Archives for 2009

Somewhere between Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White is Bradd Skubinna at Francine Seders, with maybe a dog’s left jog over to Richard (Dick) Elliott, whose murals are made of bicycle reflectors.

(Photos Spike Mafford)

On the floor, Skubinna’s starburst pattern of plastic discards, Gabe Liked Jazz, radiates outward from a meticulously color-coded center. Plastic trays for apples, small appliances, meals to go, light bulbs and muffins inflect a wall with ripples of translucent patterns accented with the remains of torn labeling. A blue screen made of blue New York Times‘ bag wrappers torn to let the light through hangs in the middle of the gallery. Both indoor sky and plastic lace, it sways faintly when the front door opens.

The Northwest Film Forum is a one-stop shop for the Seattle’s cultural life, a hub that draws from visual art, theater, dance and music communities, recognizing the fluid reality of contemporary art.

With a 30 percent drop in income, however, the forum needs help if it is to continue its programming at present levels, not only the film programming but the summer filmmaking camps for kids, screenwriting and film editing classes, filmmakers brought to town and the movies it is instrumental in getting made.

 Director Lyall Bush is asking anybody with a stake in the forum to send a $10 donation by Aug. 15:

Please walk
it in, mail
it in, or click here  to make your donation.

There’s a crow in my neighborhood who wants me dead. Its screams when it sees me are heart-stopping. Do I look like someone who kicked a chick?

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds with a niece intent on seeing the classics. I wouldn’t have picked that one, but when the hapless human herd is strafed by birds, I thought of one whose venom might be keeping it up nights.

Vanessa Renwick

Jean-Luc Mylayne takes an entirely different view, offering a fusion of factual clarity and high romance.

Jessie Henson liberates hers from embroidery.

Facts aren’t enough for Justin Gibbens.

Elizabeth Sandvig is drawn to the avian world of improbable collaborations.

Mike Simi takes his birds past Bladerunner, into the realm of ordinary plastics.

Michael Spafford ‘s have mystical powers.

Anselm Kiefer‘s have read too much and forgotten how to fly.

Mine hops up and down on the branches of a high tree. Once earned, the enmity of crows deepens and grows.

Last fall, members of the Seattle Art Dealers Association (SADA) attempted to define who in their view is a singular artist for an exhibit titled, Century 21: Dealer’s Choice.

Predictably, the results were mixed. Just because dealers align themselves in a group doesn’t mean they have
anything in common. Like every other city with a thriving gallery
scene, Seattle’s galleries run on different tracks. Many specialize in
intimate home decor. As long as there is a market for art that contains
no criticality in its approach to content, there will be galleries to
provide it.

This summer, perhaps smarting from criticism about being out of touch, SADA is back with a second project. Each gallery picked somebody new. Setting aside the fact that summer is frequently a time for introductions, what are the results?

Richard Thurston of the Grover/Thurston Gallery picked his wife, Marianne Pulfer.

Thurston:

It’s my gallery. I can do what I want.

He means of course that it’s his and Susan Grover’s gallery. Considering that Grover is his ex-wife, Thurston gets credit for his sterling sense of family values. Picking his wife is an expression of his up-yours attitude toward his peers. Plus, Pulfer is a step up for the gallery, fiercer and more compelling than much of its usual fare.

The other surprise came from Foster/White Gallery. With the photographs of Cara Barer, Foster/White moved decisively away from the visual niceties it too frequently features. Her images of ravaged books remind me of the Laura Dean Dancers in the 1970s and ’80s.

Other strong intros: Brent Sommerhauser at Greg Kucera; David Huffman at James Harris; Michael Bryon at Howard House; Ariana Page Russell at Platform, and Mark Kang O’Higgins at Linda Hodges for one painting, Deposition.

Charlie Finch on the charmed trio, all now demised, of Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

The last of a great triumvirate, Merce Cunningham, died over the
weekend. I’m the least dance-savvy person around, but it’s fair to say
that not a day has passed in my art existence without contemplating
Cage, Rauschenberg and Cunningham. What they possessed like the Three
Graces passing a chalice was an unstinting awareness of the world
around them and its positive possibilities.
When the garbage truck loads up at 4 in the morning, Cage turns
irritation into music. When HBO posters pile up under a construction,
Rauschenberg calls. When a hundred young folks stare down at their
iPods, forgetting how to walk, Cunningham does a stutter step.

More here.

Eva Lake, in reviewing Jami Attenberg’s novel, A Kept Man:

In
just about every novel about artists I have read, dealers are made out
to be vulgar or dumb, but I have found this to rarely be the case in
the real world. It leads me to believe that the writers did not know
any – or just liked easy, cheap shots.

D.K. Row calls Portland’s art economy “frail and nearly bedridden” (here), a description that rings true across the country. These are desperate times, Mrs. Lovett. Bad At Sports offers brief analysis of the recessionary impact on galleries with upbeat news from LA, here.

Doug Britt reports on New York’s Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue. It’s a nonprofit that offers grants to artists who live in five cities – Houston, San Francisco,
Chicago, Boston and Atlanta – in the hopes of providing a national support network
for artists who don’t live in NY or LA.

I
emailed the group to congratulate it on its generosity and ask, Why not
Seattle? Didn’t hear back. Atlanta makes sense. If the program’s going
to be nationwide, it needs a Southern city. Houston and Chicago are
obvious, and I’m fine with San Francisco. That leaves Boston. Boston
instead of Seattle or Philly or Portland, Oregon? Somebody in the grant
office is not paying attention.

Sue the bastards: Rose Art Museum board members take Brandeis University to court. (Story everywhere, especially good at Art Fag City. More on MAN.)

Art for the heat wave – Jeppe Hein’s Appearing Rooms. His ice cube is currently melting at Western Bridge.

In response to this post, Henry Art Gallery director Sylvia Wolf writes:

As a response to the concern voiced above, I am pleased to report that the Henry Art Gallery is strong. Managing and thriving in this economic recession calls for bold steps from Henry leadership.

As Washington State’s oldest art museum (founded in 1927), the Henry has been through tough times before. What has sustained the organization through past highs and lows is the pioneering spirit that has made the Henry a cultural leader and model of innovation in the Pacific Northwest. Those distinguishing characteristics have never been stronger.

Like all arts organizations, our revenues have dropped significantly, endowment earnings are down, and state cuts have significantly reduced our funding. To that end, between January and May, we developed a long-range plan for operating under significantly different economic conditions. Measures taken included a reduction in force and in gallery hours. In addition, effective June 1, all Henry staff work hours and pay were reduced by 20%. All of us at the Henry–staff and Board alike–have worked hard in the past six months to determine how best to serve the community during a period of diminishing resources.

Although the fiscal crisis greatly challenged us and called for sacrifices, we made our changes and ended the fiscal year, June 31, 2009, with a balanced budget. For the year ahead, we have a vigorous plan for providing access to art and artists at this time when the need for inspiration from the arts is more acute than ever.

[Read more…] about Henry Gallery director Sylvia Wolf responds

Photographers sneak up on people or catch them on the fly.
Walker Evans went so far as to rig his camera so it appeared to be
focused elsewhere for his Subway series, Many Are Called.

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection at the Henry Art Gallery concentrates on portraits that are collaborative. The subject understands the scrutiny and has prepared a face to meet it.

Edward Curtis: Among others, Bill Holm defended Curtis against Christopher Lyman’s 1982 debunking study, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions. which accused him of racism, sexism, nostalgic romanticism and intentional fraud. Lyman’s harsh view has not prevailed. Yes, Curtis traveled with costumes and used them interchangeably when subjects presented themselves as insufficiently colorful. He wanted to reconstruct the past, not document the present.

Like Curtis, Marsha Burns believes in engaged contact. In the 1980s and ’90s, she worked in gelatin silver prints or enlarged Polaroids, with subjects
standing against a folded, gray backdrop. Her prints are are an orchestration of
grays, blacks and whites, with the edges from the
contact sheet and sprocket-marks from the film serving  as decorative
borders and a homage to the means of her production.

Also like Curtis, her photos are theatrical presentations, sum points of edifice. They are visual stories whose internal construction delivers meaning. One thinks of Irving Penn’s studio shots of tribal peoples around the globe, not in this show. Burns’ are more intimate than Penn’s, but just as crisp and elegant.

In Burns’ view, style is substance, attire is destiny. Seeking to be a medium through which people could tell their own stories, she sought subjects whose bodies speak for them and (unlike Curtis) told them to compose themselves as they wished to be seen. Her lack of cynicism, her belief that portraiture can reveal essential truth, even the idea that there is something called essential truth, put Burns at odds with many of her contemporaries. While they were busy exposing reality as a series of selected fictions, she was after soul, the grace in character.

Her approach has more in common with Thomas Eakins than Cindy Sherman.

Also in the exhibit, curated by Sylvia Wolf, Henry director: Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, Frank A. Rinehart, Benjamin J. Falk, Samuel Montague Fassett, Jim Goldberg, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Deborah Luster, Fred E. Miller, Nicholas Nixon, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Andy Warhol.

Through Oct. 25.

Dominated by the Christianity for more than 1,500 years, art in the West continues to be seeded with its signs and symbols. They exert a magnetic pull over imagery that may or may not have been created to declare them.

Lauren Grossman’s use is intentional, if not reverential. (Below, Clear Christ and Behold, via Howard House)

From his literal youth, Michael Lucero from 1978, via Howard House:

Folkert De Jong‘s could be accidental, but it’s real in any case, a crucified figure who has become his cross.

Extended arms can be enough. (Damien Hirst)

A body made of Duct Tape slumping as if dead is a descent from the Cross. (Dan Webb, Mr. Fixit )

Speaking of a descent from the Cross: (Tom Otterness, Untitled)

Another descent. (Mark Kang O’Higgins)

Even a configuration of a (less than) heavenly host rings the old bell. (John Feodorov – Office Deity)

For Emily Duffy, the old bell is an alarm. In Constitutional Doublecross, she laments the blurring of the line between church and state. (Via Sandra)

As befits the iconography, the fallen continue to fall. (Maurizio Cattelan)

Faulkner:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Jasper Johns’ light bulbs came from comic strips. They remain a constant that pops up in his sculpture, prints, paintings and drawings. Jasper Johns: Light Bulbs is a survey of their appearance from 1957 to 1976, in 17 prints and six sculptures, at the Henry Gallery.

Johns, who also has a starring role in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78
at the Seattle Art Museum, likes his bulbs burnt out, which is possibly
a joke on his status as the idea man of contemporary art.

I love this survey, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Limited to one idea, the range of the artist’s material invention becomes evident.

Some light bulbs flicker before they go out, and some just go out.The world it is the old world yet.

At the Henry through Oct. 25.

In a good economy with a sold middle class, factory work seems dreary. Is this all there is? What about my hopes and dreams? In a bad economy with an eroded middle class, whatever factory work remains is an enviable a safe haven. As Bob Dylan put it in Tangled Up in Blue, “lucky just to be employed.”

Cao Fei’s My Future Is Not A Dream has a human-clog-in-the-machine feeling without the usual rage or desperation, because in this video, each clog is conscious of his/her contribution. Then there’s the magic: A ballerina appears en pointe as a dying swan and, in the next scene, as a sorter of light bulbs. A man with a clip board takes up the dance, and so does a women in jeans.

My Future Is Not A Dream is not the alienated surreal of  Doug Aitken or the worker advocacy of Allan Sekula. It is a homage to those who make things with their hands and dream with their hearts, in Mark Twain’s words, those  “valuable personages; the
workers, they that make the bread the soft-handed and ide eat.”

As Jacob Lawrence said about his Builders series:

There is always an effort to express the universal beauty
of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add
dimension to his spiritual being.

Yang Fudong’s City Lights is a madcap improvisation of the classy noir mood of French gangster films.

Men in dark suits peer around the edge of buildings, guns raised. They hold umbrellas and dance in office buildings in the shaded light of venetian blinds. Some hold guns, umbrellas and partners, others pretend the props are in their hands, that they’re not alone and ridiculous. 

Multiple short films by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong are at the Henry through Oct. 4.