Archives for 2009

At the press preview for the Seattle Art Museum’s small but choice Wyeth exhibit, Remembrance, exhibit curator Patricia Junker said Wyeth was the figure whom the international crew of artists featured in Michael Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack (1949-78) had in mind.

Both exhibits open tomorrow. (Target Practice reviews to follow.)

Wyeth’s admirers try to insinuate him into the thick of things. For the artists in Target Practice, however, he wasn’t on the firing range. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning. Andrew Wyeth? His name did not come up.

Wyeth backed himself into a corner of a particular place rooted in land and family and painted his fear of the world. With a desperate and dry exactitude, he documented every inch of what mattered to him. He aimed for sentimentality but didn’t get there.

His idea of the beautiful is dead-on-arrival, but his depiction is the equivalent of Miss Havisham preserving her cake.

Take Farm Road, above. (1979, Tempera on masonite, 21 inches high by 25 1/4 inches wide. Private collection.) Rembrandt-light shines on the greasy hair of his model, gray and brown at its roots and brass in its braids. Is the farm road in the title the rigid path of her hair? There is no other.

The rusted iron ground that rises in front of her blocks her progress. She’s right where he wants her, under his surveil, every hair on her head counted. Above, where she isn’t looking, the flat light of another dull day rises against a horizon line broken by a cluster of trees.

Wyeth is the American version of Edvard Munch, literal where Munch is flowing but tapping into the same emotional territory. Wyeth’s scream is that there is no scream. He’s the painter of a vast suppression, what it took for him to pass for normal in the countryside.

Death does not have to hang heavy in your head for you to be a fan of Obit. (I’m a fan, and I’m singing a happy tune as I type this. Worms crawl in, worms crawl out...)

Fellow AJ blogger, Jeff Weinstein, contributes to the site, most recently with a fine piece titled Hidden Memorials, on ephemeral Sufi shrines in the desert.

All that is by way of saying Obit’s Top 10 List of Stupid Death Tricks is not just anybody’s death-trick list.

Number 3, for example:

A prop can still be a deadly weapon.
Actors on Hollywood sets are routinely warned to be careful with guns used as props, but in 1984, Jon-Erik Hexum, a star of the CBS action series Cover-Up, pretended to play Russian roulette by putting a blank-loaded .44 Magnum to his temple. “Let’s see if this will do it,” he reportedly said, and pulled the trigger. The burst of hot gas fired at close range penetrated his skull.

I’d like to read a top ten list of stupid death tricks that didn’t work. Chris Burden in his reckless youth would loom large on it, when he attempted to electrocute himself, and had himself shot, nailed to a VW bug and stuffed into a sack left in traffic. The trick here, in the format of a top 10 list, would be to convey to an undifferentiated audience why everything he did continues to matter so much, to not make a joke out of some of art’s most soulful moments.

Who’s the link, lifeline, thread and thing to be scorned? He opened the door for the grandiose and unruly, for those whose hearts have (Pascal’s phrase) reasons that reason cannot know. The artists below are among many in his debt.

Anne Mathern

Mandy Greer

Alison Brady

Titus Kaphar
Dan Webb (Hold)

Mike Simi (Self-Portrait)

Christian Van Minnen

The answer is, of course,  Mr. Elaborately Ceremonial.

Via

Grim report from the New York Times on the health of galleries, here. Going into the dry season, they’re already dry. On the other hand, AJ blogger Judith H. Dobrzynski found a study that suggests the art market might have bottomed out and better days are ahead, here.

Either way, art continues to bloom, even in unlikely places.

Paula Wilson

Ellen Altfest

Alison Brady

Jennifer Zwick

And the ability of light fixtures to track your every move – surveillance by robotic florescence.

More on Huang Hsin-Chien here.

Via

Nathalie Djurberg, currently at the Frye.

With a jet-stream jolt of girl-in-charge, Djurberg’s puppets have a hard on for Manet as Travis Bickle.

All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.

Mel Ramos did his Olympia, and so did Rashid Johnson, here. Talk about pregnant with cultural possibility.

From Douglas Britt:

Two from Marfa:

So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. (Revelation 3:14-22)

Titus Kaphar vomits history. He tars, feathers and tears it up. He peels it off, like sunburned skin. He allows it to leak through surface paint slathering, first eyes, then mouth: the white behind the black and the black behind the white, the racial stew of our collective story.

Seen in reproduction, his paintings can pass for tricks. First he makes copies of the past, then he destroys them. In person, however, the intensity of his paint handling shines through its violations.

If the past awoke and walked down the street, we’d bar the door, but portraits that survive to represent various times and places tend to be lovely.

We study the lace at her throat, the sword at his hip, the polished furniture behind them.

Kaphar honors this house by burning it down. He upends it. We see it, finally, painfully, through the lens of the present, what we know about the old and the new, not just figureheads standing in the boat but the muscle at the oar.