Archives for 2009

Seattle painter Alden Mason, almost 90, leads an urban life without having acquired an urban viewpoint. His work is full of the things that moved him as a child, including the sparrows that flew around his head as he offered them carrots on his parents dairy farm in the Skagit Valley.
While realizing that his art owes a lot to his early environment, he also credits a mail-order cartoon class. He earned the tuition by trapping muskrats.

I feel guilty about those muskrats, but I loved cartoons, with figures jumping, hopping and smooching. They were having more fun than I was. They lived in a brighter world.

Foster/White Gallery hosts a birthday party for him July 25, 2-4 p.m. RSVP

W. Scott Trimble

Brent Sommerhauser

Linda Beaumont

Leo Saul Berk:

Previous plinth post here.

Go here for live Web stream coverage.

On July 24, 1 a.m. Seattle time, Seattle’s Ellen Ziegler takes her turn.

Says Ziegler:

I may regret this, but everyone might as well see me do it…
And give the Web site a check from time to time. You absolutely never
know what you’re going to see. Some of it is unbelievably lame, some is
brilliant, and most of it is a collage on a grand scale.

The project reminds her of what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about musical composition:

Hide what you compose in what you hear.
Cover what you hear.
Place something next to what you hear.
Place something far away from what you hear.
Support what you hear.
Continue for a long time an event you hear.
Transform an event until it becomes unrecognizable.
Transform an event that you hear into the one you composed last.
Compose what you expect to come next.
Compose often, but also listen for long periods to what is already
composed, without composing.
Mix all these instructions.
Increasingly accelerate the current of your intuition.

Anthony Gormley responds to the question, Is it art?, with, Who cares? Here.

Via

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell is a murderous evangelical who stalks through Night of the Hunter muttering about love and hate, which are tattooed on his knuckles.

Powell:

Lord, I am tired.
Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin’s.
Yore Book is full of killin’s. But there are things you do hate
Lord: perfume-smellin’ things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

John Currin:
Currin is our Fragonard. For rougher trade, go to Grant Barnhart and scroll till you get to Midnight Special, 100 percent not safe for work.

Marcus Martenson contemplates the problem of good and evil by looking at his feet (Good and bad clog).

[Read more…] about Night of the Hunter: love and hate (good and evil) warring together

Before Yinka Shonibare appeared at the Brooklyn Museum as part of Sensation, he was at the Seattle Art Museum with a gallery devoted to him, a rare case of Seattle being in the lead on the work of a fast-rising, international force.

Trevor Fairbrother, at the time SAM’s Deputy director of art and curator of modern art, had seen Shonibare’s work in London and bought an installation titled Nuclear Family more or less on the spot.

Back in Brooklyn once again with his own exhibit I plan to see before it closes September 20, Shonibare has become ubiquitous. It’s a dangerous position. Only an artist who is really hot can tumble in a season to tedious. So many write and talk about the star of the moment that the audience tires of itself and blames the artist for its boredom.

By taking longer to emerge and (in all senses) on a far smaller scale, Toronto’s Shary Boyle might end up with something resembling an advantage. Before she reaches international acclaim, she’ll have a back story to fuel her forward momentum and the ability to fail big without it costing her everything.

The gift in Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) remains one, despite legitimate criticism: Its message to Bible Belt literalists who thump others with their version of morality. Florida told them their principles are costing them money. Because nobody wants to live nearby, their towns deteriorate and die.

Florida has continued to expand his notion of whose presence is desirable, but it’s still not broad enough.

It needs to includes janitors (via)

who dance in Antarctica, not just artists who focus on an appreciation of menial labor, most importantly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

Claude Zervas:

Sadamasa Motonaga

Cars are common in galleries and museums, beginning with Ed Kienholtz’s Back Seat Dodge, 1964. (Post here.)

Rarely, however, is there an installation that puts viewers inside the experience of life in a broken-down, barely-running van.

The pure products of America go crazy:

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

Created by Eric Thompson and Aubrey Birdwell, the front room installation at OHGE Ltd has an air of inevitability. You’re where you never wanted to be but knew you were going, slipping fast from middle class to teeter on the edge of dependent or maybe homeless. What you’ve got is the van.

Video screens serve as the outside world. They’re blurry, as if you’ve been drinking. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were driving underwater. Sound seals the deal. It gurgles with a slap-happy lurch and dull roar.

OHGE Ltd is a tiny gallery, but this show gives it a sense of scale. In the backroom (really a closet) are Stephan Moore’s power-of-postive thinking videos, playing simultaneously. As people beam and chuckle, a voice drones nonsense about unlocking the door to brain chemistry happiness.

Although separate shows, the ads and the van are collectively titled, ENLIGHTEN ENCOURAGE EMPOWER.

From van men Thompson and Birdwell:

In travel and as a form of rogue property we often carry with us a semblance of the familiar den.

The box with a locked door full of comforts for us alone. We carry this capsule to contain our individual and separate existences…We reject and embrace that we are free-floating and disconnected from everything around us. 

In space and temporal media, these pieces attempt to re-stage our memories of American life. Through cultural quotation we attempt to pry open the locked box and articulate the immense void of American culture. 

I asked Yahoo! Answers for the key to becoming successful. Here is my favorite reply by user “dagmar”.

I think you need talent but you also need drive and determination. Set your mind to what you are trying to accomplish and keep at it. Of course a lot of it depends on what you are trying to be successful in. If it is an artistic pursuit that can be a lot more difficult to succeed in than say, being a Dr. or an accountant. No matter what your goal, do the best you can and do it with joy and love. Make the best of whatever success you find and don’t be discouraged. If you try to enjoy life and not get too caught up in ‘success’ you can be very happy and satisfied.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if this piece by Alison Brady from I Want You (Magazine) via Pilot Books (here)

were labeled a tribute to the late Hannah Wilke, whose S.O.S. Starification Object Series in the 1970s featured her body and chewing gum?