On a battered trunk sits a TV set so old and ugly it would get tossed from a donations box. When it’s plugged in, the screen lights to bluish-white and black static. Through its haze appears a head-and-shoulders shot of University of Washington art professor Doug Jeck, the terror of undergraduates. His big fake nose makes him look like a forlorn, featherless parrot. Covered in ceramic dust, he sings I Will Always Love You in a trembling falsetto.
My brother once owned a dog who could sing like a saxophone. Trying to encourage a performance, I half-crooned a howl to get him in the mood. Nothing. “You have to put your heart in it,” my brother said.
Jeck puts his heart in it. Even if he’d never made anything else, for this one piece (Pathetique, 2003) he’d deserve a place in art’s memory bank.
But that’s not all. Jeck’s After Muybridge 2007 – suite of 9 photos of clay figures morphing from one frame to another – hangs on a wall.
Detail:
Muybridge documented motion and Jeck breakdown. There’s a foolish attempt to rise again in the final frame, a burnt offering. Jeck’s figures lack the resilience of Thomas Schutte‘s lumpen freaks from, for instance, United Enemies. Instead, the Seattle artist parodies American individualism. His tiny people are masters of their own ships and captains of their own souls with nowhere to go and no way to get there.
Jeck is part of Wet and Leatherhard at Lawrimore Project, curated by Susie J. Lee. Instead of final products, Lee looks at process, at what a devotion to the muck of the earth does to contemporary artists.
Photos and a video document a 1972 performance by Jim Melchert and his friends. They stuck their heads in buckets of wet clay and waited for it to dry. Kristen Morgin recreates old tin toys with unfired replicas, the new far more fragile than the old. Wynne Greenwood‘s attempts at a vessel wouldn’t pass muster at summer camp, yet like the obese in bikinis, their bloated splendor insists on attention.
For Tim Roda, Meiro Koizumi and Ben Waterman, clay is a prop for performance. For Sterling Ruby, the ultimate performance cannot be controlled. It’s what happens in the firing. Artists make offerings, and the kiln decides who is Cain and who is Abel.
Through Feb. 13.
Doug Jeck is a pill and his work is absurdly old fashioned, but this piece that Susie unearthed is terrific. C’est la vie, say the old folks, goes to show you never can tell. Whenever I see him, I’m going to think of him as a forlorn, featherless parrot who sings like Tiny Tim. It should make him easier to take.