Archives for February 2010

Previous, much commented upon, post: Ryan Henry Ward gives Seattle a bad case of the cutes.

What made this post so objectionable to many appears to be my distaste for whimsy. Who could be against whimsy? I must be a monster. Possibly I needed more context. I associate the word, which comes from whim, with the kind of art that’s deliberately impersonating the drawings of children. It’s a step backwards to achieve an innocence not possible for adults.

No matter how technically inept, drawings from real children have a purity and grace. Fake children can no longer inhabit that experience. They can’t be what they once were, with chubby little fingers holding their crayons.

Certain folk artists draw in a style associated with childhood, but there’s a crucial difference in delivery. They’re serious. They have whittled away at their form, battered it down to a primal event instead of borrowing it from the five-year-olds in their lives.

For me, Ward is a prime offender in the we-won’t-grow-up art whimsy movement. His calcified cute clogs arteries. Even so, I don’t mind that he has a mural or two around Seattle. Had he done a few, I wouldn’t have said a word. But he’s big into volume, volume, volume. Fifty murals, 70 murals: He keeps changing the number. In a recent email, he said (contradicting an earlier one), that he has completed 48 public murals in Seattle and plans to do more.

What makes him think he’s entitled to that much public space? The business people who pay him don’t own the city. Everyone who lives here does. There are street artists/muralists I love, but I wouldn’t presume to suggest any one of them blanket Seattle with his wares. In public art, diversity is essential. There’s room for Ward, but not as much room as he insists on taking.

One more phrase to consider: ad hominem, or arguing through personal attack. You sweetness and light people appear to have hair-trigger tempers. A sizable number of you quickly devolve into playground name calling. No wonder you like artists who impersonate children.

From The Crying Game:

Do you want to pick up your teeth with broken fingers?

Jim Melchert, Flip, graphite on broken porcelain, via Moon River

Art (put-down-your-mice) Chantry has many objects he has chosen to accompany him through his life on earth. Some of them he’s showing off on facebook.

First up is a 78 rpm of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Moon”. Back in the early 1950’s , when 45 rpm records were first entering the market, those little 7″ plastic disks with the big holes were way cool. You wanted to impress your pals with your latest technology (sorta like the i-pad, ya know?) This person decided to crudely grind out the center of the 78 rpm (10″) record and then pop in a 45 adapter. That way he could actually fool his pals into thinking he was hip to the latest tech savvy universe!

The new Dale Chihuly grant is a hefty chunk of change: $25,000 for two Washington State artists in any discipline annually for three years, administered by Artist Trust. Chihuly and his wife Leslie gave $150,000, and Artist Trust turned it into a recession gap-grant with bells on.

Three years from now, we’ll all be coming up roses, right? Better a sizable check in tight times than the same amount extended over a longer period. I’ll drink to that.

The Chihulys could have limited the award to glass artists. I’m glad they didn’t. They could have limited it to visual artists. I wish they had, not because I begrudge dancers, writers, musicians and theater workers their chance at temporary financial security, but because artists in all disciplines benefit from what visual artists continue to provide, every year, at the Artist Trust Auction. That’s 23 years of giving away their work to support everybody’s work.

This year’s auction was a big success, says Artist Trust. It raised $325,000, $315,000, highest in AT history. The money earned by visual artists goes to fund “grants, resources and career training for artists in all disciplines throughout Washington State.”

The highest bid of the night was $5,000 for Alan Fulle‘s Freedom Space (23″ x 52″ oil and acrylic on canvas within epoxy resin from 2008). At the Traver Gallery, this piece lists at $7,500. The high-water bid was a bargain.

Fulle is underrated, but apparently not by those drinking champagne and waving bid paddles over their heads. Although he’s a dazzling and materially adventurous painter, he shows at a gallery known for glass. Its audience is a gated community, with little follow-through traffic on the street.

At any rate, congratulations to Artist Trust, and big thanks to the Chihulys.

I’d love to see an exhibit of New York street photography from Helen Levitt to Marsha Burns, in color and out loud, with lone figures unfolding themselves into that quintessentially urban landscape.

Levitt, image via

Burns:

With a banana.

Mapplethorpe image here. The update, by David B. Smith, below. (The Velvet Polyester, 2008)

They are illustrators. Hear them roar in numbers too big to ignore.

Illustrator militancy is relatively new. Formerly, the breed took its second-class status for granted. If illustrators were discussed, they were the ones talking. In the art context, nobody  gave them much thought. Illustrators were around (some good, some clever, most bland or annoying), illustrating things – advertisements, company announcements, greeting cards, t-shirts, comic strips.

Cartoonists proved the most unruly. Between R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, they battered the opposition into a puddle, becoming a rising tide carrying all (drawings of) boats.

The question now is not whether it’s illustration or art. It’s what kind of illustration it is, and what kind of art.

Friends of the Nib at Vermillion Gallery features the drawings and prints of 31 Seattle illustrators (mostly cartoonists) who  meet weekly “to chew the fat and scratch the
paper. “

As a group, they’re a wonder.

Take David Lasky: His ultimate graphic novel is one page, six panels. Lasky draws as if his pen swallowed a ball. All of his lines have bounce. What’s really distinctive is his writing. He channels Kafka by way of Donald Barthelme – pared to the bone, funny with a low-grade fever of the tragic.

Then there’s Kaia Chessen, busting out of the frame but with a feeling of heirloom. 

Nobody puts Ellen in the corner. For big, clean and sexually charged graphics, she can’t be beat.

Through March 4.

How do animals see? Depends on whether they’re predators with eyes front and center, or prey, with eyes on the sides of their heads for an inclusive span.

Paul Berger became interested in the visual world of prey animals after reading Temple Grandin, who redesigns slaughterhouses to take away the terror. According to Grandin, prey animals do not feel anxiety or regret, but they have a fast trigger on fear. When nothing is wrong, they are calm as Buddha, even when seconds from their death.

McDonald’s hired her not because the company is swell in every way but because calm animals die more quickly, more cleanly. Also, with her on the payroll, McDonald’s has something to say in its own defense when criticized by animal rights groups.

Back to Berger and his wide span. (PANORAMAS SERIES, 2008-2010) He offers something rare those whose vision is selective in its focus. In his photos, the world shifts, becomes elastic and enlarged beyond the frame with which we were born, the narrow frame that helps us zero in for the kill.

Berger:

 I have been exploring extended synthetic
panoramic imaging, wandering into a kind of “bovine vision” of visual
horizon grazing between 240 and 360 degrees. It is the camera vision of
choice for those who scan the horizon wide, eschewing the specificity
of the pointed gaze for the more generalized awareness of a uniformly
focused peripheral vision.

Technically, this series, as has been
the case with most “straight” photography in the past, at first appears
to be a seamless, straightforward transcription of the three
dimensional world. However, they are, in fact, the result of a highly
processed data stream. This stream begins with a sequence of seven to
ten wide-angle (24mm) individual photographs, taken with a digital
camera attached to a tripod on a head that allows for rotation about the
“nodal” point of the lens. The resulting images are merged, in
software, into either a cylindrical or spherical digital space. After
adjustments, a two-dimensional frame is imposed within this space (the
final “photograph”) and the result is exported back into a conventional
digital file.

Contrary to this post and possibly contrary to reality, unless she has a trust fund or a sugar daddy,a friend of Laura Castellanos (bunny artist) has a message of good cheer taped to her refrigerator:

Volume, volume volume. I feel for YouTube. Its empire is massive and hard to police. Should it take an anything-goes attitude, the government will step in. On the other hand, over-control incites outrage from the suppressed.

Cast in point. Fabulous video artist Amy Greenfield was kicked off the site for “violating community standards.” Whoa. Protest letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Electronic Frontier Foundation here.

Money quote:

For all of their pronouncements in favor of free speech, Google and other Internet intermediaries are fast becoming the new arbiters of morality – and setting the tone of what is acceptable and what is not. There is no First Amendment to protect our speech in such communities, but that is why it is much more important to get involved and express our outrage when artistic expression using a female body is booted off the site – or put in a special X-rated section – as pornographic and offensive.