Archives for 2009

In a one-day only exhibit in a studio behind an alley: Saturday, Aug. 29, 2-6 p.m., 1618 10th Ave. W. Queen Anne, Seattle

Meredith Lee

Dave Badders

[Read more…] about The tiny art movement continues

From Portland, beside the urinals of the largest independent bookstore in the country:

Oscar the Grout

Grout the Devil

Grout of Bounds

Thanks, Scott.

Rachel Maxi’s The Lay of the Land at Grey:

Creatures and Curiosities from the Digital Kitchen at Vermillion:

Paula Rebsom at Form/Space Atelier:

Outskirts
is a site-specific infiltration using photographs and a kiosk to
narrate a previous site- specific exhibit by Rebsom developed during a
residency at the Ucross Foundation in a Wyoming prairie dog metropolis.

Don Kenn’s Post-It Drawings, via C-Monster.

I like these too: Marc Johns, previously on CM, and Xu Zhen.

Triple Candie’s R.I.P. fake show for Maurizio Cattelan, via ANABA, here. Holland Cotter on TC’s 2006 fake show for David Hammons,
here, whom Cotter rightly calls “one of the three or four most
interesting and influential American artists of the last 30 years.”

Susanna Bluhm makes excellent comparisons between artists in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-1978 at the Seattle Art Museum and major moments in art history, here.

She should have identified them, however. Top, Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1958. Bottom, Matthias Grunewald, from The Crucifixion, 1515 (Isenheim altarpiece).

Jen Graves on the (I hope) come-back kid future of Seattle’s 911 Media Arts Center, here. Who’s to blame for its travails?

Billionaire Paul Allen’s “city within a city, where lively
workplaces, shops, restaurants, schools, parks, entertainment, and
recreation are located in a dynamic, emerging neighbor-hood” is once
again forcing out the arts. Allen’s plan for South Lake Union, once
touted as a developing arts and technology hub, is instead turning into
a designer playground for the rich. 911 Media Arts Center, like
independent arts groups Consolidated Works and Center on Contemporary
Art before it, can no longer afford the rent it pays to Allen’s company
Vulcan.

Not fair, but admirably rousing. ConWorks collapsed under the weight of a bungling board. 911 and CoCA couldn’t afford the rent in a dollhouse.

On the other end of the spectrum, Ken Johnson slams the socially relevant at the Newwark Museum, here.

The strategy is pretty clear: almost every piece in the
exhibition, whatever its form — and there is a great variety of formal
approaches –pertains to a social issue. Race, ethnicity, identity,
immigration, ancestry, disenfranchisement and globalization are among
the themes represented, and if they are not immediately discernible in
the works themselves, wall labels helpfully explain. Call it Postmodern
Social Realism Lite.

Ouch.

Finally, Martin Creed on YouTube (TateShots): “Art is just a word.” Word.

Eroyn Franklin debuts her new book of hand-cut images and text, Another Glorious Day At The Nothing Factory, at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Aug. 22, 6-9 p.m.

As the title suggests, it’s a Northwest memoir.

ON FAMILY
ROAD TRIPS WHEN I WAS LITTLE I LAID DOWN IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE
MINIVAN.  I WOULD ARRANGE MY HEAD SO THAT WHEN I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW
ALL I COULD SEE WERE CLOUDS.  I WOULD PRETEND WE WERE FLYING AND THAT
THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS LAND.  WHENEVER A TALL TREE OR A TELEPHONE
POLE WOULD CAREEN INTO MY LINE OF SIGHT I WOULD CLOSE MY EYES AND
SQUEEZE OUT ITS MEMORY, THE MEMORY OF SOIL.

HE WAS BORN
ON THE DARKEST DAY OF THE YEAR.  A FACT THAT SEEMED TO COINCIDE WITH
HIS DEMEANOR.  I LOVED HIS SADNESS, NOT THE MAKING OF HIS SORROW, BUT
ITS AUTUMNAL  KINDRED QUALITY.  ITS SUBTLE PERVASIVENESS SO SIMILARLY
ALIGNED WITH MINE.  HE WAS LIKE A DOLEFUL GRANDFATHER WHOSE MOMENTS
COULD BE BRIGHTENED SO HANDSOMELY BY HIS BROOD.  I SO RARELY GOT TO
DRAW THIS OUT IN HIM, NOT ON HIS FAULT, BUT BECAUSE I WAS LAZY WITH OUR
LOVE.  LAZY BEING THE LEAST BAD THING I CAN SAY ABOUT MY BEHAVIOR.

His Web site.

Crossing the Fremont Bridge:

The Space Needle seen from Belltown:

Anthony Gormley’s fascinating Fourth Plinth project (live on the link One & Other) features 2,400 randomly selected volunteers who each take the pedestal for an hour to do what they want: eat, lecture, dance, sunbathe, sit on a (portable) toilet, text friends, play music, strip, jog, paint, draw, read, clip their toenails, wave to friends, giggle, sing and do yoga. I saw a woman who yelled at anyone who looked at her, feeling, she said, stalked.

Asked another, rhetorically:

What am I symbolizing? Artist? Sex machine? Muppet?

Seattle’s Ellen Ziegler used her hour to enlarge the idea of the project. Holding a mirror, she directed it at those gazing up at her. In looking at her, they were looking at themselves.

Watch Ziegler on the Plinth here. (The tape starts with a minute or two of the final performance of toilet guy wearing a kind of ribbon-like diaper.)

Participating (including travel expenses) cost her about $2,000, which she didn’t have.

Wrote Ziegler:

More than 120 donors contributed almost $2000 toward my travel and expenses, mostly in $10 donations. Why? I believe it’s because of the Quilting Bee Theory of Artist Funding. As artists, we need short-term funding from time to time. You give me $10 when I need it now, then when you have an urgent funding need, I’ll give you $10.
Community support is essential in these times. I’m thrilled that it worked, not only for my sake, but to know that it’s a method to support each other, just like a quilting bee or a barn raising. 

Following is a (long) list of donors to date:

[Read more…] about Ellen Ziegler shares the Plinth

What the Los Angeles County Art Museum’s threatened film program is to LA, the Northwest Film Forum is to Seattle. 

With a 30 percent drop in income, on July 30 NFF asked everybody with a
stake to send $10 by Aug. 15. Sub Pop responded with a matching grant
of $10,000. To date, NFF has raised more than $33,000.

NFF was looking at a $70,000 deficit for the current year (on a $700,000 annual budget) and hopes to close with less than $35,000 in the minus column.

In the meantime, NFF has laid off its
excellent managing director Susie Purves, whose background covers a wide variety of
Seattle’s arts institutions, including as curator and/or director of the
Center on Contemporary Art, Kirkland Arts Center, On the Boards and the
Seattle International Children’s Festival.

Two more staff have been cut from full time to 24 hours a week. Again, an arts institution will try to do what it does with less money and important staff missing. Director Lyall said he hopes to be full strength by the end of the year.

What NFF does, from its Web site:

[Read more…] about Northwest Film Forum cuts staff

From the Royal Academy of Arts, birds as a good thing:

John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) was born the year the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) delivered their manifesto challenging official art rules promoted by the Academy. Waterhouse revived the literary and mythological inspiration of his predecessors, often staging, with crisp brushwork, dramatic confrontations of a single figure and a group. An active member of the Academy in the 1880s and 90s, Waterhouse nevertheless fell into oblivion in the early 20th century. Left, “St. Eulalia, 1885.” (Tate, London) The saint was martyred in Rome at age 12. According to Prudentius, a Christian poet who also lived in the 4th century, a white dove flew out of her mouth and snow suddenly fell at the moment of her death.