Archives for 2009

I did not hustle to see The Puppet Show from the ICA when it opened at the Frye last month, partly because (already been chewed) puppets are everywhere. Pretty sure the exhibit plucked a few stringed bodies from the contemporary image stream as easy-to-chew crowd pleasers and sorry more compelling explorations tend not to travel, I filed it under an ever-receding-into-the-future to-do list.

I should have listened to Jen Graves, review here. (Mine in multiples soon to follow.)

The Puppet Show is killer good, and so is its catalog. Catalogs for crowd pleasers are either too jolly or too academic, good for their show lists, images and quotes from artists. This one, like Poussin, can truly claim to have thought of everything.

Below, jewels plucked from its various crowns, otherwise known as quotes from essays, beginning with the anchor piece by ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner, which provides an essential history of.

The art of bringing dead things to life is how Kiki Smith, who was once a busker with a Punch and Judy show, relates her work as a sculptor to puppetry. Or half-life, since part of what makes puppets so compelling – and, to many minds, creepy – as objects is that they always appear to be as much dead as alive.

The puppet that opens its eyes after everyone has gone to sleep…

(About Calder’s Circus, from 1961:) The sight of a big old bear of a man playing with tiny childish objects … encapsulates a lifetime’s effort to make art as gratifying as a toy.

fingers tangled in strings…

In the creation of art, it is the puppet one makes of oneself that is most important. (Harold Rosenberg)

Jane Taylor: Big points for resuscitation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which was always too big-idea for me, and whose virtues have receded through
the lens of nephews and nieces, who unanimously reject it.

‘Stop.
Will you. Stop Dave. Will you stop Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid Dave.‘ 
These are not questions, nor are they appeals. They are chains of
signifiers.

[Read more…] about Prelude to a puppet: the catalog (Hello Dave)

Via

Theodore Roethke, images Charles LeDray. From Sperone Westwater except portrait of the artist.

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

After Chase Bank bought the failed Washington Mutual in 2008, Chase found itself with more art than it had space for, as Chase’s Washington Mutual is a slimmed-down version of the disgraced original.

What happens to roughly two-dozen paintings, drawings and sculptures by veterans of the Northwest mainstream that Chase decided not to keep? (Including Alden Mason, Joseph Goldberg, Jeffry Mitchell, Robert Sperry, Frank Okada, Doris Chase and Gaylen Hansen.)

Earlier this week, Chase staged a give-away. Museums were invited to choose what they wanted, followed by other selected nonprofits. The Seattle Art Museum confirmed that it participated but declined to say what it picked, as those choices are dependent upon approval from an acquisitions committee.

Rumor has it SAM chose the Sperry and nothing else. Other museums didn’t want to confirm the giveaway at all, as they believe Chase wants to remain anonymous.

Chase could have sold everything anonymously and cashed the check, although the gap between the work’s appraised value and current market value could be large, making tax deductions a better financial option. Whatever the motive, there are worse things that could happen to art than landing in a museum.

Arts patron and irrepressible character Max Gurvich died at home in Seattle at age 94. (Seattle Times obit here.)

Board member and donor (with his wife Helen) to a variety of Seattle arts groups, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Gallery and Cornish College of the Arts, Gurvich’s lasting legacy might be a hideous pair of woven, window-blind style metal sculptures that rise 22-feet out of the water at the west end of the Evergreen Point Bridge, which connects Seattle to its  Eastside suburbs.

I wrote a story for the PI when they were installed in 2002. Here’s a recap:

Seattle’s rules for who can place what art in what part of the public sphere are rigorous, and yet Gurvich triumphed over all that to install his creations in a prominent spot, where 130,000 cars drive by them each day.

Here’s the good part: He didn’t say he was the artist to anybody who needed to approve the placement. Instead, he spent a year getting a permit from the Department of Transportation and the go-ahead from the majority of nine community clubs and six cities on Lake Washington.

They didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell.

Tom Lentz, Department of Transportation assistant regional manager for maintenance and traffic:

I thought Max was the
patron, and he had an artist working with him. I guess I should have
asked, but I’m an engineer. I looked into the engineering issues.
Rarely do people offer to give us something. I found it refreshing. Max
got support from the city’s art commission, and the state’s, too.

Actually, he didn’t. The state, King County and Seattle arts
commissions all said they had nothing to do with it.

When Lentz went back to his files to figure out what happened, he found that the DOT contacted both city and state arts commissions, and was told by
each it wasn’t their baby. Not on city property, said the city. Not
through our funding sources, said the state. 

The
sculptures, titled Aurora Borealis, look like early ’60s room dividers from a suburban den
joined to make inverted pyramids. Seven years after their installation, their kitsch exuberance has run its course.

Seattle curator Vicki Halper:

You have to hand it to him. He did it all. He should have been
stopped, but he did it all. 

Via

Via

Everybody’s got something to hide ‘cept for me and my monkey.
– John Lennon

Andrew Miksys:

Miksys won his first bingo game at 11, collecting $280. In high school he delivered a newspaper his father published, Bingo
Today, to veterans halls, fraternal associations, churches and sports
clubs in Seattle.

He knows the people he photographs in bingo halls, most of whom are dead and don’t know it. The routine of the game keeps them in a pretense of motion. They
stare are their cards the way the empty eye sockets of skeletons stare
into eternity.

Below, their stash.

Matt Browning:

Politicians infantilize the audience by reducing its members to first
names and jobs, as if everybody is a waiter in a cheap restaurant,
always on duty.
(Joe the Plumber.) Artists do the reverse. Instead of gassing up a stereotype till it
rises like a parade float, they use absurdist intensity to bring it to ground where it can be examined, ridiculed, celebrated and/or fractured into
the particular.

Take Matt Browning, who explained himself in his debut exhibit at Seattle’s Crawl Space late last year:

Men typically engage in bizarre competitions and intrepid
behavior during their lives as a means of bolstering machismo and
camaraderie. Instituting male pedagogy, identity and peer acceptance in
suburban America can, for example, take the form of climbing the
tallest tree as a child, asserting athletic prowess in adolescence, and
winning reckless drinking competitions in early adulthood. My work
illustrates the simultaneous presence of lunacy and beauty in these
types of testosterone-laden behaviors.

He digs to the root of male desire and
finds it wrapped in baseball, beer, pot, skate boarding and the blunt end of taking things
apart:

Leave no trace, review here.

Liz Magor:

When she was a child, she liked to slip into a forest near her
home in search of a kid-size weasel hole. She thought if she lived
there with a dog and a bag of potatoes, the silence of the natural
world would replace the ruckus in her head. Her work is about the folly of aspiring to be in a hole, and the cultures that become one.

Hollow

Laura Fritz:

Fritz thinks inside the box, where she finds fragments of your inner life. When you were otherwise engaged, what was private became public and subject to experiment. Her merger of science and art involves video, mechanical contraptions, cast-polyester molds and a tendency to surround images with thick slabs of silence.

Like Larry Bell, her boxes are all about light, but unlike his spare volumes that trap light on their surfaces through a variety of coated films, her light needs the light in the larger room shut off to be seen at all.
In the dark, when her fuzzy and uncertain pulses are the only illumination, they slide around you and take you in. In Section 4, a cat’s shadow appears inside a box, lit by the milky glow of her video screen. The cat hesitates at the locked door and bows its head.

Section 4

From Ms.C, my favorite monster (where high gets low), photo of Muro by Raquel Paiewonsky. C-Monster commentary: “Boobies!” Who says art criticism on blogs is not of the highest order? 

Click to enlarge. (Previous from me, Breasts at work and play here.)

Topping the charts (again): Holland Cotter with his review of Light of the Sufis, here. Cotter is where I go to shop for images.

Two from Sufi review:  A 17th century Indian painting he describes as “an ego reduced by love to an ash on the arm of God.” Nobody with as wide a view of art writes better:

A Koran page handwritten in light — that is, in gold and silver inks on
a sheet of parchment dyed deep blue — is the exhibition’s oldest work,
dating from the 10th or 11th century. Seen by candlelight, the words,
which describe the rewards of Paradise, would have glinted against the
dark ground like constellations in a night sky.

Also, Cotter on Giacometti, here:

These portraits are laborious, noodling things, their lines repeated
over and over as if Giacometti were determined to create something
solid from nothing, then to obliterate that something. Far more relaxed
— and surely Giacometti drew as compulsively as he did to relieve
tension — are the drawings that look incidental, on the fly: an empty
studio interior, apples in front of a window, a pot of tulips, a tree.
Heaviness lifts; anxiety is dispelled. The faint lines of the tree fly
outward and upward like flames, evidence of a lightened-up, fly-away
artist that some part of Giacometti may always have wanted to be.

Most dutiful plod: Kenneth Baker’s review of Lords of the Samurai. He tells anecdotes from the catalog and calls it a day.

Also insupportable: Baker’s contention that Ansel Adams tops Georgia O’Keeffe in SF exhibit. No matter what’s on view, this isn’t possible. Baker doesn’t bother to try to prove the impossible either. He just asserts it. What’s happening to one of the best art critics writing inside the dying empire of a newspaper, or, what’s your frequency, Kenneth? Working for a living, taking what you’re given? Your slumber-while-typing depresses.

Dress up the skin of your life: With infections, here.

Speaking of food and art, Toi Sennhauser is a deeper sea diver. At art festivals, she has served bread baked with her vaginal yeast as starter, here, and made edible candy portraits of her family, here. (Her husband is a stick-to-your-teeth kind of guy, and her mom’s got a sour exterior.)

Energy in the technicals: Paul Levy gets specific about Howard Hodgkin, here.

Verbal tennis at the Houston Chronicle: Douglas Britt gets it right in a platformed response to The Art Guys, sadly,  here and here. How do I know, since I didn’t see it? That’s the beauty of video documentation, here. If the AG of the 1980s met the AG of today, the former would tell the latter to stop messing with the legacy.

Hooyman here via Kate Speck, who graduates from high school today. (Hi Kate Speck!) Hooyman’s title should be, global warming on the way to the grocery store. Love the hat.