty wings are all that’s left of the deep, but the light that shimmers on the beast’s bloated flank is as dainty as a Fragonard slipper.

Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Thanks to scale shifts, now and then are together again in Goya garb and contemporary: The crowd marinating in its own stupidity gazes at a scene beyond its
understanding.

Mastiff On Trial, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sweeney Todd:

 
There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
      and the vermin of the world inhabit it
And its morals aren’t worth what a pig could spit…

On a lighter note: The image of women stepping into their underwear is an erotic staple, especially in Barnhart’s vein of catching the subject unawares.

Precious Broken Elastic, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 11 x 14 inches

But pearly pink and baby blue shades set up a dainty scene that isn’t there. If the model knows how to put on underwear, it’s not evident from the image. She’s forcing herself into her clothes like a plow furrowing a field.

Sunset, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 40 x 30

Isle of Man, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 60 x 48

Although there are narratives here in an Eric Fischl vein, Barnhart isn’t interested in creating a common thread.  Fischl would never put such a range of paintings together in one show. He hits a theme and explores it. Barnhart’s disregard for connectives approaches Martin Kippenberger’s. Barnhart believes in the vibrational field of a painting, and the idea that vibrations on the same frequency tend to fuse. His do. Beg For It at Ambach & Rice is a force field. (My review of his previous show here.)

Through Jan. 24.