Archives for January 2010

Jeff Antebi in Haiti before the earthquake:

I was in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, wandering at the edge
of a marketplace as the sun went down. Whole swaths of the city are
without electricity, government services or security. Things become
spectral, as areas heavily trafficked and lively by day transform into
deserted, nightmarish landscapes. I navigated for several miles using
distant bonfires like homing devices.

Cite Soleil, 8 x 10 inches

Antebi’s  photo-portrait of Haiti here. All proceeds from the sale of Cite Soleil go to Doctors Without Borders and OxFam, earmarked for Haiti. To purchase photo, email Wall Space Gallery at <mailto:gallery@wallspaceseattle.com>.

Note from Seattle writer Dean Patton Paton about his son, Jesse Hagopian, used with permission. (Donate to Mercy Corps here. For information on text donations, go here.)

Photo, Dean with Jesse at Jesse’s wedding

Some of you know this; some of you don’t: My son Jesse, his wife Sarah and their young son Miles went to Port au Prince, Haiti, last Saturday and were there when the earthquake devastated the country (Sarah was there to do HIV trainings, part of her work with the University of Washington).

Half of their hotel, the Hotel Creole, collapsed; the half they were staying in remained standing, and they are physically okay. Somewhat miraculously, Sarah had come home from work uncharacteristically early, five minutes before the quake hit, so they were all together.

In the hotel was a nurse, and because of this the Hotel Creole was turned into a kind of de facto hospital. For the past two days Jesse has been this man’s deputy, first going through the hotel to strip sheets off of the beds and tear them into strips; then breaking apart furniture to use as splints; finally doing what the nurse told him to do, resetting broken bones, splinting, applying tourniquets, trying to stop bleeding and cleaning wounds. We were all relieved to learn the hotel had a supply of rubber gloves for Jesse and the Nurse to use as they worked on the stream of patients. Yesterday, despite what seemed a complete blackout of telephone and Internet connections, Jesse managed to find some unexplainable iPhone pathway through Miami and was able to call several of us; he said everything was awful, there was no medicine, no gauze, no hydrogen peroxide, no ibuprofen.

“Everywhere people are screaming, crying,” he said. “People come up to me and say, ‘Doctor, please help my child,” and I say, ‘I’m not a doctor, I don’t speak Creole, and we don’t have any medicine. I can’t help you, I’m sorry.” He told a story of a man who managed to get out of his house, but his son remained trapped. After a day, he managed to dig out his son and he brought the boy, with a head injury and a bone poking out of his leg, to the hotel because he had heard a nurse was there doing what could be done. Jesse wrapped the boy with the torn sheets, to staunch the bleeding and do what he could to straighten the leg and clean up the young boy’s skull, “But then,” Jesse said, “he died. We couldn’t save him.”

[Read more…] about Haiti – a note from a friend

Artists come and go from galleries all the time. Usually, it’s the
former dropping the latter. Artists either get
better opportunities or they just can’t stand to work with their
dealers a minute longer.

Gallerists drop artists too, most
frequently because the artists prove unreliable. They miss exhibition
dates and leave the dealer hanging, sell their work on the side in
violation of an agreement or trash talk the dealer on a regular basis.
If a dealer is found chained to a radiator after an S&M session
that went badly, he won’t look kindly on his own artists spreading the
word.

Dealers may feel certain artists have failed to evolve. When Linda Farris
found herself in the position of representing too many artists whom she
felt had not delivered on their early promise, one of the top reasons
she closed her gallery was to avoid cleaning house. She loved all the
artists in her lineup but didn’t necessarily love what their work had
become.

Closing for that reason is rare. Also rare is for
dealers to drop an artist for sales reasons if they continue to
appreciate the product. Bruce Nauman sold badly until fairly recently.
A dealer who let him go due to a paltry economic return (and I don’t
know of one) would be covered in shame. If dealers think a particular
artist is top of the line, they hang in through the thin hoping to help
create the thick.

On the other hand, if the artist’s rise proves
meteoric, the loyal dealer might well be dumped in favor of one who couldn’t have cared less during the lean years. That’s a painful payoff, intolerable in other business
contexts, but gallerists are more than business people. They can never
be great if they keep both eyes on the bottom line.

Enter the
recession. Solid artists sell little or nothing. Trade that was once
brisk has slowed to a trickle. Unless dealers have a trust fund or
represent at least a couple of recession-proof cash cows, the price of
mounting shows they couldn’t have sold in flush times becomes more of a
mental burden.

Case in point: Seattle gallerist James Harris recently dropped Glenn Rudolph. In terms of Northwest art, it’s similar to a New York dealer dropping Nauman twenty years ago.

Rudolph is a poet of the post-apocalypse. He likes to photograph
bad news once the news value has faded and people are making the best
of their diminished circumstances. He favors those who live it up on
the margins of society, in a bizarre social club (the Duct Tape
Warriors in the Kent Valley), the artificial splendor of a suburban
housing development (Kent, again) and his own neighborhood in North
Seattle.

[Read more…] about Galleries look at their narrowing options

Via

DeLillo, from Pafko At The Wall:

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

Barnhart, at Ambach&Rice through Jan. 24.

Brodsky, from a 1996 essay in the New York Review of Books:

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time.

Taylor

Yuki Nakamura is interested in old, hand-blown electric lights. So is Chris Burden, Sheila Klein, Jim Hodges and Jeff Wall, among others. Because there is no more than a genetic hair’s difference between us and chimps, Terry Pratchett thinks electric lights are more interesting than stars. We swung down from the trees to cast our light against the dark.

Nakamura, Filament Drawing, porcelain, DVD projection, 2010. The dark bulb is stage set for the electronic drawing, a line that advances, coils and disappears to reemerge for another try – let there be thin, fragile lines of experimental effort.

Light Bubbles (porcelain, plexiglas) depends upon conditions in the room, either projecting rabbit ear shadows or pooling its darks at each bulb’s base. Her plexiglas bases evoke Robert Irwin‘s, but with more of a back story. Her bulbs are containers for the thing contained, our history from torch to gas to common glow.

Nakamura is a kind of landscape artist, interested more in emblems than places, in maps that explore the meaning of the destination.

At Howard House through Jan. 30.

From Best of:

(Cuban born painter) Juan Alonso
wants to help out in Haiti but like a lot of us, he isn’t in a position
to donate a big wad of cash. Instead, he’s donated a beautiful piece of
his art called Sent. You have until Friday at noon to bid on it. Currently, the high bid is $550. All money raised goes to MercyCorps. More information here.

Sent, 2005, color pencil on paper. 19″ x 14″ image / 33 ½” x 28 ½” framed

I want to give beauty its due, but I’m a sucker for the beast.

The beauty:

Dale Chihuly, glass ceiling, Victoria And Albert Museum

The beasts:

Auroa Robson, from discarded plastic bottles, via

Judy Pfaff, made from whatever’s at hand.

[Read more…] about Beauty and the beasts

If a writer inserts a couple of paragraphs written by someone else into an essay without attribution, the end result is not called a collage. If an artist does the equivalent, it is. Art is an omnivore. It will eat anything. The law calls the practice fair use, although the protection the term implies exists only on a case-by-case basis. Since the 1980s, the art world has called it appropriation. The practice predates the movement by a century: It’s hard to imagine Modernism without it.

Even so, Bill Eppridge‘s outrage is understandable. (Via C-Monster)

Eppridge, Barstow to Vegas Motorcycle Race, 1971

Seattle’s Deborah Faye Lawrence, The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, 2008

Undeniable, from Eppridge:

The artist used my work to make her collaged work look better.

Debatable:

I risked my life many times to make photographs — in this case I was
standing on the skid outside a helicopter at 500 feet. Seeing my work
stolen in this manner just flat-out offends me because the artist used
something that she didn’t earn or create for her own benefit.

That’s cowboy logic. It’s true that you can’t rope a steer from your desk, but you can make powerful art without breaking a sweat.

Back to undeniable: Great image, Mr. Eppridge.