Archives for February 2010

The oldest goal of sculpture is to be soul-catcher, not to mirror a surface but to find a pulse and praise it. Dan Webb finds that pulse on the surface. To the detritus of the world he brings his monumental ambition. A weed, a fly, a party favor; a prepackaged meal on a dinner tray, a person climbing the corporate ladder, a kid sharing a secret under a blanket, an anonymous set of armor banished to storage: What we no longer value or never valued, he redeems in the powerful mirror of his material abilities.

The depth of his work comes from its translations. A dandelion wilted and past its prime in the back yard is an annoyance, a reminder that there’s work to do or the yard in question is beyond work and past care. Let weeds flourish till the plot falls into other hands or is left to its own devices, eating a hole in the human hunger for order.

Webb’s weed rises to glory from a block of wood, fire burnt at its bottom with a pale, perfect tap root touching the floor. I saw this piece unfinished in the studio, as Webb was chiseling under the leaf rising on the left. “Stop,” I said, as I’d say to someone about to run out into traffic. I feared for the life of the thing.

Webb’s carving has a show-off quality. It’s a high wire act with no net, performed in front of an audience that is no longer sure such dazzling feats are worth watching. Isn’t excessive skill a trap for the unimaginative? When cameras can count every hair on your head, what is the point of verisimilitude?

WOODYLION, 2009
Carved Redwood
32 x 14 x 11 inches

The surface of the world is the world. Skill is a trap when it is excessive to the thing expressed. Webb lives in the precision he brings to bear on what is battered. It’s his signature. He’s breathing inside his homage to whatever is begotten without pleasure, born without care, and dies alone.

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Into that vast indifference, Webb asserts a form of recyling that he raises to the level of the  alchemical. His sculptures would mean nothing without the skill of his rendering. He didn’t attach the tap root to the bottom of the wood block and glue the carved weed to its top. Through the oldest process of sculptural subtraction, he found a spent weed inside a stump and let it out.


STONE FLY (FOR PETRUS), 2010
Carved gray marble
8.5 x 19 x 11 inches (Petrus is a mid-15th century painter famed for his ability to fool the eye, in this case, with a fly painted at the edge of his painting’s frame.)

DOUBLE KNOT, 2010
Carved gray marble
15 x 8 x 12 inches

SUCKED IN, 2010
Carved limestone
4 x 24.5 x 16 inches

Webb’s Stones and Flowers is at the Greg Kucera Gallery through March 27.

In response to a post about Dale and Leslie Chihuly giving Artist Trust $150,000 for two $25,000 grants to Washington State artists in any discipline annually for three years, Juan Alonso observed:

I know whenever I say anything regarding auctions I get a lot of folks who misunderstand my point. To be clear, I am a huge fan of Artist Trust, in fact, I am currently trying to create a scholarship fund for one of their programs, so do don’t get your undies in a bunch about this. It’s just an opinion.

So here goes: When I was on the PONCHO art acquisition committee, one of my suggestions was that all the proceeds from the visual art auction go to visual art organizations and that the other disciplines should do their own “donating for fundraisers” but my idea did not fly. As a visual artist, I would love to afford to go to the opera and the ballet and the symphony and I do want them all to thrive but I have little access to any of them. Any ballet dancer, opera singer of symphony musician can go to any gallery and some museums (at least on certain days) for free yet I don’t see any of these organizations (Ballet, Opera, Symphony, etc), individually or collectively, doing anything to benefit the visual arts.

The boundaries between disciplines are porous, and artists work freely across them. The essential thing about artists is that they are artists. Artist Trust embraces and supports all equally. But visual artists are most likely to create a product that can be sold. For that reason, they are the ones who support all others through the Artist Trust auction.

Hence, Alonso’s excellent point. It’s worth noting, however, that Leslie Chihuly is head of the Seattle Symphony’s board of directors. She is more likely to favor an all disciplines approach. A cynical version of the Golden Rule (S/he who makes the gold makes the rules) isn’t always true.

More Gardiner: (Thurberesque image from facebook)

It’s the male version of Louise Bourgeois’ femme masion, from 1947, who “shows herself at the very moment she thinks she’s hiding.” (via)

There’s also the far more elaborate piece by Janine Antoni, One Another, from 2008.

From his Seattle Subtext:

She remembers the exact moment she figured out subtraction, sitting on the small ledge dividing the backyard into lawn and concrete, staring at the paper in her hand and the numbers on it, thinking of subtraction as another kind of addition and both as ways of counting.

Berger, Mathematics #57, 1976

In Seattle, it’s a problem. First, they write about art in their own publication, refusing to let critics interested in participating do so. Second, they’re curating their own shows. What do they think critics and curators are, chopped liver? (Prince Charles is also beset by upstarts, story here. When will it all end?)

Latest outrage: Parallel Universe, curated by artists Francisco Guerrero and Joseph Park at Grey Gallery.

It’s the best group show in the city. The idea came from a deep familiarity with artists’ studios. Guerrero and Park started thinking about what they saw in studio corners, work that represents paths not taken that still could be: ideas abandoned, on hold or too recent to represent anything other than a stray idea.

Claude Zervas shows these lights at the James Harris Gallery. At Grey are lights not found at James Harris, gleaming out of the eye sockets of chainsaw bears.

Jeffry Mitchell‘s touch is a miracle of deft. When he draws, he draws silks in the air. Not this time.

Joseph Park is not a black velvet painter, except when he is.

What is this twerpy little piece by the ever-elegant Leo Saul Berk, something like a diseased mouth and something like a doughnut? Titled Cloud Flower, it’s nothing like a cloud. More like a drain with tea leaves matted around its rim.

Dan Webb is not a cartoonist.

Claire Cowie finishes what she starts.

Dawn Cerny does not do abstract art.

I don’t know Josepf Vascovitz‘s work well enough to know what is and is not his pervue, but these drawings are splendid, with a golden yet mucky glow. (I love the reader, reading water, and Adam with Eve, bulky as the first couple must have been, so recently associated with apes.)

Also scoring in Parallel Universe: Gretchen Bennett, Eric Elliott, Harrell Fletcher, Francisco Guerrero, Alfred Harris, Victoria Haven, Jenny Heishman, Nicholas Nyland, Lead Pencil Studio and Joey Veltkamp.
Through April 2.

Gallery Hours: 4pm – 2am everyday, by appointment and by chance.

In 1969, when the National Guard occupied Berkeley, California, I was living in an apartment just north of campus. Every 20 minutes helicopters would pass overhead, like heavy-metal clockwork. Looking at Zack
Schrock‘s photo brought that time back.

Living under helicopter rotation is not good for the nervous system. I moved. What about those who can’t move, who grow up in American neighborhoods that are under regular overhead  surveillance?

The anti-war movement in the 1960s gave participants (and bystanders, trying to get out of the way) an experience impoverished people of color continue to endure as a matter of course – the chance to be under served and over policed.

From Paul Beatty’s 1997 novel, The White Boy Shuffle:

I turned onto Whitworth Avenue and suddenly found myself engulfed in a blinding waterfall of light. Instinctively, my hands shot above my head as I waited for the standard drill–“Face down on the ground, hands behind your head, ankles crossed. Move!” But no instructions were forthcoming. I waited a minute or two and looked for a police cruiser; nothing. No beat cops, only the helicopter hovering overhead and me standing in a fifty-foot circle of light, becoming more appreciative of the moon.

Beatty’s novel inspired Kori Newkirk‘s mural in Freestyle. Made of black pomade applied to a white wall, Newkirk’s rendition of the species ghetto bird smelled like hair product. Its title, All Over, links it to Jackson Pollock, even though the latter’s fields fail to suggest a similar soundtrack.

After 9/11, of course, the entire country became suspicious of what might come from the sky.

Euan Macdonald, “Untitled, (three falling pianos), 2006, triptych, gouache on paper, 101×76 each (Image via)

Macdonald’s A Little Ramble is at Western Bridge through April 17.

This post is dedicated to everybody who participated in this performance at Western Bridge.

Cry for help 2009 pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, blood (Via)

Jen T. Mills

Anne Hirondelle

 Via

A container is not the thing contained. It’s a prop instead of an essential, except in the work of Brooklyn’s Jennie C. Jones.

Jones:

My practice is both a comment on and a continuum of the conceptual ideology of jazz, an honoring of the deep radical legacy of its experimentation, of hybrid modernist forms, of wit, of riff — the turning of a phrase onto itself.

Her sculptures and drawings are improvisations on the cassette tape, transistor radio, boom box, Walkman, from intimate long play to the impersonal present. In her hands, old style records with their pop and fizz beat the immaculate conception of new style downloads. You can’t hold a download in your hands. Downloads move from computer to ear bud without taking your body into account, your care or disregard, how you treat your cultural legacy.

Formally, her work is subtle, with a wit that does not translate online. There, her work becomes one thing. In person, it’s myriad-minded.

Top 100 jazz Lps 1969-79, (2010)
Paper, cassette cases, plywood, album list presented as title card.
18 x 24 x 3 in.

Top 100 jazz Lp’s 1969-79
has a one-two punch. First, it’s a primary structure – Donald Judd-like with a backbeat of the domestic. A second look delivers the literal. It’s a homage to cassette tapes, a mimicking of their form for abstract effect. Online, the piece looks like a photo of an industrial kind of window shutter.

Holland Cotter called Jones’ installation, Homage to an Unknown Suburban Black Girl, one of the highlights of Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001.

Cotter:

Based on a found snapshot of a young black girl sitting in what looks like a suburban interior, the piece focused on how two different strands of African-American history coexist in a single picture.
One history is of assimilation, implied by the middle-class setting. The other, suggested by the girl’s Afro hairstyle, is of Black Power politics, which arose in response to a racism that integration alone could not change. In short, in Ms. Jones’s reading, the photograph was a document of people who remained, consciously or not, tolerated guests in the house — American culture — that they had helped to build.

In the same review, he described Jones’ sculptural foray into Bebop at Artists Space as “even subtler.”

Cotter:

This time the document she presents is aural: the sound of Charlie Parker’s music as informally recorded by another saxophonist, Dean Benedetti, who was obsessed with Parker’s life and art. The tapes surfaced in 1988 and were regarded as treasured relics despite their poorly recorded and distorted sound.
In the gallery, an edited version of the recordings plays from two large speakers, and small collage-drawings by Ms. Jones hang on the wall. At first glance, the drawings are classic Modernist-style abstractions composed of squares and rectangles. But wirelike black ink lines that emerge from the geometric forms turn them into something else: clusters of tiny microphones or speakers.
Positioned around the room, they seem to be at once recording and projecting Parker’s music, music that is, Ms. Jones seems to suggest, not a distorted ghost from the past or the obscure object of someone’s desire, but the very sound of Modernism itself, loud, clear and everywhere.

Common objects she burnishes into relics, like slivers of the True Cross:

Blanks (45, LP and cassette liner notes), (2007)
Hand-brushed aluminum Artist Proofs.
To be editioned in stainless steel with an additional 8-track sleeve.

What is the shape of musical memory?

from Blank series, 2009-10, collage and ink on paper

To March 27 at Lawrimore Project.