Archives for 2009

University of Washington print technician Larry Sommers died last week in Chicago of a heart attack. With his major impact on generations of students, he certainly deserves but did not get an obituary in the Seattle PI (online only) or the Seattle Times.

This could be a piece about journalists stretched too thin to cover their communities, but instead, it’s a piece about Sommers’ name in lights across Seattle’s art blogosphere. Two of his former students have blogs and know how to use them.

Emily Podhast Pothast of Translinguistic Other offers great insights into how he did his job, followed by his view of heaven:

One time Larry told me if he could live in any place at any time, he’d
be a rich girl in the 19th century because they all had ponies.  I
tried to tell him that if having a pony was a big priority for him, he
could probably make it happen in his present life. He didn’t listen. He
was too busy chanting “PONY PONY PONY!”

Christina Olsen Burtner on Toys & Noise explains why he was the glue that held everything together.

Raised Catholic, Jeffry Mitchell understands the ecstasy of suffering. He knows the virtue of denial, that each act of rejecting pleasure produces it, and each battering of the body’s dreams earns emeralds and rubies for a crown in heaven.

But what if a Catholic voluptuary rejects the Cross? In Mitchell’s words:

A feather, a skull, the moon and stars, a man (?) and half a lady, crystals and sequins and the grandchildren of Piero Manzoni and Allan Kaprow. There’s something about magic, Hippie magic, and the way the LOVE CHILDREN freed them selves from the cross and sought spiritual expression through ancient forms other than the Christian one that resonates through this show for me. It’s very much my story, and the story I look for. It’s the story that I can’t help but see and although I claim that each pair of works in this show found each other on their own, the instant I see these works I bring stories to each of them, helplessly, naturally.

Mitchell curated Call and Response at Crawl Space with an eye out for inner magic, for spiritual passion expressed through the body.

Jack Ryan’s moon ringed with cheap florescence (Image, detail) brings to mind William Carlos Williams’ poem, The Attic Which Is Desire:

the unused tent

of

and day–

Here

from the street

by

is

transfixed.

[Read more…] about At Crawl Space: Love children free themselves from the Cross

Anticipating their impoverished futures tied to chairs in nursing homes and drugged out of their minds, artists are looking at the aesthetics of drool and drool-like substances.

Some are too young to worry, but if they want to worry, I say let them.

Ryan Trecartin, from A Family Finds Entertainment.

Getting the Love Want (Practice) from Zack Bent on Vimeo.

Still others let paintings do the drooling for them. From Darren Waterston,  Geist, 2004, oil on wood panel, 36 x 24 inches.

My first cookbook was Adelle Davis’ Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit from 1970. Following her, I made casseroles that tasted like axle grease, cookies in tough blocks and watery messes with milk. (Davis might not be entirely to blame. I am not celebrated for my ability to follow  a recipe.)

I was reminded of my first stab at cooking by Bay Area painter Rooney
O’Neil, whom I’ve known since college. I married her brother, which is
why the top image in her photo of a part of her wall features her niece
and mine, Jade O’Neil, when Jade was about two, with a Bruce Davidson image from 1965 at the bottom. (Click to enlarge.)

Jade’s now 18. Time does
run on.

Rooney O’Neil wrote in a recent email:

I first learned about nutrition from her too, and drank her yeast glop for years. As one researcher pointed out, in 1974, she stopped saying that anyone who drank a quart of milk a day would not die of cancer, when she died of cancer.

She got many things right, she got many things wrong. Not just her recipes, but her “cures.” I did like this comment, from DayLily02:
“In a sub-chapter, titled, Eat the Superior Meats Most Often, we learn that “the housewife who wishes to maintain maximum health in her family is wise to serve glandular meats at least once or twice a week.

“OK–so the brain is not a gland, but apparently it is a rich source of the B vitamin cholin. Here’s what Davis says about cooking them, Since brains are so frequently disliked, I have tried to work out recipes especially for those persons who sincerely wish to develop an enjoyment of them. If time permits, first freeze them in an ice tray… (because cube-shaped brains are less repulsive than brain-shaped brains.)

“The only thing that sounds less appealing to me than eating a brain, is stuffing it into one of my ice cube trays. Also interesting, Davis never mentions the species on whose brain we’ll be dining. Cow? Pig? Squirrel? What? Then come the recipes: Baked Brains in Bacon Rings, Creamed Brains, Brains in Casserole, Brain Salad,–and my favorite: Brain Sandwich Spread. Because mayonnaise makes anything edible.”

Art critics might miss the point, but they never advise you to eat brains in ice cube trays.

You gotta have hope! Mustn’t sit around and mope.
Nothing’s half as bad as
it may appear,
wait till next year and hope.


Image, Joseph Mills. Bootsy Holler.

(Click image to enlarge)
1. Jen Graves on Christina
Orr-Cahall, soon to be director and CEO of EMP, here. Good piece. What happened two decades ago at the Corcoran still matters. It’s a decision that echoes outward, and 19 years of admirable service at the Norton cannot erase it.

What Graves didn’t do is get inside the decision to cancel the Mapplethorpe show. That’s because Orr-Cahall won’t talk about it. Is there a gag order? What was going on with the Corcoran board? I heard indirectly from a couple of Orr-Cahall’s friends that she was trapped between big-money board members who insisted the show be canceled and the very real fear that the government would cut off all Corcoran funding if the Mapplethorpe show proceeded.

Looks as if she took the bullet for the team. Yes, she did the wrong thing. If she couldn’t proceed, she should have resigned, which is easy to say now.

One thing is clear: EMP blew its introduction. The museum needed to raise the issue and provide a response. Asked and answered. Instead, it counted on lazy or nonexistent press to ignore it.

(Michael Brenson on the 1989 cultural moment here. Richard Lacayo on the economic reality of the fallout here.)

One further thought: Graves compares the odious Helms to Hitler. If Helms had forced unruly artists into labor camps followed by liquidation, it would be a point worth making. Otherwise, it’s an off-putting cliche. The shock value is gone. What’s left is stale overkill. On the other hand, when Tony Curtis compared kissing Marilyn Monroe to kissing Hitler, he scored. The image of kissing refreshed the insult and made it stick.

2. Kenneth Baker on Wayne Thiebaud, here. An insightful Thiebaud review is essential for the Bay Area’s premier newspaper, and Baker came through:

Thiebaud’s early paintings of pastries and other foodstuffs took seriously the roots of still life as subject matter originally meant to domesticate high art for a nascent middle-class audience and market. His pictures did something analogous: They made the esoteric pleasures of brushwork, color and materiality democratically available by pushing parallels between paint and frosting, color and sweetness, intensities of visual and gustatory sensation.

The new paintings use those tactics to disguise a meditation on the surrealism that lurks within all pictorial illusion.

3. David Pagel’s Elias Simé: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, here.

To step into the fantastically jam-packed installation now at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is to step into another world: a nuanced universe suffused with compassion, sensuality and wisdom, a place so far removed from the cold calculations and multi-tasking distractions of life in Los Angeles that it seems you have to be a specialist (or very privileged) to go there.

It’s all too easy to see the 60-plus sculptures, 40-odd paintings, seven thrones and five wall reliefs by Ethiopian artist Elias Simé as an anthropologist would: ingenious artifacts from a fully formed culture fundamentally different from our own and probably part of a way of life being squeezed out by global consumerism.

But Elias Simé: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart is nothing of the sort.

4. Edward Winkleman on Julie Evan, here.

The thought that went through my mind as I viewed Julie’s show (in addition to thinking she’s been holding back on the sensuality quotient…these drawings are smokin’ hot) was how sometimes an artist’s accomplishments simply cannot be rushed. It can take just the right combination of life experiences, exposure to other ideas, and simply being in the right place at the right time for things to click. None of which may make sense to even the artist (or be particularly pleasant) at the time, but which definitely results in an eventual accomplishment that enriches our lives.

An oblivious form of regional art criticism pretends that the art in question exists on it own, without reference to the larger world. Reminds me of a derisive little ditty on the philosophy of George Berkeley, pronounced Barkley.

Dr. George Berkeley hinted darkly
If I cannot see you, you cannot be you.

A review of Katherine Gray on Culture Monster is an excellent example of the type. It opens with an observation that might have been supportable 30 years ago:

Katherine Gray works in a medium — glass — that rarely takes center stage in a contemporary art gallery not already given over to craft or design.

Onward to description, followed by more description:

The centerpiece of the show, Forest Glass, is an installation
consisting of a pair of free-standing, clear acrylic shelving units,
each roughly 9 feet tall and around the breadth of a coffee table,
loaded with hundreds of mismatched thrift store glasses.

Good idea, stacked glass. Who has done it before? For starters, Tony Cragg, Louise Bourgeois, Dante Marioni, Josiah McElheny and Ann Gardner. Gardner stacked mismatched thrift-store glass in the 1990s, no examples online. All of these artists, by the way, have shown in contemporary art galleries (and museums) not already given over to craft or design.

From Noise Addicts:

I’ve got 2 large boxes completely full of old cassette tapes (remember those?) in my closet. There are probably over 400 tapes sitting there, degrading, losing their magnetic information, slowly dissolving into silence…

Noise Addicts found an artist who turns played-out tapes into homages to the musicians whose songs were coded into their surfaces.

Portraits in audio tape by Iri5. Click to enlarge. More of her work here.

Dry on left, wet on right: click to enlarge.
Left to right: First row: Joe Biel and Juniper Shuey. Second row: Gretchen Bennett and Susan Robb. Third row: Debra Baxter and Alden Mason. Fourth row: Leo Saul Berk and Claire Cowie. Fifth row: Blake Haygood and Darren Waterston.

When I was in third grade, finally trusted with my sister’s vintage Nancy Drews, I ate them as I read them; not the whole thing but the crackly margins around the text – yellowed Communion wafers tasty as taco chips.

Artists do something similar, although to greater acclaim. They destroy books in order to honor them and make them their own.

The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book  is at the Bellevue Arts Museum through June 14.

Although major figures from the art of the book (Anselm Kiefer, Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Glenn Ligon, Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival and Ed Ruscha), are not here, Book Borrowers is studded with gems. From the elaborate to the stark, the best fuse the container with the thing contained. (Click to see larger images.)

1. Jennifer Khoshbin  (Hood)
2. Brian Dettmer  (New Book of Knowledge).

Other artists in the show are Noriko Ambe; Brian Dettmer; Long-Bin Chen; Jacquline Rush Lee; James Allen; Gary Berg; Casey Curran; Alan Corkery Hahn; Jane Lackey; Guy
Laramée; Georgia Russell, and
Yuken Teruya.