Archives for January 2010

Calvin Coolidge

The business of America is business.

Andy Warhol

Making money is art and working is art and good
business is the best art.

Caleb Larsen

Pay my (art-related) credit card debt.

Tire Truck Buddha by NameTheRabbit via deviantART (Thanks, Paul O’Neil)

Gary Snyder, from Mother Earth: Her Whales

And Japan quibbles for words on
          what kind of  whales they can kill?

A once-great Buddhist nation
           dribbles methyl mercury
           like gonorrhea
                       in the sea.
…

Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
               the monkeys,
                  like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.

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.

Unite and make something! The irrepressible David Shrigley‘s video for Pringle jumpers on Pacific Standard Time.

Spiders decorate their webs.  

Guidelines for dealing with book (or gallery/museum) assistants, via Paul Constant.  

Art criticism for the stupid: From the London Times Online – Behind the smile Mona Lisa may have suffered from high cholesterol. It’s a painting, people. Plus, everybody knows Mona is made of coffee.

From Amy Goodwin

The nicest-possible-way-of-writing-a-negative-review award goes to Roberta Smith for her non-appreciation of Lynda Benglis’ recent efforts.

But all innovative, driven artists — of which Ms. Benglis is definitely one — have comfortable ruts they periodically fall into, or pitfalls they need to avoid. This show emphasizes hers, while giving notice that in all probability she will soon be working her way out of them.

Related: From NewsGrist – Ten most scathing reviews of last year. (Howard Halle, whoever that is, is dead wrong about Emily Jacir.)

The under-appreciated art blog award goes to John Perreault, whose Artopia is on ArtsJournal. Perreault’s last two entries, How the West Was Won: Fetish Finish and Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced Art? are among the best things I’ve read anywhere about anything in the new year. Perreault refuses to rush his posts. Once a week or less is all we get from him, but he makes every word count. His complexities are polished to a rare clarity.

Most-patronizing-post-from-an-art-blogger award goes to Tyler Green for his ruminations on Byron Kim. First Green says that Kim’s Synecdoche is not a great work of art. Green follows with the incredible opinion that the National Gallery of Art was right to acquire it anyway, in the interests of diversity.

Synecdoche, the Byron Kim installation acquired by the National Gallery of Art late last year, is
not a great work of art. It is closer to the end of every art
historical precedent it engages than it is to the beginning: abstract
painting, the use of the grid, monochrome painting,
abstraction-as-portraiture, minimalism, even its use of art world
insiders as models to help the work ‘get over,’ WWE-style….

Still, it is a worthwhile acquisition for the National Gallery of Art,
a mostly federally-funded institution that should be collecting works
of art that engage the most prominent American philosophical
conversations. Synecdoche, which Kim began in 1991 and to which
he has added ever since, is one of the better examples of American
artists engaging with with the 1980s and 1990s debate about
multiculturalism in America.

I don’t agree about the piece, but if I did, I wouldn’t praise the National Gallery for buying it. Green seems to be supporting affirmative action for unqualified art works. Few things could be more insulting to artists of color.

More Green: I admire Green and read his blog daily. Learn a lot. Appreciate his hustle and intelligence. But his arch attacks on Jerry Saltz are getting old. As Green reports, linking to an ARTINFO blurb, Saltz used what Green calls “a four-letter epithet” in a facebook post. It’s fuck, by the way. Saltz typed the word fuck. Big fucking deal.

Stefano Catalani is now director of curatorial affairs/artistic director of the Bellevue Arts Museum, a promotion he earned. Working in an impossible building in a crafts niche, he has made his shows matter.

Michael Brophy’s paintings have good lungs. They expand to fill a sky with room left over for the land, which is frequently dark save for moonlight on water.

During a residency last year in Reykjavik, Icleand, Gretchen
Bennett noticed that, as in Seattle, people in Reykjavik tend to hang
onto their holiday lights way past the occasion. Till sluggish, dazed spring approaches, colored light strings hang in doorways and along the edges of the windows.

Walking
home one night, she saw smashed beer bottles in the street, pieces of glass
held together by the adhesive of the label beneath them. Reflected party lights turned them into jewels. The stars she could see were
not in the sky but under her feet.

Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars, 2010 glass plastic bag

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams, early in the 20th century. Early in the 21st, the idea continues to have resonance.

Bennett is interested in decay and repetition as an affirmative position – an eroded X marks her spot. Like many in her generation, she offers an open-ended approach to materials instead of a specific style, in her case especially materials that have kicked around the edges of urban cultures, such as fake wood grain and skateboard decals. Her drawings in colored pencil are based on images that are past their technical prime and have been reproduced nearly to death, frayed and blurred instead of specific.

The Dull Flame of Desire, 2010, prisma color pencil on paper 22 x 30.5 inches

Ghost Dog 2010 prisma color pencil on paper 26 x 26 inches

Her current exhibit at Howard House takes its titled, Community World Theater, from a movie theater in Tacoma, Washington, that served as a pivotal site for dozens of punk concerts in 1987 to 1988. An earlier series of drawings treated Kurt Cobain as a kind of J.M.W. Turner weather-event – atmosphere overtaking concrete form.

In Iceland in a semi-permanent gray dark, she began to think of a culture whose recesses could be staged. In the dark, stage light is the sun. A generous use of it includes all the ordinarily lost moments. It can celebrate not just a performance but the moments after, when even a lost soul who may have fallen into an empty drum set gets up again and stumbles toward the folds of stage drapery, looking for an exit.

The Dull Flame of Desire 2010 felted panels, prismacolor pencils on paper, installation, dimensions variable

Her question is not, what is new? It’s what can be stitched together and born again.

Through Jan. 30.

From Evagee via This Isn’t Happiness

Benefit for Haiti’s Yele Fund. All prints 8 x 10 inches, $50.

Including, Jason Hanasik, Untitled, Two Lemons, 2008

Via

SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade took the title of his current exhibition, Leopards in the Temple, from a story by Franz Kafka that reads in its entirety:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the
sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it
can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

In his review, Ken Johnson praised what he took to be Meade’s refreshingly modest claims for the artists in his survey:

Fionn Meade, the show’s organizer and the SculptureCenter’s curator,
says in an essay that he is under no illusions about which kind of cat
he’s wrangling. The artists he has picked, he writes, “return to
distinct formal vocabularies and art historical trajectories,” and they
are intent on “borrowing and unsettling rather than wholesale attempts
at either remaking or deconstructing.” In other words, while working
with familiar elements of style they mix and match their sources of
inspiration in new but not shockingly novel ways.

Mr. Meade is describing the essence of contemporary academicism, and
while he puts a positive spin on this, it could be read as a
devastating critique. These are not the bestial vandals so beloved by
myth makers of the modern. It’s rare for a curator to assess his
artists in such honest terms, and in a sense Mr. Meade is operating in
the gap between curator and critic. At a time when curators too often
function more like smooth-talking hucksters than independent
intellectuals, that is good and refreshing.

Meade’s claims are only modest for those who still accept a modernist trajectory that peaks with destructive originals. Behind these tigers trail house-broken copycats, footnotes in someone else’s story.

But what if the artists in Meade’s show do not seek to despoil new frontiers but instead chose to acknowledge that the ground on which they stand is occupied?  What if they want to make art out of an old ceremony rather than create a new one? What if their aim is not to shock but to unify? What if, in other words, they are not academics of old struggles but pioneers in new harmonies, ones with roots in the chaos of old scores?

Installation view, Leopards in the Temple:

Meade comes from Seattle, where Ezra Pound’s injunction to “Make it new” matters less than E. M. Forster’s “Only connect.”

The artist statement of an exhibit at Tacoma’s now defunct Helm Gallery, Second Peoples, is worth quoting in full:

We have coined the name ‘second peoples’ to describe the people who
arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance,
after the traumatic event, after everything’s been said and done,
after, even, the end. We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are
too.

This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We
inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational
noise. Our corner of North America-these mountains, that timber, this
rich land-belonged to someone else. Our popular culture-those TV shows,
that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they’re cool-belonged
to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald
Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position.
How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened
before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in
our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in “Second Sex”, we think we
should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined
to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn
second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy,
presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We
think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught
activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures
created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position,
a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

Johnson again, about Meade’s show:

No one here, however, is likely to topple the current regime of art,
and in that respect these artists stand for the majority of
contemporary strivers. They are resourceful, alert and eager to please,
but are not wildly imaginative. Call them the mild ones.

Note the verb topple. Artists need not make war on their predecessors to qualify as major. Back in the 14th Century, Chaucer cast tributes behind him: “Out of old fields comes all the new corn.”