Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
The Seattle Art Museum‘s blog, SOAP, is off to a promising start with three entries by new director Derrick Cartright. After receiving a certain amount of (gentle) ridicule for its (what the?) name, (here and here), Cartright countered with a description of the process of choosing it and a few image associations, chief among them:
Considering the alternatives, floating is a good thing.
When Michael Knutson was 19 and doing summer farm work, a grain thresher grabbed his left
hand and chewed.
If he hadn’t been wearing a sweat shirt, he would have bled
out. The shirt twisted in the machinery to form a tourniquet just under
his shoulder, leaving him dangling.
Help arrived 20 minutes later. He
did not lose consciousness.
The accident helped him focus, he said. “I was vague about what I
wanted to do. After that, I knew I wanted to paint.”
In his early 30s, Robert Hardgrave was making a slim living as an illustrator when his kidneys failed. After the transplant, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. In the interval between health and disease, he became a terrific painter. He still does commercial work, but not for clients who want him to illustrate their ideas. They come to him, they get him.
Although tainted by association with fetishistic fundamentalists, the concept of born-again applies.
Friday night, 5-9 p.m., Hardgrave hosts what he calls Drum of the Draw at Halogen Gallery, 2316 Second Avenue.
Hardgrave:
It’s an invitational drawing event that brings artists and their creative process to the public for one night each month. The artists create original drawings while the public is invited to enjoy refreshments, observe the artists at work and purchase art as it is completed. None of the work is over $200.00. Participating artists are:
Daniel Mitchell,
Karin Yamagiwa,
Ninjagrl, Robert Hardgrave, Soopajdelux,
Suzanne Kaufman and
Todd Lown.
Nancy Spero, 1926-2009. Holland Cotter obit here.
The Bite – Olga Broumas
What I wear in the morning pleases
me: green shirt, skirt of wine.
I am wrappedin myself as the smell of night
wraps round my sleep when I sleepoutside. By the
time
I get to the cornerbar, corner store, corner construction
site, I become divine.
I turnmen into swine. Leave
them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.
On the first day of the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle, I walked uptown to the Sheraton hear Morris Dees talk about the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center. On route, I found myself surrounded by a sea of people in turtle suits, if not a sea, then a substantial cluster.
They were in town to represent the ocean, which didn’t have a representative at the conference. By the time I left the hotel,
the turtles had company: labor unions, other environmentalists,
progressive religious groups, anarchists from Eugene, police,
reporters, press photographers and TV camera crews.
Joe Hill, who’d advised, “Don’t mourn for America – organize,” would
have been proud. The 1999 battle in Seattle brought together a wide spectrum of forces to protest a common if abstract foe – unregulated, free market Capitalism.
Allan Sekula ‘s interest in the event set him apart from journalists seeking peak moments or critical points of revealation.
I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes
deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber
bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic
solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.
Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a
movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the
city streets against the abstraction of global capital.
Wrote Richard Lacayo:
In this moment of triumphant capitalism, of planetary cash flows and a
priapic Dow, all the second thoughts and outright furies about the
global economy collected on the streets of downtown Seattle and crashed
through the windows of Nike Town. After two days of uproar scented with
tear gas and pepper spray, the world may never again think the same way
about free trade and what it costs.
Ten photos from 30 in Sekula’s series, titled, Waiting for Tear Gas, are at the Henry Gallery through Jan. 31. Because the series is a narrative, it would have been swell to see all 30, but the 10 in the hallway are riveting. The cheap charm of their carny glamor does not obscure their heart.
The Dance (for Robert Duncan)
Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones
The dance (held up for me by
an older man. He told me how. Showed
me. Not steps, but the fix
of muscle. A position
for myself: to move.
Duncan
told of dance. His poems
full of what we called
so long for you to be. A
dance. And all his words
ran out of it. That there
was some bright elegance
the sad meat of the body
made. Some gesture, that
if we became, for one blank moment
would turn us
into creatures of rhythm.
Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987-2006
I want to be sung. I want
all my bones and meat hummed
against the thick floating
winter sky. I want myself
as dance. As what I am
given love, or time, or space
to feel myself.
Mark Prent, Thawing Out, 1972
The time of thought. The space
of actual movement. (Where they
have taken up the sea, and
keep me against my will.) I said, also,
love, being older or younger
than your world. I am given
to lying, love, call you out
now, given to feeling things
I alone create.
Zhang Huan, My New York, 2002
And let me once, create
myself. And let you, whoever
sits now breathing on my words
create a self of your own. One
that will love me.
On Labor Day, 1993, Jason Sprinkle and a few of his friends attached a ball and chain to the foot of Jonathan Borofsky‘s “Hammering Man” in front of the Seattle Art Museum. To prevent damage to the sculpture, they padded the chain with foam. (Image via)
Elmgreen & Dragset at the Frieze Art Fair in London, 2009. (Image via)
Still traveling around the U.S., the Chinese Corpses exhibit Bodies – The Exhibition returns to Seattle.
I wonder what Zhang Huan thinks.
Who’s bodies are those in the exhibit? Questions raised and unanswered here.
In their extended synthetic panoramas, Scott McFarland and Paul Berger tend to shrink shadows or misdirect them. They look like raisins added to cookie dough at the last minute.
Mary Temple: Her trees
painted in latex on walls and stain on floors suggest a fragility they
have transcended. They will not dissolve when the sun goes down or lose
their form in a larger dark.
Pat De Caro – When it really is too late to have a happy childhood.
Roger Shimomura: When Japanese Americans were shadows to their fellow citizens.
Susie J. Lee – Fugue State
Tannaz Farsi– A reflection is a shadow that repeats everything it sees.
Ross Sawyers,at Platform Gallery Through Nov. 29.
Stephanie Syjuco – A blackout as a bird of prey.
Mark Takamichi Miller – They may be bloated apparitions, but they still dress up.
Joey Veltkamp – 1977. Their last good kiss was years ago. (Image via)
an ArtsJournal blog
