Archives for December 2009

Daniel Carrillo is time-traveling Seattle artists into the past. Through a wet plate collodion process, he presents them as their own long-gone great-grandparents.

Carrillo:

These are positives on glass plates also called Ambrotypes and they are 7 x 9 inches. Collodion is poured onto a glass plate then sensitized in silver nitrate then exposed while the plate is still wet- hence the name. When developed they have an antiquated, quirky, unpredictable, handmade quality to them that has made them irresistible and has, for me, brought the magic back of photography.

Carrillo’s portrait of the otherwise animate Steven Miller:

From an anonymous source going by the name of Not Buying It in response to the post titled, Mary Henry – artists hidden in plain sight:

Neglected abstract geometric artists are plentiful? Are you talking about painters who deserve to be well known? Name five. Not just anybody, but somebody who has created work that could stand up to international attention. The artists at the top aren’t there by luck. They are better than the obscure. I’ve never heard of Mary Henry. Her work looks pretty good online, but online is nowhere as you must know. There must be a reason why it doesn’t fly when seen in person. If not, it would have.

Ordinarily, I don’t single out comments from someone who chooses to be anonymous, but I like this issue, if only because the idea that there are only three or four artists who matter in a generation is gaining ground. (The Onion‘s disquisition on the theme here.)

Jerry Saltz, lamenting it:

… instead of the love spreading and everyone becoming “famous for 15 minutes,” by decade’s end art-worlders fixated on a tiny clique of mostly male, mostly high-priced artists: Murakami, Hirst, Eliasson. Warhol’s dictum was infernally inverted to “In the future, only 15 people will be famous.”

You don’t need a weatherman to know that some people don’t like to go outside. Anybody who believes a handful of artists represents the world doesn’t care about art. If a focus is narrow enough, the only thing visible through its aperture is hierarchy. Art is about invention, possibility, rigor and surprise. Artists who rise to the top have all that and something else besides: the luck of the draw. For their representations of their place and time, they manage to become visible, frequently due to circumstances beyond their arranging.

My favorite fall-into-fame story is Charles LeDray‘s, which I’ve told before, here.  To recap: He was born in Seattle in 1960 and raised here. His mother taught him to sew at age 4. By the time he was 10, he could sew, knit and macrame with a skill that staggered his elders. He took at the craft classes he could at the Queen Anne Community Center and endured the sexual taunting frequently hurled at boys who’d rather sew than play hoops or hang out at arcades.

LeDray, Grey Area, 2009

After high school, he took a couple of painting classes at Cornish College of the Arts but didn’t complete them. He worked as a guard at the Seattle Art Museum in the mid-to late ’80s and had a single exhibit of paintings at the Broadway Espresso in 1983. That’s it, aside from the time he tried to show tiny figurative collages on the sidewalk during Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Gallery Walk. The police, seeing gay porn, told him to pack up and leave. If anyone else noticed, there is no record of it.

The silence surrounding him in Seattle was resounding.
In 1989, planning to try his luck in New York, he asked SAM’s director of exhibition design, Michael McCafferty, to write a recommendation. Bear in mind that LeDray was a guard, not even a part-time member of McCafferty’s design crew. Nevertheless, McCafferty whipped out a piece of museum stationery on which he scribbled a note to the effect that LeDray was a valuable member of his team and recommended him unreservedly.

After dropping his duffels at a friend’s apartment, LeDray headed over to the Museum of Modern Art, where he presented McCafferty’s introduction. That afternoon, he was handling MOMA’s Van Gogh’s.

When, years later, I asked McCafferty about this incident, I wondered if he sensed LeDray’s latent potential. Did he think LeDray had the makings of a major artist, in other words?
No, said McCafferty. Back then, I thought of him mainly as a collector of Space Needle memorabilia.
McCafferty believes in recommending people. They ask, he says yes.

Back to LeDray. The freelance job at MOMA led to a job as art handler at the Jack Tilton Gallery. One day he noticed the objects in an upcoming exhibit had a link with what he made on his own at home to relax. Gallery director Janine Cirincione told him to show her. He brought in a bear in a jacket. She told him she couldn’t use the bear but the jacket would do nicely.
Hours before the show opened, she added LeDray, whose career took off.

Obviously, he had to be remarkable to turn McCafferty’s blind recommendation into a career, and LeDray is. He’s now a leader in what could be called the “Revenge of the Maker” movement, a corrective to the equally valid Call-It-In School. Without a series of fortunate accidents, however, would he have had the opportunity to be heard or would he have been the fabled tree whose fall in a forest attracted no witnesses and therefore made no sound?

Not Buying It asked for five artists who have worked in the abstract geometric vein and deserve a wider audience.

[Read more…] about Art fame and the reasons for it

Engineering seniors at the University of Maine are using Buster Simpson‘s shovels to keep the walkways clear on their plaza.

Simpson:

This collective effort provides a passage for undergraduates, serve as a civic effort to save maintenance costs, protects the campus environment from salt and abrasive sand and suggests a mental and physical college credit. Stay off the machines, keep shoveling, peace on earth.

Cuban-born New York painter Carmen Herrera, 94, is heading toward limelight. A Deborah Sontag feature story about her reports that she sold her first painting five years ago, at age 89. Since then, her career trajectory is straight up.

The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

It’s easy. Artists who would shine if those in charge of a significant stage managed to notice them exist all over the world. The interesting question is not why she was overlooked but why she’s being noticed now. Turns out, the factors that held her back – being female, an immigrant and a practitioner of a style that was not in style – are the same ones working in her favor at this late date, when there’s a serious focus on both Latin American female artists and Herrera’s particular niche, geometric abstraction.

When it comes to geometric abstraction rooted in the early 20th century, neglected artists are thick on the ground. An obvious candidate for more attention is Seattle’s Mary Henry, who died in May at age 96.

From my obit:

For her, abstraction was a clarifying order of interlocking rectangles, horizontal stripes, lumbering squares and powerful wedges. Her color choices leaned toward the bracing. Yellows tunnel through whites and hang over orange. Her blacks shine, and her blues are
deep as the sea.

Field of Silence, 1990 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

Baden Baden, 2002, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Seattle writers who, like myself, were unable to interest the wider world in her work include Matthew Kangas, Jen Graves, Gary Faigin and Elizabeth Bryant, the latter not linkable online.

Graves:

Henry’s paintings are alluring and unyielding, and I figure she’s the only way into them.

Fortunately, that’s not true. Henry’s gone but her paintings are still here, available for viewing at Howard House, which has a goofy Web site. You have to follow the links to get to her. The paintings, not the artist who made them, offer the best route into themselves.

When Stranger art critic Jen Graves took out after Garrison Keillor, I took out after her in this links post:

No humor allowed: Jen Graves posted this dazzling piece of (at least brief) nonsense yesterday:

Remember: American men don’t do art unless it involves naked ladies, unless the men have thin shoulders. I hate you, Garrison Keillor.

Jen.
He’s kidding. Kidding. The whole thing is a spoof on sex stereotypes,
not an indulgence of them. Hate Garrison Keillor? Save it for Dick
Cheney.

Surely the man who invented the place where all the women are strong, the men are good looking and the children are above average would have to be kidding when he sounds like a sexist troll.

Maybe not. Seattle painter Susanna Bluhm referred me to another version of what’s on Keillor’s mind these days. Turns out, he’s mad at musical Jews.

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that
trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest
of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along
if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t. Christmas is a Christian holiday–if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. (more)

What’s up with Keillor? The doctor is not in, but I’m tempted to think the aging humorist has a medical problem. Something pressing on his cerebral cortex, perhaps? Shout out to Keillor: Time for a check up from the neck up.

Second apology goes out to Stranger book critic Paul Constant. When the Los Angeles Times covered the Elliott Bay Book Company’s closure in Pioneer Square, I praised the article, saying the locals missed the story under their noses. I singled out Constant for special blame, saying he was “more interested in griping that he didn’t get full credit from the Seattle Times for being first as the news breaker.” (more)

The problem is, the LA Times piece read a bit like an obit. Yes, Elliott Bay is leaving Pioneer Square, which is a huge blow to the neighborhood, but, as Constant later reported, it is reopening on Capitol Hill. Constant was waiting to get his facts straight, always laudable.

In the immortal words of Gilda Radner:

By examining the connective tissue between parents and children, Parenthesis is art made from life’s glue. My review here. Jen Graves here. Through Saturday.

From Neil Goldberg‘s video, My Parents Read Dreams I’ve Had About Them, 1998. (He told them not to smile.)

Also ending Saturday: Ten years of New work by SuttonBeresCuller at Lawrimore Project. that surveys ten years of their concerns. My review, Blowing in Blocked Wind, here. Jen Graves here.

Rachel Maxi, final holiday sale, Tuesday, December 22 from 4 to 8 PM  in Seattle: 1326 13th Ave S. 98144 . Tiny paintings for everyone!

If you squint, it’s almost a tree.

In John Ashbery‘s River of the Canoefish, mackerel echo their meaning in Yeats‘ Sailing to Byzantium, but with Ashbery’s own note of revulsion for the mindless forces of biology:

Yeats:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Ashbery:

Today they are as abundant as mackerel, as far as the eye can see,
tumbled, tumescent, tinted all the colors of the rainbow
though not in the same order,
a swelling, scumbled mass, rife with incident
and generally immune to sorrow.
Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let’s not.

In Ashbery’s honor, a small survey of the art of disgust. Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let’s not.

Marc Quinn, SELF (red), 2006

Katy Stone, Explosion 7 (double bloom), 2006
Acrylic on Duralar, pins

Grant Barnhart, 1938 Acrylic on canvas, 2009

Jon Haddock  R.King – Screenshot Series
2000
chromogenic print from digital file created in photoshop

Nigel Cooke, Mind, 2008 Oil/Canvas

All those moments will be lost like tears in the rain. – Bladerunner

Richard Wright won the Turner Prize. It didn’t hurt him that he frequently destroys what he makes, which means like traditional sand painting, that work is unavailable for purchase. Because nobody’s in it for the money, everybody shares in the warm glow of the moment. Self-editing blue chips can get by on grants, patronage and prizes, as well as what they don’t toss.

What about artists of whom few have heard? When they make a habit of destroying their product, few care because few know.

Let me introduce Seattle’s Randy Wood. When he wants to, which isn’t often, he can paint images of rocks and trees that the amateurs of the Chinese literati tradition would have viewed with favor. Possibly as a homage to them, all of course dead, he sends the drawings crafted in their style to join them: dust thou art, or, in the case of one performance, bedding thou art.

At Soil in 2005, he presented a long glass case with drawings fanned out along the bottom and two rodents scurrying back and forth on top of them. During the course of the exhibit, the rodents chewed the drawings to pulp, which they used as bedding.

First day of They Will Be The Judge Of That:

Wood occasionally takes to the road with a performance he calls Bye Bye Little Drawing.

From his Web site:

It consists of myself sitting at a portable table, creating watercolors and ink drawings and, as soon as they dry, running them through a paper shredder.
People have strong reactions to the shredding of my own work. I’ve been asked to stop, some have offered to buy a piece before I destroy it, and children love to watch art get shredded.

I once asked if he’d save from the shredder a single line of trees whose leaves were a furry green. Like the man who wouldn’t help The Band find a place to lay their heads, no was all he said.

The latest round of acquisitions at the Seattle Art Museum concentrates on Asian and Asian American work, which is, for the museum, a kind of roots music. SAM opened as a Pan-Asian art museum, a field that continues to be a strength.

Highlights.

Xue Song, Coca Cola, 1998, 24 x 20 inches.

Miwa Yanagi, Yuka, from the My Grandmothers series, 2000. Chromogenic print on Plexiglas, mounted on aluminum.

Chiho Aoshima, Red Eyed Tribe Maker, 2002, print
Yuken Teruya, Untitled, (Sigonas), 2002, paper bag sculpture
Joseph Park, Tigerish Bean Maker, 2005, painting
Johsel Namkung,  four photographs, 1980s, including:

Wei Letang (John Way), hanging scroll, 1988
Mr. Hikone Maker, two paintings, 1999-2000
Shen Shichong, hanging scroll, 1629
Zhang Yu, hanging scroll, 1792
Toshiko Takaezu, late 1950s stoneware.

Koo Bohnchang , vessel, 2005
Deng Shu, Boating in Guangling, 1924
Sarah Sze, scroll, 1996
Aki Fujimoto, Mmmmmmmmmmmm 1999; Fine Today, 1999, and 9 Polaroid prints, 1999
Tomoko Takahashi, Line In & Out: Day and Night, 1999
Shen Liang, Book Cover Series, 2006
Sun Yi, hanging scroll, Peony Maker, early 18th century
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi House, photograph, 1999
Bada Shanren (Zhu Da), hanging scroll, Lotus and Ducks Maker Bada Shanren, 1690s
Akio Takamori, Sleeper, Maker, 2000