Archives for February 2010

From a comment to this post:

Try not to let your lust to denigrate Valentine’s Day (bitter,
much?) affect your art judgment.

What? I object. To prove my heart is far from bitter, I offer two Valentine’s Day tributes.

First, from an email by Michael Cepress, artist and men’s clothing designer.

Just in time for your favorite or most hated holiday, we’ve designed a shirt for a special Sunday.
Want to impress your sweetie with something new in your closet?
Or would you rather settle in for a night alone with your favorite bottle?
Either way, add a little style to your date!

The quick back story:
At my very first Little Richard concert in 2000, I met the man himself as he took the stage in black and red sequined silk pajamas.
The moment stuck with me, and I’ve translated spirit of that look into this Valentines Day design.
We’re calling this shirt “King Richard.”
ON SALE – 25% OFF
THIS SATURDAY ONLY – FEB 13, 2010!

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics opens tonight with, as the Web site claims, “glowing hearts.” Torch relay runners have made their way around the city, culminating in the lighting the Olympic torch.

Michael Drebert beat them to it. Last month he lit a cigarette in Vancouver and drove south to Seattle, firing one cigarette from the butt of the previous until he reached Western Bridge, where he offered to light others’ cigarettes from his. Hanging in a gallery was his hand-drawn poster of the plan, which he calls Ember.

Drebert was the first artist invited by Western Bridge to participate in its new seires titled New Year. He’s one of 13 commissioned to do whatever they want in the upstairs gallery, within the limitations of the space, time and budget. Western Bridge isn’t kidding about the limitations of time. Each show is two weeks, open Thursdays to Saturdays. That’s a 6-day run.

Jen Graves called Drebert’s performance and drawing “boundless, funny and sweet.” Sweet? Really? How many dead smokers does she know? How many with emphysema, trying to breathe through the wet tissue that used to be their lungs?

Yes, this down-at-the-heels version of the Vancouver Olympic Torch is wry commentary on a winter show that lacks snow. It’s wry commentary on the Olympics themselves, and how sponsoring it affects (erases) a city’s down and out. And yes, it’s chummy, especially for those who ignore the chill buried inside it. I know at least one former smoker who relapsed in order to participate. (Talk about hunger for community.) For those who aren’t even trying to quit, Drebert offered a moment of solidarity with a bad choice, if it is a choice for the hardcore addicted. Show them a film of people smoking through a hole in their throats after cancer surgery. With trembling fingers, the addicts in the audience will light their next one.

Art has no obligation to be good for you. No doubt Drebert aced his own assignment, but calling that assignment  “boundless, funny and sweet” is at the very least insufficient. Drebert provided thin ice. To pretend all was well was to fall through it.

 Currently on view is Matt Sheridan Smith’s Flotsam/Jetsam, through Feb. 20.

Contrary to this poster of unknown origin, passed along by Jack Mackie, nobody owns anything. That’s what makes it art. Everything is always in the process of being rethought. I’m reproducing it because I like the way it looks on a page, with the central spine of the word “owns” and prickly words as leaves on either side, and because it has a nice sound shape when read aloud.

Anybody know whose poster this is, please let me know so I can credit. Thanks, everybody! The artist is Vuk Vidor.

On a hike last summer, Claudia
Fitch came across a stand of deadly nightshade. (image via)

Its colors were
precise, and its leaves so crisply constructed they looked manufactured.
FLOATING MECHANISM (nightshade) is the result, an installation
at Suyama Space
curated by Beth Sellars.

Fitch has a
longstanding interest in
the theme of manufactured gardens, specifically topiary, using steel and
AstroTurf for the
purpose.
Her gardens led to figurative abstractions: breasts, hips and hairdos
made from welded metal armatures and Styrofoam covered in velvety
flocking.

She engages art history as if the artists in it were in
the room, having a conversation with her.

Umberto Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in
Space 1913 (cast 1931). Bronze, 43 7/8″ x 34 7/8″ x 15 3/4″ (111.2 x
88.5 x 40 cm). Image via Museum
of Modern Art

MANTEL PIECE #2
(pleated), 2007 (Patinated bronze with oil paint 21″ x
20″ x 6″ Ed/3) Her version has a touch of Art Deco that tones down
Futurism’s inherent hysteria.

For FM (nightshade),
she engaged the landscape as a floating world, following Hiroshige.
Instead of following him into anything close to a literal terrain, she
took her tribute into the comics. Is there another artist who turns the
jaunty emblems of comic strips into abstraction without losing their
wisecracking verve?

The lens-like object on its cantilevered armature hangs
over a pool, seeing itself. Hanging over the floor is a production line
of blooms, quite breast-like. What is the fate of a breast in the age of
mechanical reproduction? Each is perfect. Each one rises, dotted with
red at its tip. None lies flat or sags on its side. FM (nightshade)
is a hat tip to Fitch’s fellow makers, those who, like her, fabricate
fantasies from the world’s raw material.

Through April 23.

Bluhm, in response to an
item in this
post:

Everybody’s dependent on a web of connections. I’d say
those connections are not worth having if they break under the strain of
an honest but negative reaction, but I’m a critic. Critics put their
connections to the test on a regular basis. Those seeking safe haven
have been known to associate themselves with one group of artists,
snubbing all others. But even if each of the chosen continues to dazzle,
the critics don’t. They become boosters and not critics at all. A
critic has to be open to the possibility of failure, including her own.
If her left hand offends, she doesn’t have to cut it off but she does
have to deal with it.

Partly because Dave Hickey and Christopher
Knight believe that non-major metropolises do not offer enough room for
conflict, they think art can’t thrive there.

Knight:

In
an October lecture
at the Smithsonian, critic Dave Hickey noted that, in the Internet’s
vast territory, niches are the equivalent of villages. And art does
poorly in the homogenized, provincial ether of a village.
To thrive art needs cities, where cosmopolitan diversity, conflict and
sheer accident are the norm. (more)

There
are other, more genial models for significant arts journalism. Calvin
Tomkins, for one. An art critic once told him that if he weren’t willing to shoot, he needed to get off the firing range. If
the art world were nothing but a firing range, nobody would thrive
there.

Back to Bluhm.

I’d Never Seen Your Kind Before,
Your Every Word Was A Poem
26″ x 40″, Mixed media on paper, 2007

She is one of ten new
artists recently selected to join the Seattle art collective known as Soil. Story on Joey Veltkamp’s Best
Of.

Froh opens tonight, 6-10, at Vermillion in BFF: Excerpts From Friends of the Nib. Friends of the Nib are a group of Seattle cartoonists who meet weekly at Cafe Racer (5828 Roosevelt Way NE), “to chew the fat and scratch the
paper. “

I know a couple who went to a marriage revival program sponsored by a fundamentalist church. For a week they both sported a big button on their chests. I Love My Wife, said his. I Love My Husband, said hers. “I love my freedom,” said her brother, under his breath and hiding in the kitchen.

Ghada Amer‘s happy-ever-after jumpsuits are just right for Valentine’s Day. Write it often enough, it will sound like the truth: Ken Loves Barbie. Barbie Loves Ken.

Mike Simi – Self-Portrait

Vaughn Bell – Self-Portrait (At Soil. More on Bell here.)

No one will suggest selling these dresses, suits, shawls, bandages and hats at Macy’s. Vogue will not feature them. Anna Wintour will not call. They are artworks with bodies inside them, and they come from a long and culturally diverse tradition. Below is a survey of lesser-known contemporary examples (not including the deservedly ubiquitous Nick Cave, for instance).

Jarbas Lopes

Carl Smool, a Joseph-Beuys suit worn by Michael McCafferty. (Beuys felt suit in the rear, collection, Seattle Art Museum. Photo, Robert Wade)

Tomiko Jones, from The Bunny Chronicles

Alice Wheeler, Self-Portrait as the Wicked Witch

Zack Bent, Clean Break

Elizabeth Jameson

Mandy Greer, Hazel River

Lastly, Michael Cepress, crossover artist. Anna Wintour might well call him.

Some sculptures tug on the public’s heart strings. Because they are insufficient, the public offers its assistance. However banal the sculptures themselves, the participation they elicit makes them memorable.

Gandhi, braced for winter, via

Waiting for the Interurban, image via