Archives for January 2010

Russell Crotty

Patrick Kelley

Time for a positive note. As Jeffrey Mitchell, both artist and bear, likes to say, “Two paws up.”

Here’s Seattle novelist Jonathan Evison on an artist’s life, via Harold Hollingsworth. They both identify with the Charlie Kaufman line from Adaptation, “You are what you love, not what loves you.”

 
Hollingsworth in 1967:

He still wears that hat or one suspiciously like it. What he does today, image via.

From Paul Campos, via Paul O’Neil

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one
basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It
lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might
last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably
score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate
victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the
basket.

Our national government and almost all of the
establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be
called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;

(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

Heide Hinrichs, from The Expected Obedience of Your Thoughts

Campos continued:

The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or
syndicated columnist can’t really imagine not being able to afford to
take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but
he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight
that’s blown out of the sky. And while it’s true the risk he faces of
suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are
for a poor person, literally zero.

Kris Martin, Mandi VIII (Note the absence of the snakes, and yet the figures writhe.)

Campos:

Terrorball, then, is an
elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face – after all,
it’s certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year,
and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by
terrorism — but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic
reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves
the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting
the fear of terrorism.

And now this, via:

U.S. President Barack Obama has announced he would suspend the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners to Yemen, where an Al Qaeda-linked group is said to have planned a failed attack on a U.S. airliner.
Around half the 198 remaining Guantánamo prisoners are Yemeni nationals and, according to the latest data available, less than 40 have already been cleared for release.
In a statement, the Center for Constitutional Rights said: “Dozens of men from Yemen who have been cleared for release after extensive [government] scrutiny are about to be left in limbo once more due to politics, not facts. Halting [their] repatriation is unconscionable.”

In other words, dozens of Yemeni men are going to continue their prison stay not because of what they have done but because there is a threat that someone in their number might do something in the future, inflamed, no doubt, by being detained by us without trial and tortured for years. 

Lacking evidence to bring them to trial, we must release them, no matter how unsavory their future actions. If we imprison people for crimes they may commit, we have become what we fear. This is not what “Yes We Can” was supposed to mean.

Look around the world baby it can’t be denied
Why are we always on the wrong side. (via)

Selma Waldman

Leon Golub

Nancy Spero

Michael Spafford

Jack Daws

From two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Schneider on his blog, Cold Truth, a meal to kick off the tens, as in, 2010.

For the appetizer: San Antonio Bay oysters polluted with Noroviruses. For the main course: grilled beef infected with E. coli from contaminated tenderizing needles; chicken with Campylobacter or imported ham with Listeria monocytogenes. Then there’s a side dish of stuffing loaded with salmonella-contaminated hazelnuts. And for those watching their weight: a popular nutritional drink fouled with the food poison Bacillus cereus.

Even the family pet wasn’t forgotten. Its pigs ears and beef hooves were laced with salmonella.
All those item were recalled in December by the federal government or were the subjects of warnings by food safety experts.

And 2010 isn’t shaping up to set a safer table, according to some of the country’s leading food safety experts. (more)

Carrie Schneider

Happy New Year!

Jen Graves on Do-Ho Suh:

Some/One has been up so long at SAM, and in such a prominent way, that its impact has faded for me. But it is a majestic work, and by a terrific artist; I love his silken architectures, houses and structures that hang in the air, memories. (more)

Made of 100,000 dog tags that sweep the floor to rise to
a hero’s armor, Some/One is a salute to the soldiers whose deaths become a monument to the man in charge. Seen from the front, the gown is an empty
cavity whose inside is covered in cheap reflective material, giving
viewers the dubious honor of seeing themselves as the One in the title surrounded by  the Some.

There are music critics who call for a moratorium on Mozart. They’ve had enough, forgetting that for each generation, he is new, and new to those who know him already as they hear him again at different stages of their lives. But music critics are in concert halls all the time. The music holds up, but they wear down.

At least music critics are forced to sit in their seats and listen. Art critics, hurrying from gallery to gallery, museum to museum, respond to art that stops them in their tracks, art that, in Peter Brooks’ phrase, pulls them up by their own hair and turns them inside out. The next time they see that piece, they want the same high, the flush of the first time.

There’s the pleasure of encountering a significant form and the joy of its reverberations, figuring out its relationships and meanings in its context.

Tim Appelo:

Sometimes the only cure for boredom is to look harder.

Nice essay by Appelo, but his solution is wide of the mark. The problem is not lack of work.  Critics seeking to reengage their original reactions have already done the work. The thrill of that effort is gone. They’ve moved from being on a hot date to being with an old friend. The bedrock of any critic’s experience is old friends. As Graves is brave enough to note, it can be difficult to keep old friends from boring us.

Rare chance to see Dan Graham’s film, Rock My Religion from 1984. According to Graham, rock predates Chuck Berry to take root in America with the Shakers.

At the Henry, Jan. 15, 7-8:15 p.m. Preview below.

E.V. Day‘s Cherry Bomb Vortex is a party dress having (bad speller alert) an organism orgasm.

Turns out, that’s what brain neurons look like at any given moment. (From Wired, via)

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

People who want to protect American lives by means of a war on terror aren’t usually the same people who want to protect Americans with health insurance, education, decent jobs, pollution controls, bank regulation, safety nets and social justice.

Seattle painter Ken Kelly needed emergency brain surgery, which he was lucky enough to obtain. Now he has the bill, which is large. He is uninsured.

Were he a European, his friends could limit their involvement to a card, an email, a texted well-wish, a hug or a flower or two. Because he’s an American, they need to do more. In an event that is surely repeated for other artists many times around the country, Kelly’s friends are organizing a fund-raising art auction for him on Jan. 23, 7 p.m. at Lemon Lime Studio, 411 Yale Ave. N., two blocks north of REI.

(1/7 Update from Kelly: “As you can see, the brain surgery caused complications…”)

[Read more…] about Uninsured artist – the usual story

He opens Jan. 21 at Carmichael Gallery.

Nobody’s perfect, especially list makers. Half way in, they’re looking at the finish line. Which is to say, mistakes were made. This post, Opening Thursday Night in Seattle, needed to include Lawrimore Project. There is never a good reason to leave out Lawrimore Project, which is surely one of the West Coast’s top galleries.

Opening at LP Thursday night, 6-9, are Caleb Larsen‘s Everything All of the Time Right Now plus Wet And Leatherhard, a group exhibit focused on ceramics curated by Susie J. Lee. The latter features Sterling Ruby, Jim Melchert, Kristen Morgin, Wynne Greenwood, Ben Waterman, Meiro Koizumi, Doug Jeck and Tim Roda.

From Larsen, the $10,000 sculpture, in progress. It accepts your dollar bills and gives you nothing back.