Archives for 2009

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I can’t believe Jen Graves and I are arguing about William Hogarth. My comment was an incredulous, take-it-for-granted, passing swipe in parenthesis in a story about my misgivings on the appointment of Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker as director of the Frye Art Museum:

(Graves also wrote Danzker’s exhibit, William Hogarth: Nationalism, Mass Media and the Artist,
was “awesome-sounding.” Awesome? Hogarth is an illustrator in the worst
sense of the word. He belongs in picture books accompanying stories.)

Her response:

I cannot even address a person who dismisses Hogarth.

Maybe it’s generational. Nobody from my time and place countenances the didactical moralism of Hogarth, the 18th-century’s Norman Rockwell.  It’s hardwired. You can have them both, Jen.

Via.

An Egyptian bust from 1500 B.C. to 1050 B.C. at Chicago’s Field Museum is getting heavy traffic thanks to its resemblance to Michael Jackson.

After Surrealism exhausted all of its possible permutations, it reemerged in Japan as amine and bounced back elsewhere as a delicate version of Pop with a punk twist.

Born and raised in Japan, Toshi Asai has the troubling delicacy down cold. She draws madonnas from a tattoo parlor, outer-space Virgin Marys and their animal companions.

Fantagraphics celebrates 20 years in Seattle with Comics Savants: A Survey of Seattle Alternative Cartoonists Saturday, 6:00 to 9:00 PM. On view at Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery will be original artwork by Peter Bagge, Jim Blanchard, Charles Burns, Ellen Forney, Roberta Gregory, Ted Jouflas, Megan Kelso, David Lasky, Jason T. Miles, Patrick Moriarity, Eric Reynolds, Jim Woodring, and 2009 Xeric award winner Eroyn Franklin.

Some of these people are the best of the best. Below, a small sample. Hit the links for more.

Charles Burns:

Ellen Forney:
Jim Woodring

Jason T. Miles

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker has much to recommend her as the new director of the Frye. She’s scholarly, curious, engaged and engaging. An international figure, she has strong local roots, first as curator then director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977-91. (Previous post, announcing the appointment, here.)

Her problem is exactly the same as the Frye’s. With nearly unlimited resources and the wide world from which to collect, Charles and Emma Frye chose to concentrate on the academic realists of the Munich Secession Movement. As members of a movement, its artists were forward thinkers. As painters, despite occasionally overheated subject matter, they are unspeakably dreary.

And they are the artists on whom Danzker has chosen to focus. After leaving the Vancouver Art Gallery, she was director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich from 1992 to 2005, devoted to Franz von Stuck. Villa Stuck. The name suits.

Art historian Meyer Schapiro usefully distinguished between a painting’s subject matter and object matter. Von Stuck and his associates painted with no strength in their object matter. They weren’t just past their pull date, they don’t have a date, being feeble in any era. While artists around the world surged forward, rocking the foundations of what art could be, these artists clung to overheated and underfed attempts at imagery.

For every painting that holds its own there are five that cry out for
the privacy of storage. Seen rarely and in small groups, they might be
able to charm as artifacts, like lion-footed tables,
heavy brocade curtains and corsets.
Thanks to the terms of the Frye will, however, these weak
vessels must continuously pour themselves out on the wall, cruelly
exposed to familiarity breeding contempt.

Jen Graves wrote today that she didn’t think the Frye could have hired someone better. True, if the museum insists on maintaining the delusion that its collection is tip top. I was looking for somebody who’d figure out a way to free the museum from the dead hand of the past, to move the Frye’s holdings into storage, deaccession and trade up.

(Graves also wrote Danzker’s exhibit, William Hogarth: Nationalism, Mass Media and the Artist, was “awesome-sounding.” Awesome? Hogarth is an illustrator in the worst sense of the word. He belongs in picture books accompanying stories.)

Danzker curated The Munich Secession and America at the Frye earlier this year. It was as meticulous and thoughtful as it was unconvincing.

Danzker is interested in creating closer ties between Northwest art communities, something she did while a curator at VAG in the late 1970s, working with Anne Focke’s and/or, an art center that closed by 1980 and has not been equaled in the NW since.

I’d got nothing against Danzker but her taste. Here’s hoping she can overcome it.
 

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker takes over at the Frye Oct. 1, replacing Midge Bowman, who served as director since 2004. 

From the press release:

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Birnie Danzker lived in the Pacific
Northwest from 1977 to 1991, during which time she served as curator
and then director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Birnie Danzker left
Vancouver for Munich, where she directed the Museum Villa Stuck for 15
years…Birnie Danzker has curated
exhibitions …at the International Center of
Photography in New York (1980), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art
and P.S. 1 — MOMA (2002), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005).
No stranger to Seattle or the Frye, in 2008 Birnie Danzker undertook
extensive research on the history of the Frye’s Founding Collection curated The Munich Secession and America and Transatlantic:
American Artists in Germany, which opened at the Frye in January 2009.

There Goes the Neighborhood is the title of an mobile installation that went up in flames early this morning where it was parked in what functions as the sculpture court behind Lawrimore Project, scorching the gallery’s back wall and breaking out windows.

Created by SuttonBeresCuller, There Goes the Neighborhood was destroyed, but the gallery lost nothing else, said Scott Lawrimore, who got a call from the fire department at 6 a.m.

“They were amazing,” said Lawrimore about the fire department. “They broke into the gallery and physically removed the art that was threatened in storage.”

There Goes The Neighborhood is insured, he said. He speculated that someone climbed the fence and used the artwork as shelter while smoking.

A group show, Spite House, will open as planned tomorrow night at 6.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from…

 Philip Guston

Tracey Emin

Will Ryman

Shaun Kardinal

Mamie Tinkler (watercolor)

Jennifer Zwick

For the communal experience, there’s Alice Wheeler’s portrait of Peaches resting on a bed of her admirers. (Via) Wheeler’s Women are Beautiful is at the Greg Kucera Gallery through Aug. 15. My review here. Jen Graves’ podcast interview here.

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