Archives for February 2010

Beginning in the diverse field of Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, the influence of comic strips on figurative artists became easy to track. Abstraction is different. Elizabeth Murray pioneered, but few followed.

They’re following now. These artists favor curved over straight lines, rebounds over splats. They seek the painterly sweet spot, a place where the ball bounces without bothering to articulate a ball. They infuse into their colored grounds the comic spirit of up and at ’em.

Karin Davie (her Web site here)

Davie is so crucial I’m going to reproduce her twice. If her paintings were particle physicists, they’d pop gum at the podium.

Claude Zervas – comic abstraction imitating a flower.

Darren Waterston – sci-fi spiritualism meets Chinese landscape painting merged with George Herriman to beget gorgeous goo.

Susan Dory: Comparing her to mid-20th century Color Field figure such as Morris Louis is useful. His transparent, overlapping mounds of color are art in art about art. Hers, less transparent, have roots in thought bubbles, Internet tubes and tunnels made by moles planning to surface in Elmer Fudd’s garden.

Omar Chacon – It’s raining in Toon Town
More Chacon, detail:

Mary Heilmann – life in a comic strip highrise
Harold Hollingsworth – When comic weather takes a dark turn, forked tongues serve as rain.

Aaron Bagley – up, up and away

Default network cognition:

It’s an
interconnected and anatomically
defined brain system that preferentially activates when individuals
focus on internal tasks such as daydreaming, envisioning the future,
retrieving memories, and gauging others’ perspectives….Its subsystems
include part of the medial temporal lobe for memory, part of the medial
prefrontal cortex for mental simulations, and the posterior cingulate
cortex for integration, along with the adjacent precuneus and the
medial, lateral and inferior parietal cortex….The default network has
been hypothesized to generate spontaneous thoughts during mind-wandering
and believed to be an essential component of creativity. (more)

Vancouver
B.C.’s Isabelle
Pauwels is the first winner of the Brink
Award. Administered by the Henry Gallery, the Brink was conceived and funded by Seattle collectors/art
patrons
John and Shari Behnke. It’s intended to offer encouragement to a Northwest artist who might be poised at the beginning of a substantial career. Besides the honor of it all, winners get $12,5000 and a solo exhibition at the Henry. Pauwels’ installation is now on view and titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/ The complete ordered field.

The title itself is unbelievable. If hers is an ordered field, chaos has competition. Her work appears tossed off – notebook entries, not novels. Instead of dipping into her subject matter – reality TV, talk shows, candid snapshots, family films and cultural documentaries – she lets it flow around her. Should she fashion a figure, it will have no spine. The viewer who is looking for a narrative thread can find it, but probably not without cue cards, otherwise known as background information.

Pauwels:

My
work attempts to interrupt the audience’s familiar reading of a genre in
order to alter its expectations of what content should do, and what its
reaction should be.

Born in Belgium herself, Pauwels’ grandparents were part of the last generation of that country’s colonials.

A little history:

Belgium itself had only been independent since 1830, prior to that it was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. By the time independent Belgium might have been in a position to consider an overseas empire, major imperial powers
already had the most economically promising territories for colonisation within their spheres of influence. Leopold II tried to interest his government in establishing colonies but it lacked the resources to develop the candidate territories and turned down his plans.
Leopold II exploited the Congo for its natural rubber which was starting to become a valuable commodity. His regime in the Congo operated as a forced labour colony, with murder and mutilation as punishment for villagers who did not collect and supply the rubber quota they were given. It is estimated that millions of Congolese died during this time, although many of these could be attributed to the introduction of new diseases. (more)

History, of course, is that nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is unable to awake. Joseph Beuys confronted his Nazi past with personal myth. Unlike Beuys, Pauwels was not a direct participant in a time notable for its horror. Neither were her grandparents. They were post Leopold II – paternalists, not murderers. They existed in a still poisonous aftermath, and she was born long after that. If she doesn’t bring it up her connection to the colonial past, nobody else will.

Her touch is so light, her subject is barely there. The gallery includes notes and fragments of notes, a grass hut with a flickering film inside, another stuttering film and other detritus. She can be unexpectedly funny. A series of postcards framed blank-side out feature only a line drawn as a cross, meant to separate the space between address and message. These crosses become a series of backs – victims of colonialism lined up and disappeared on postcards no one sent. 

Salman
Rushdie, from The Moor’s Last Sigh:

The
trouble with the English is their history happened overseas, so
they don’t know what it means.

My first encounter with this installation triggered  an instinctive and stubborn hostility. Her work struck me as glib, coded in-group and embedded with a vast sense of its own entitled worth (how blind and ignorant be our detractors).  By the second and third visit, however, I began to lose faith in my reaction. I relaxed a little inside the mental default mode of her fragile vessel.

Instead of purposefully seeking connections, I disengaged, slipping out of gear to see where viewer passivity might get me. In the end I got a kind of acceptance, an admiration for her truth to materials.  She promised no greater revelations. How close can we get to her grandparents? How close can we get to our own? For most of us, there’s nothing left besides romanticized anecdotes, a few photos, a letter or two; maybe a suit, a hat or a wedding ring. If her film stutters in its projection, so does memory’s.

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in
any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some
from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of
slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear,
learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et
decor” ..

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies,
then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home
to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and
liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never
before.
Young blood and high blood 
Fair
cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness
as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias,
trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.


V.

There
died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone
in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Back to the Brink Award: The selection committee included Henry director
Sylvia Wolf and
curators Elizabeth Brown and Sara
Krajewski; Seattle artist Joe Park; Portland artist Harrell Fletcher;
Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery director, Christina Ritchie; and
the Behnkes. 

Pauwels continues through May 9.

Blacks them out.

Austin Kleon, Creativity is Subtraction (via)

Walker Evans – Alabama Farm Interior (Fields Family Cabin), 1936, from Now
Let Us Praise Famous Men

Stefan Steins

IMAGE DELETED ON REQUEST OF ARTIST

From Seattle’s Lucas Deon Spivey:

Remember those photos you took of your friends pretending to be the wife
and husband from American Gothic?  Or the one where you
imitated Edvard Munch’s The Scream?  Now we have a name and a website
for that – it’s called art bombing and you can post them at And Now That’s
Art.

Below, a person with a bagel next to Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun, 1969, in front of the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Not only do they move mountains, they are mountains. Below, five ways to praise the powerful.

1. Assert it. (Carol Adelman, Self-Portrait)

2. Remember it. (Virginia Ivanicki)

3. Threaten it. (Jennifer Campbell)

4. Locate it  (Anne Mathern)

5. Acknowledge it. (Jennifer Zwick)

The stately spiderwebs in the corners of Miss Havisham’s mansion are evidence of industry. Miss Havisham’s decay allowed fictional insects to work unhindered, their nets and clumps as intricate as any artifice of eternity.

Mandy Greer crocheted the weedy banks of a urban river and floated them high in the trees. Filtered through forest light, her webbing became a kind of stained glass even as insects were eating it away.

From last summer’s performance, Mater Matrix Mother and Medium, Greer constructed her current exhibit of performance artifacts at Ohge Ltd. Gallery, obscurely titled Zuster Sweostor Systir, it’s a crocheted installation that overwhelms a dresser’s dummy and runs up a wall, along with photos, a documentary film, paper quilts and sculptures made of sewn leaves.

It’s hard to collaborate with nature when nature has the home field advantage, out in the stage-set semi-wilds of a park, and even harder to assemble fragments from that engagement into an exhibit inside a small gallery.

Greer breezed through both challenges. Born too late to participate in the back-to-the-land communes that sprang up across Europe and the Americas in the late 1960s, Greer embodies the spirit of that time as an aesthetic but not just an aesthetic. She’s a mother-earth hippie, the sort of person who has become a sitcom figure of fun. The ideas her work espouses cue the laugh track in our heads, but her work shakes off cynical reactions like a dog bounding back with a stick shakes off the sea.

Nature was not her only collaborator.  She made the film that features performances of Zoe Scofield and Morgan Henderson with Ian Lucero; the photos with Jennifer Zwick (performance photos by Juniper Shuey), and sculptures with her husband Paul Margolis and her son Hazel.

Greer:

 During my six weeks of residency at Camp Long in Seattle, spending long hours crocheting a fabricated river into the trees, I spent a great deal of time in quiet, face pressed to bark, watching ants travel, ducks tend to ducklings and watching small changes take place every day in my pond. A giant Barred Owl watched me, and it all felt very viscerally wild. But in between the quiet was the blast of horns from ships, a low hum of cars on the interstate and the weekly visit of the grounds keep with a leaf blower.

 This forest, like most in Seattle — save for a few trees in Seward Park, has nothing to do with the deep mystery of the forest that was once here. It is fabricated, tended, groomed, minded, the old pond filled with a hose when it gets too low. An early photograph in the lodge shows the landscape barren, stripped of its organic past.

 Zoe Scofield, on an early site visit, astutely observed how like a stage set it all was, and we intended to draw that out. The theatricality of the park is like that of a 18th-century folly, a ruin, at once referencing a romantic vision of nature as well as the human longing to experience something more sublime. I felt something of that sublime, following that great owl that watched me midday, I went off trail until I stood below it. And when its head glided around so that it could glare at me, warn me, I felt a jolt of instinct or electricity.

 In the fabricated, tiny forests we tend, there is still buried the pull the human animal has always felt, to go back. As the summer came to ending, and I cut down the river, folded it up, I came back to my site over and over again as the forest turned to fall. With my son, I sifted for skeletal leaves on my hands and knees, just as we had sifted through dead leaves at the bottom of the pond looking for salamander egg sacks, finding the perfect lacy forms like Scandinavian lace discarded after a flood. I wanted to sew the forest together into a blanket, organize it all, to prepare for the winter, the leaves the same color as my hair, everything going red to brown.

We found nurse logs feeding Turkey Tail fungus like crocheted ruffles, and orange mushrooms under which we buried a mouse. On our hands and knees, it wasn’t urban recreation, but fairy tale. I collected my hair and Hazel’s hair, had it spun into yarn, and we each took on our roles in a landscape both out of our reach and right there with us, as organic as it is artificial.

Note: In the original draft,  Miss Havisham was mistyped as Havishman.

Art is subtle, even when it’s crude, but context is crude, even when
it’s subtle. It’s a constructed narrative that places art in a
tradition.

Jasper
Johns:

Publicly a work becomes not just intention,
but the way it is used. If an artist makes something – or if you make
chewing gum and everybody ends up using it as glue, whoever made it is
given the responsibility of making glue, even if what he really intends
is chewing gum. You can’t control that kind of thing. (more)

Gum or glue: Given
that any number of elements can be used to define,
including but not limited to peer association, psychological projection,
philosophical inquiry and product similarity at a particular time and
place, those elements can give way to others, heretofore not
thought of, that could help artists emerge from whatever hole
they’ve been forced into.

The words that surround an artist’s practice are a
key, a code, a misdirection or a muffling device. What’s true of
criticism is true of the labels employed in criticism as well as marketing. What matters
most? Location, location, location.  

I’m thinking of Ken
Johnson’s review
of the Outsider Art Fair in New York. Who is or isn’t an outsider is
hard to define, which means the category is wide open. An artist going
nowhere fast might get there faster should he or she be placed in the
outsider context. Getting there is not the point for outsider artists. Because they are never out of date, they need no destination. Because they don’t register in
the play of current aesthetics, they are better served in the outsider’s ever-present,
never-changing now.

For others, a less radical change in conceptual geography might do the trick.

Why can’t, for instance, Dale Chihuly‘s more madcap ventures
be grouped thematically with the exuberantly lustful? Critics are only as good as their sales pitch. Assume for a moment that a critic exists who could close this deal, who could slip Chihuly into a lineup with the likes
of Marilyn Minter and Ben
Weiner, just for starters. That critic could give glass art’s main man a way for a wider audience to think about him that is not what it thinks already.

Minter, Chewy (image via)

Weiner – The Crimes of Paris (Pink Hair Gel), 2008, oil on canvas, 64 x 197 inches

Chihuly, detail. (image via) If he had called the piece partially reproduced below a homage to pink hair gel or even an explosion in a shingle factory, would the change his narrative be enough to bump him onto a new track?

She was 66. From the Oregonian’s D.K. Row:

Simply put: No one in the current art world championed local and Northwest artists as passionately and consistently as Russo, whose 23 year-old gallery is a de facto museum for regional artists, past and present: Lucinda Parker, Jay Backstrand, Fay Jones, and the estates of Louis Bunce, Robert Colescott, Carl Morris and her uncle, Michele Russo, among others, are represented by the Russo business.

But Russo was more than the seemingly shy yet quietly tough art dealer on Northwest 21st Avenue. She was an embodiment of a specific mid-century lineage whose spirit and heritage continues but whose active champions are now few.

“We will never see this kind of lifelong commitment again,” says Bruce Guenther, a longtime Russo friend and chief curator at the Portland Art Museum. “Laura was literally raised in this town. Her knowledge of the history of the cultural scene here, and her connections — social and personal — with the artists of this city can’t be matched.” (more)

Row noted that Martha Lee, manager of the Laura Russo
Gallery, will continue it. Its strengths have always been its painters. Highlights include:

Betty Merken, Torque, monotype, 2009

Lucinda Parker, Outlook, December 1, 2007  gouache on paper 2007
Fay Jones, Forget, Forgotten, acrylic/paper, 2009

Gregory Grenon Me and My Ethereal Dress oil on plexiglas 2008

Michael Brophy, Silence 2, oil/canvas 2009

Francis Celentano Cirque Variation 11  acrylic on canvas  2006
Jan Reaves Dutchman’s Britches mixed media on flax paper  2009

The Seattle Art Museum has no Picassos to speak of – a couple of prints, a single drawing and a scarf. Yes, a scarf. No paintings. No sculptures. Paul Allen owns at least one small painting. Aside from its appearance in Double Take at EMP, Allen is keeping his Picasso (or Picassos) to himself, along with the rest of his collection.

That’s why Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso Paris is a big deal. It opens in October at SAM with 75 paintings and sculptures chosen to document all phases of his career, plus a survey of prints and photographs.

Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937
Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm
Pablo Picasso, Spanish, worked in France, 1881-1973
Musée National Picasso, Paris
© 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photo Credit: Jean-Gilles Berizzi / Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York.


For more information, go here.