Archives for 2009

When the Seattle artist team known as Lead Pencil exhibited Arrival at 2 a.m. in 2007…

the piece reminded a lot of people of Mariele Neudecker’s The Internal Slipping Out of the World at Large from 2000.

Much talk ensued, with little in the way of conclusion. Since then, other examples of the form have continued to circulate, suggesting that Lead Pencil cannot borrow what is already widely distributed.

(Grand Central Station, anonymous, probably from the 1950s, from Corbis)

Lygia Pape:

Simon Aldridge:

Jim Hirschfield has been working with monofilament as a kind of stringed light harp since the early 1980s.
Hirschfield:

I have been using monofilaments to investigate the phenomenon that results from the creation of ephemeral planes that pass through, divide, and ultimately become an integral aspect of the space in which they exist.

He’s interested in changing space without occupying it, or, as Wallace Stevens put it in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

Fred Sandback is the master of ephemeral planes.

Since his death, Alyson Shotz has been coming up fast on the inside rail.

Painters have a stake here too.

Kate Shepherd:

Margie Livingston

What Wayne Thiebaud said years ago, that art is more about likeness than difference, still holds true and is worth remembering the next time a confluence is understood to be a copy.

Heidi Britt Anderson and her twin sister Erika Lynn Anderson were born in Seattle in 1976. Both are artists, Heidi in Seattle and Erika in New York.

(Shared Web site here. All images here are Heidi’s. Click to enlarge.)

Just by looking at the Web site, which isn’t enough evidence, I think Seattle got the better deal. While Erika’s drawing is heavy and awkward, Heidi’s is confectionery light. Since they’re both dealing with the mystical end of other-worldly ventures, light is right.There’s a lot of folk fantasia around, but Heidi’s has every sign of the genuine.

She opens in Seattle Friday night at 7 at Cairo.

Jasper Johns via Betsey Brock

Joseph Beuys, via Judith Tannerbaum

Bernardi Roig

Felix Gonzales-Torres

Haegue Yang
Atsuko Tanaka, Electric Dress, via Martin

The Art Guys, Travel Light

SuttonBeresCuller, Homesick

Christian Boltanski (via Claude Zervas)

Claude Zervas

Tivon Rice, Resolution

Dan Corson

 Brian Jungen, via BeFruitful&Multiply

Tiffany Holmes, darkSky

Ted Apel, via TJ Norris

Roger Hirons (dipped in semen)

Michel Delacroix

ANABA, via Martin

Tavares Strachan, Cloud Chamber

Strachan, Cloud Chamber, detail

Christina Seely, Metropolis 40°25’N 3°41’W (Madrid)

Valay Shende

Scott Wayne Indiana

When I enter a room, I look for a chair. Almost any room, almost any chair. The assumed context of this expectation is unexamined except through art, where it is frustrated.

Dawn Cerny

David Hockney

Drew Daley

Pat DeCaro

Harriet Saunderson

Sean M. Johnson

Urs Fischer

Roy McMakin

All the classics, from Duchamp and Beuys to Bruce Nauman, at DesignBoom.

(Previous post on the modestly-sized here)

Diem Chau carves crayons.

But that’s not all.

Her blog here. Her Web site.

Saya Moriyasu brings Elie Nadelman-style high romance to pocket-sized figures.

Moriyasu’s gallery here.

Marita Dingus makes her small people from whatever is at hand.

Dingus’ gallery here. Her Web site here.

John Perreault tackles The Generational: Younger than Jesus on his blog, Artopia. He tackled it last week, but in the spirit of this post, the concept of “today” covers a lot of ground.

Perreault:

The NuMu “The Generational” has an attention-getting but foolish extended title: “Younger Than Jesus”, which seems to mean that all the 50 artists from 25 different countries are younger than The Christ when He was crucified. I find this truly offensive. And I am not even a Christian.

Will future titles be equally insulting? How about: More Boring Than the Buddha; Bossier Than Moses; Louder Than Luther; Madder Than Mohammad; More Baffling Than Madame Blavatsky?

…
Well, yes, art is indeed global. But so is late capitalism and so is tuberculosis. In spite of transnational trends like the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, and then Modernism, it was once thought nations were little, much cherished pockets of stylistic development, language tics, and even aesthetic surprise. Not so anymore.
…

The official Artopia doctrine is that art has been done in by a fatal disconnect from poetry and from the metaphysical. Whatever art was, it is being continued somewhere else.

In a similar vein, Edward Winkleman capers through aesthetic theory, here.

OK, so clearly I have no idea what I’m talking about (and yet, amazingly, that doesn’t slow me down one bit, does it?)

Not all artists are connected in webs of art-based relationships. When not in their studios, they work day jobs or dig in their garden, drop the kids at
school if they have kids and do yoga if they can bear to bend over.

There are artists, good artists, who have no idea what anyone in
Artforum thinks or what’s on view in any particular museum or gallery.
They are so outside the system of having a gallery or being included in
a museum that years go by without them giving it much thought, and yet,
day after day, they’re still working.

Because at its root art is so frequently about the interplay of ideas arising from a particular time and place, being cut off from other artists as well as curators, dealers and critics is not usually a good thing. For some people, however, it’s necessary. Talk can be depressing noise, and other people’s voices can drain the life from an inspiration that arises from materials at hand.

Nole Giulini is not naive by any stretch, nor is she uninformed or entirely unknown. Her banana peels sewn into a species of Persian slipper were included in an exhibit at the New Museum in 1996. Her dessicated Mickey Mouse is in the Surrealist Impulse at the Tacoma Art Museum, which is what made me think of her again.

It’s a stopper, that little mouse, made of dried fungal membranes joined by coarse thread.

Some of her sock puppets bring to mind Louise Bourgeois’ wool figures, heavy with absurdly sexual implications.

Her fungal puppets might have marched straight out of a William Kentridge video. Brought into their own universe and seen in their own company, however, both wool and fungal objects remind viewers of no other.

Giulini needs what she doesn’t have – a solo show in a respected and well-attended space. Instead, every couple of years, a single piece pops up. Take Unititled (wedding dress) from 1994 constructed entirely of used underwear, which I saw half a dozen years ago in Seattle.

A girdle stretches across the shoulders with old
lace at the waist. The skirt features a massive Jockey train, each garment
signaling a long lifeline. Get married in this dress, and you’re up front about your back story, which trails behind you, sporting intractable stains.

Out, out, damn spot! This dress says don’t bother.

This dress says, virginal white is either a fantasy or the person
wearing it is too young to make the commitment. Getting married means
dressing up, but being married means picking up somebody else’s
underwear.

Be mine.

The box with clear glass sides contains rabbit droppings, each wrapped in 22 K gold, Untitled from 1991.

A curator or the right kind of dealer could put it together. Do artists have to make the scene to make anything happen for them, even in a regional context? When does the work speak for itself?

Not necessarily on purpose.

Robert Longo:

Xu Zhen:

Image from flickr. Hirons is a finalist for this year’s Turner Prize.

As an addition to this post (Body farming: the latest in pushing up daises), artist/curator Sharon Arnold suggested the image below by Jennifer Zwick:

Very nice indeed. It reminds me of Crazy Jane’s final, trump-card words to the bishop:

A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.

And as an addition to this post (Art at the end of the road: your life span – time’s up), David Maisel suggested this image from his series, Library of Dust: