Archives for February 2010

The milky light suggests cataracts on the lens. (Via)

The cartoonist Gahan Wilson will be at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Dec. Feb.13, 6-9 p.m., to celebrate the publication of GAHAN WILSON: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons with an exhibition of his originals and a book signing.

Fantagraphics gallery director Larry Reid adds:

Also on display on February 13 for one night only is a recently completed sculpted portrait of R. Crumb by Seattle artist Mike Leavitt. Commissioned for a private out-of-state collection, this is only opportunity to view the fully articulated wood carved figure – the latest addition to Leavitt’s ongoing Art Army series.

The reception on the 13th coincides with the Georgetown Second Saturday Art Attack, featuring visual and performing arts throughout the neighborhood.

When I noticed that the Seattle Art Museum is running a Steve McQueen festival, I was thrilled. After winding my way through its Web site to get to film programs, I realized SAM is hosting the wrong Steve McQueen.

The wrong Steve McQueen: (image via)

The right Steve McQueen: (image via) Profile here.

Of course people want to see the wrong Steve McQueen. I like him too. But SAM is an art museum. Wouldn’t it be great if visitors could go there to see at least the right McQueen’s shorter films from a library of video/film artists available for screening by appointment?  I’d like to see Bear (1993), Drumroll (1998) and Deadpan (1999), the last being homage to Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. Deadpan was at Western Bridge the Henry a few years ago. Be nice to see it again.

The Northwest Film Forum screens a fair sampling of films and videos that are art straight up. Last April it featured McQueen’s Hunger, about Bobby Sands. At the time, I couldn’t force myself to go. Having lost my job a month earlier, I was trying to hang out on the sunny side of the street. I’d love to see it now, and where is it?

The theoretical advantage of film & video is that anyone can see it anywhere. Alas, that is far from the case. In the meantime, SAM is screening the Steve McQueen who is already ubiquitous. Something wrong here.

Rush, Fox News and its zany all recall Father Charles Coughlin, anti-Semitic radio priest of the 1930s. While today’s version is certainly appalling,  none of them go as far as Coughlin, who sided with Hitler right up until FDR managed to talk the American Catholic Church into ordering him off the air.

Here’s the big difference. Coughlin appealed to those who had nothing and wanted someone to blame. Fox appeals to the well-fed.

Maynard Dixon’s Forgotten Man from 1934 (image via) is not a portrait of a Glenn Beck supporter.

Tebaggers aren’t worried about scabs.

Dixon, Scabs (image via)

Nor are they likely to break factory windows. Their goal is to prevent a just and multicultural America from emerging. Since the last election, they have managed to convince a growing number of the disenfranchised to join them. The phenomenon makes the violent strikers of the 1930s look like sages. They at least knew who was on their side and who wasn’t.

Vachel Lindsay

FACTORY windows are always broken. 
Somebody's always throwing bricks, 
Somebody's always heaving cinders, 
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Other windows are let alone. 
No one throws through the chapel-window 
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Something or other is going wrong. 
Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark. 
End of factory-window song.

From Emily Pothast of Translinguistic Other:

I’m writing to enlist some help drawing attention to a silent auction to help a Seattle business owner from Haiti (David Pierre-Louis of Lucid Jazz Lounge in the University District) provide direct assistance to the survivors of the earthquake in his old community. The deadline for dropping off work with coordinator Leilani Lehman (lani.lehman@gmail.com) is this Sunday, February 7. Participating artists include Allison Manch, Gala Bent, Celeste Cooning and myself.

Pothast, L’Origine du Monde, college/drawing, 6 x 6 inches

You can relegate it to TV.

Donna Stack

Princess and the Pea (the pea), Down feather brocade Asian floor pillows, monitor and video. The video is looped to display a single pea as it slowly dries out and becomes plump again.

Or wrap it in a rug.

Fred Muram, Rug

You can banish it to the back pasture in your mind.

Grant Barnhart, Way of the Warrior

You can set it on fire…

Lauren Grossman, The Pentecost

Or turn it into a joke.

Grossman again. Drunkard

You can wipe your personal slate clean.

Ingrid Lahti

If all else fails, you can praise it.

After the frozen streets of Seattle’s snow storm of 2008, the city promised to use salt for traction in the future. Forget the health of the Sound and keep the traffic moving. Winter is at present so mild people are walking around without coats, but if big weather hits again, Candy Chang in Helsinki has a suggestion: Yes to pebbles, not to salt.

Chang:

After Helsinki’s first big snow, the City sprinkles pebbles on the sidewalks to give pedestrians grip over the ice. How many pounds or kilograms of pebbles they must have, I’m not sure, but they continue to add more after each snowfall until the Spring (who am I kidding, Summer) when they sweep it, store it, and use it again next year. This means no contamination of the groundwater. This also means that many winter walks involve you, your thoughts, and one tiny pebble caught in your shoe.

 Short, dark month, but the art is good.

Opening Wednesday night in Bellevue, 6-9 p.m.

Open Satellite launches a biennial of architectural model making titled Supermodel, featuring students and Allied Works Architecture, AWA image below. (Clothespins are finally getting the respect they deserve.)

Opening Thursday (10 a.m.-2 p.m.) at Wright Space, 407 Dexter Ave. N.

BIG IS BETTER (or so some claim) Large-scale paintings from the Virginia and Bagley Wright collection, 1960s-1980s, featuring Jennifer Bartlett, Al Held, Al
Jensen, Donald Judd, Robert Longo, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, Susan
Rothenberg, Julian Schnabel and Frank Stella.

Opening Thursday night in Pioneer Square, 6-8 p.m.

The late Mary Henry at Howard House – abstraction as echo chamber.

Gaylen Hansen at Linda Hodges. These ducks matter.

Mandy Greer at Ohge Ltd – If a little is good, more is so much better.

Fertilizing Utopias at Soil, with Claire Johnson’s tree portraits in the back space. In Fertilizing Utopias, Vaughn Bell:

Jason Hirata at James Harris (pigment mixed with sweat, image in previous post). Also at Harris, Alexander Kroll – small scale, intimate gestures.

[Read more…] about Opening February in Seattle

From the Seattle Art Museum:

SAM presents three films that spotlight the comic
brilliance of Richard Pryor (1940-2005). Tickets for all three films:
nonmembers $20, SAM members $17. Tickets for individual films: $7.

February 5
Silver Streak
(Arthur Hiller, 1976). Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh, Patrick McGoohan, Scatman Crothers. In 35 mm, color, 113 min.
In this Hitchcock-style comic thriller Silver Streak, Pryor tries to teach uptight businessman Gene Wilder how to “move like a black man.”

Whatever humor Silver Streak had in 1976 has leeched away in time. It was never more than the race version of Some Like It Hot, a better movie by light years.

February 12

Blue Collar
(Paul Schrader, 1978). Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, Ed Begley Jr. In 35 mm, color, 114 min.
Blue Collar features Pryor’s best acting performance as a fed-up auto worker who helps rob his bosses.

 

Great movie, but it has nothing to do with Pryor’s comedy. It’s a crime story, and he burns through it.

February 19

Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip
(Joe Layton, 1982). Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. In 35 mm, color, 82 min. Rated R for language.
Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip gives us Pryor’s artistry as a stand-up comic as he transmutes personal problems into improvisational narratives that groove like jazz riffs.

If you’re looking for the comic brilliance, go to this one.

On The Bedpost Over Night?

It hasn’t on Hannah Wilke. (image via)
 
Or in Dan Winters’ photo, Chewing Gum on Theater Seats, Electra, Texas, March 27, 1995, archival pigment print, (image via)

Or in Simone Decker’s melting Medievalism, Chewing in Venice.

More Decker:

Ben Wilson paints the pieces ground into the pavement. (image via)

Finally, in Seattle, The Gum Wall, a collective project. (image via)

All these people would be in big trouble in Singapore.