Archives for 2009

Titian’s title  (1538) is, Venus of Urbino, but she’s clearly Danae, contemplating a remote act of sexual congress with a god.

That golden shower signifies the life force. Myriad artists aspire to its quickening light.

Lecia Dole-Recio

Leo Saul Berk
Blake Haygood, the tragedy of insufficient projection

Mary Ann Peters, evoking Robert Sund: It’s easy to see in the insect world/ How many pilgrims have fallen to their knees.

Hydrangea, 2005

Artist’s Web site

When Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune Stage 1 opened at Mass MOCA in 2004, the nine Ford Tauruses were low to or on the ground in a corridor in semi-dark.

In Seattle three years later, Cai said through an interpreter that he was thinking about suicide bombers, about how terrorism takes place in the middle of an ordinary day, and how we go on afterward.

Installed at the Seattle Art Museum, however, Cai’s intentions were undone by daylight. Placement too. Inopportune One hangs high over the lobby in bright light. What read as an explosion at Mass MOCA became a swizzle-stick oddity at the Seattle Art Museum. The easily alarmed might worry about one of those cars falling on them in an earthquake, but who thinks of suicide bombers? The tale does not relate. (Photo, Paul Brown, Seattle PI)

At the Guggenheim (smaller cars), the piece is different again, somewhere between a giant male charm bracelet, a vertical Nascar run and an illuminated Chinese scroll painting come to three-dimensional life.

In the dark, Inopportune carries the dark; in the light, it becomes artifice – like Oz, its tricks exposed.

And that’s where Cai lives, in the shifting ground of the metaphors he evokes. As the first falls away, other, more ambiguous ones take its place. Instead of determining the impact of this piece, context reveal another kind of impact latent in the work all along. Shutter the windows and turn out the lights in SAM’s lobby, and something close to Cai’s first thought will spring back into view.

Via

Artists for a Work Free America and Vital 5 Productions are offering a grant that mocks all others. The entry deadline is Friday. Because few people have entered, undoubtedly suspecting a joke, the chances of winning are pretty good. The Arbitrary Art Grant is a joke, but it comes with a real payout of $500.

Call it kidding on the square.

You have 5 4 days left to walk into a grocery store, construct a sculpture from the store’s inventory and email an image to: info@vital5productions.com.
All entries will be exhibited this summer at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, and one random applicant will be awarded $500.00 USD.

This grant is open to all people in all countries of all ages and backgrounds. The winner will be announced on May 30th along with the outline for our next Arbitrary Art Grant in Writing.
For more information, visit: www.vital5productions.com/currentevents
Brought to you by Artists for a Work Free America and Vital 5 Productions.

Here’s the romantic part.

In 1993, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos managed to ring the that-ain’t-art bell by giving away $10 bills to day laborers just north of the Mexican border. The NEA withdrew funding. God knows the NEA didn’t want to get caught doing anything for day laborers. (New York Times story here. Artist response to NYT story here.)

Back to this Arbitrary Art Grant, the latest in a string, none of which receive government funding (This one does). Even if you don’t win the money, you’re guaranteed to be part of the exhibit. I couldn’t find in the directions “one entry per person” but it’s there.

Finally, from Jen Graves’ excellent profile of Seattle dealer Scott Lawrimore (Lawrimore Project), an anecdote from his early days as gallery assistant:

When he was working for Seattle galleries, he instituted a program: the $150 studio visit. He’d go to artists’ studios but often would be unable to show their work for one reason or another, so he’d give them $150 in exchange for whatever they thought that was worth. “I always wanted them to, like, spit in a napkin and give it to me,” he said wistfully. “But they never did.”

In 1964, Scottish artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills
began a project they called Journey to the Surface of the Earth. Within that category, many series followed, such as London Series, Tidal Series, Thaw Series, Japan Series and overall, the World Series. From their Web site:

Each
of these series has involved various random selection techniques to
isolate a rectangle of the Earth’s surface. In the case of the World
Series, 1000 random selections were made from a giant map of the world
by blindfolded visitors to the exhibition at London’s ICA in 1969.
The random selection serves several purposes: nothing is excluded as a
potential subject; the particular is chosen as a representative of the
whole & it reduces their subjective role as artists & creators
to that of “presenters”. To present a slice of reality as objectively
& truthfully as possible. They call this “motiveless appraisal”.
Once the random selection has been made, they recreate the site in a
fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief.

Mark Boyle died in 2005, but Hills and their two children, Sebastian and Georgia, continue as Boyle Family.

I can’t find a review of Tavares Strachan‘s Portal from Where We Are Is Always Miles Away that mentioned the Boyles, even though Strachan is singing a nonrandom version of their song. From Roberta Smith’s review,
you’d think Strachan was the first to pick up a piece of the earth and
replicate it, pound for pound, in Strachan’s case, the place where he
got a parking ticket.

And here we go again, Karen Rosenberg on Strachan in the NYT
on Sunday, no tip of the hat to Boyle Family. Milan Kundera called
history a thin thread of remembering stretched over an ocean of
forgetting. It is the job of everyone who writes about art to
strengthen that thread.

Nothing against Strachan. I think he’s terrific.

Sign of god or symptom of hallucinogens, the object that lives inside its own burning is a theme beloved by painters but no longer limited to them. Starting in the 1970s and gaining ground in the new century, artists in a range of other media have made it their own.

Ryan Mrozowski, suggested by BeFruitful&Multiply:

Kevin Schmidt, suggested by dvnms

Lauren Grossman, Not Consumed, suggested by Billy Howard. (I should have thought of this one, since I reviewed the dang show.)

Ana Mendieta, suggested by Sharon Arnold

James Lavadour, suggested by Harold Hollingsworth

Charles Linder , suggested by IMALEADER

Richard Misrach
Charles LaBelle

Kerry Skarbakka

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai again

Harrell Fletcher: consuming fire as relational aesthetics

Claude Zervas: His bears prevent forest fires by eating them

Alice Wheeler: motel sign as burning bush

Nathalie Djurberg, suggested by Gretchen

Monika Baer, suggested by BeFruitful&Multiply

Kaucyila Brooke, Tit for Twat

Elizabeth Sandvig, Swimming with Giant Green Turtles

Bob Zoell, Dead Mom Standing

Michael Mahalchick, Don’t Look at Me

Charles Ray, Family Romance

Sherry Markovitz, Mothers and Daughters

Margot Quan Knight, Tadhg

From Supermandolini

Your war:

Your commute: