Count pillows. (Michelle de la Vega)
Archives for 2009
Trash people
Three unlikely ways to die
From Alex Dodge (via)
By contemplating the Stations of the Cross
By shredder
By spontaneous liquidation
You who are about to go to the dentist
Mike Wagner salutes you.
Time running out on Target Practice
Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 closes at the Seattle Art Museum on Monday, which means, it’s open Labor Day. If you live in the Northwest and fail to see this show, you’re going to have to lie about it later and say you did. For the sake of your immortal soul, time to get a move on. If you’re strapped for cash, no problem. Admission at SAM is pay-what-you-can.
(Otto Muehl)
Douglas Britt, art critic of the Houston Chronicle, contributed three silent videos on the HC’s entertainment blog, here, here and here. Jen Graves review here. Emily Pothast on Translinguistic Other here. Sharon Susanna Bluhm on Getting to Know You Better here.
My reviews here, here, here, here, here and here. This is the most important contemporary art exhibit in the history of the Seattle Art Museum. Why it is not traveling is beyond me.
Kenny Scharf revels in imaginary regionalism
If you’re a New York artist who seeks to score a public art commission in a park in Portland, Oregon, what comes to mind? Leaping fish, forests and forest stumps, mountains and/or a water feature? How about an emblem of a locked and loaded gray sky or maybe, if you don’t mind ripping off Chris Burden (proposed 1991) by way of a Jeff Koons train (proposed 2009), a full-scale fishing boat hanging off the side of a building?
If none of that appeals, you’re safe with a totem pole, even though the tribes that created the original models never lived that far south.
Kenny Scharf made a smashing success of the last option. Starting with a cliche isn’t a problem. It’s where you end up that matters.
Say it, no ideas but in things. Patterson, William Carlos Williams
In Jameson Park at the edge of the Pearl District, New York Pop Shop tribalism:
Detail, via
Detail, via:
Art that awes, moves and weirds-out
Talking to a student while surveying his work, Paul McCarthy told him to “make it weirder.”
It’s MacCarthy’s McCarthy’s version of Jasper Johns’ all-purpose art formula: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”
Only artists who know their way around the weird can hope to win the 2009 Metropolis Art Prize: $20,000, a dedicated artist channel on Babelguym’s Metropolis and a screening in Times Square. There are other cash prizes with a Times Square spotlight, including one for “best street art video.” (Info on Two Coats of Paint)
Jurors say they want to be “inspired, challenged, excited, awed, moved, intrigued and weirded-out.” Open to artists in all visual media, but entries have to be submitted on video.
Northwest artists who should put a video together (or use one they’ve already made) include:
Matt McCormick, detail from The Subconscous Art of Graffiti Removal
Laura Fritz (The cat, Laura. Put a stamp on it and slide it into a mail box.)
Tivon Rice (Osteotmy)
Alice Wheeler
The Northwest has a rich vein of the strange to tap, and I’ve only just begun. I’ll end with a glass artist.
Eli Hansen, Jack Pepsi
For the category of best street video, nobody’s going to top Jessica Jobaris dancing as if she’d been shot.
Lost pigeon: Does not have a name
From David Shrigley, a sign you’re unlikely to see in what passes for real life, via:
Street
pigeons have few friends, but one of them is a scientist. He claims
they can be taught to discriminate between Chagall, Van Gogh and
Picasso, here. The same scientist came to the same conclusion a decade earlier, here.
Maybe he repeats himself because the first time around, he failed to raise their status. In the photo below by Regine Petersen,
the bird pauses as it eats the soft center of a piece of bread. Once
you know about its visual skills, doesn’t the image also look as if the
animal is contemplating the interior of a frame?
