Archives for January 2010

From Randy Kennedy:

In 1969 (Ida) Applebroog, then known by her married name, Ida Horowitz, was a mother of four, a native New Yorker living unhappily in San Diego, where her husband had moved the family to accept an academic position. Ms. Applebroog had been struggling to make a name for herself as an artist and struggling with depression. Her only sanctuary in her chaotic household came at night, when she shut herself in the bathroom and climbed into the tub.

Over a period of several weeks just before her 40th birthday, she took a sketch pad into the bathroom with her too and perched in front of a full-length mirror, making obsessive self-portraits, more than 150 in all, but portraits focused exclusively on her naked crotch. (more)

Now in her 80s, she found the drawings again, which she scanned into a computer and manipulated, printing them on Japanese paper recast with watercolor. (At Hauser & Wirth till March 6.)

This week, Pinchuk announced the prize’s jury. Among the seven members, again, just one woman — (Yuko) Hasegawa), Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); former Chief Curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
That mix is hardly representative of the art world, and it’s a snub to the talented female curators, museum directors, critics, academics, dealers and collectors that populate the art world. Not to mention female artists.

Let’s hope Hasegawa has a strong voice. She’ll need it among these other jurors: Daniel Birnbaum (Sweden) – Director of the Städelschule Art Academy, Frankfurt am Main; Director of the Venice Biennale 2009
* Okwui Enwezor (Nigeria) – Director of Documenta XI; former Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute
* Ivo Mesquita (Brazil) – Chief Curator at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Curator of the 2008 São Paolo Biennial
* Eckhard Schneider (Germany) – General Director of the PinchukArtCentre
* Robert Storr (USA) – Dean of the Yale University School of Art; Director of the Venice Biennale 2007
* Ai Weiwei (China) – artist. (more)

Judith: Daniel Birnbaum is pretty good on this issue and Robert Storr is excellent. Possession of a vagina guarantees nothing. The interesting thing about this panel is that both Storr and Okwui Enwezor are on it. Unfortunately not online is their highly entertaining exchange of insults and insights  in the letters-to-the-editor space in Artforum, 2008. If they’re meeting in the same room, somebody needs to sneak in a camera.

The Museum on Fire makes a sensible comparison – Walter Hopps and Jeffry Deitch, both dealers turned museum curators.
Joanne Mattera on the perils of storing images electronically.
Two Coats of Paint on the demise of  Art on Paper.
Jonathan Melber on the Brooklyn Art Museum‘s progressive, public-friendly copyright policies, via NEWSgrist.
Seattle’s John Morefield, an out-of-work architectural designer, set up an architectural advice booth (5 cents) at the Ballard Farmer’s Market and got covered in the New York Times.
Liz Stone, who identifies herself as a web master for the Seattle Art Museum, wrote about some of the negative mail that finds its way to her inbox. (Note to Stone: The writer who called SAM’s site boring was being kind.)
Seattlle artist Amanda Manitach is off to a good start with a blog titled, my heroes died of syphilis, via Translinguistic Other.

I’ve gone to the countryside outside computer range to root around in the mud, admire the naked fists of bare trees and avoid eye contact with the methamphetamine farmers who populate the neighborhood.

Christopher Buening, Methhead

Not as lovely, but far more likely to be loitering around:

Scott Wayne Indiana from Coin Op

At Elizabeth Leach through Jan. 30. Interview with Christopher about his father, Robert, after the latter’s death in 2008, here. Podcast interview with Eva Lake (30 minutes, worth it), here.

Philip McCracken, Buddha’s Mind (Via) – Eternity as dinner

As long as artists are using your work, you’re not dead.

Leo Kenney, Formation No. 4, New Center, 1966 (At Seattle artREsource)

Jeffrey Simmons, Proxima, 2008 (At Greg Kucera)

Susan Dory‘s paintings could not have existed before satellite transmissions, personal computers and cell phones. Like Tim Bavington‘s, her color sense is electronic. But while his stripes relate loosely to musical tones, her horizontal pulses appear to be celestial. When sending messages to galaxies far, far away, we could code them on her color wheel. There are worse ways of saying hello.

Post-It Notes are raw material for Marc Dombrosky, and so are notes on the backs of envelopes, receipts and letters. He cares about what people want to remember after they’ve forgotten it. Dombrosky is the kind of person who does not look up. What interests him is on the ground. When a written fragment speaks to him, he takes it home and reinforces the text by sewing over the script.

With homespun domestic skill, he returns trash to the bosom of the family. Lost or tossed messages are upgraded into a kind of street poetry.

Lately, Dombrosky has moved beyond saving the written word to saving thrown-away tarps and corny t-shirts.  Beside eroded gold lettering, King of Pop, is a hand-embroidered black mass: The King of Pop develops a goiter.

Dombrosky’s Neverland at Platform Gallery through Feb. 20.

In college in the late 1960s, a friend of a friend knew a guy named Fred. Thanks to Fred’s bad luck, his fame spread beyond his immediate circle. He walked into an elevator that wasn’t there and had to be rescued, clinging to the cables. If he was on a bus, it broke down. A teaching assistant lost his research paper. There were no copies. He went fishing, and his girlfriend’s hook snagged his cheek.

Rumor had it that Fred carried Kenneth Fearing’s Dirge in his pocket.

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;

   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow–

One day, Fred’s fortunes rose. He had scored a summer job as life guard at a posh LA hotel. The pay was great, the work light and the atmosphere relaxing. What could go wrong? On the first day, arriving as dawn broke, he found a corpse floating face down in the water. Because he failed to jump in to check for vital signs, he never got a chance to sit in the life guard station.

Looking at Amir Zaki‘s digitally manipulated and color-saturated photos of life guard towers in L.A., Fred came to mind.

Not only is no one there, no one could be there.

They are cool-school emblems of futility, a perfect match for Raymond Chandler’s view of swimming pools, a world away from David Hockney’s:

Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.

At James Harris Gallery through Feb. 20