Archives for March 2010

The process to which the French word collage refers was invented by the Japanese more than 500 years ago. They tore strips out of old paintings, calligraphies and colored paper patches to reuse in new work.

Born in Japan, Seattle artist Paul Horiuchi (1906-1999) used collage much as his forebears did:
to set a meditative mood and to orchestrate color, form
and texture into a harmonious composition.

Horiuchi fused the sensibility of the Japanese rock garden with Western modernist expressive abstraction.
Seattle artREsource is host to a small but fine survey of his work, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Run by Jena Scott, artREsource is a gallery devoted to the secondary market. Rarely has she a chance to organize an exhibit, but once she had half-a-dozen first-rate Horiuchi’s, she sought more to make the show.

Horiuchi came to the States in his teens. He was working for the railroad in Rock Springs, Wyoming, when FDR signed Executive Order 9066. Because he, his wife and two young sons weren’t on the West Coast, they escaped detention. Instead, isolated from other Japanese-Americans and hearing rumors that they would be arrested or even killed, they burned a collection of old Japanese books and prints that had been in their family for generations.

Fired by the railroad for being of Japanese descent, he and his family lived in their car and later in a homemade house on a
truck, making a living through janitorial and gardening work.
The paintings and drawings he made during and before this period were stored in a friend’s basement and lost in a flood.

By the time he arrived in Seattle, he was a 40-year-old railroad man, auto mechanic, sign painter and artist. Mark Tobey was for him a catalyst, although when Horiuchi began making collages in 1956, Tobey told him to stick to watercolors, because his watercolors were so spare and beautiful.

In 1962, he created the 70-foot-long Mural Amphitheater for the World’s Fair in Seattle.
During his career, he was awarded prizes and purchase awards from the Ford Foundation, the Rome-New York Foundation and the Carnegie Art International. Japan designated him a sacred treasure.

The tumult of his life does not appear in his work. Instead, there’s a serene balance of color and weight with a strong, underlying vitality, a sense of dynamic forces being brought into line.

Through May 8. (Extended through May 29.)

Hat hip to New York Times’ critic Ken Johnson for his Viola Frey review, which challenges conventional opinion by pretending it isn’t there. Why not? It’s his review. He can use all his space for what he’s thinking.

Viola Frey’s giant ceramic sculptures of men and women are among the underappreciated wonders of late-20th-century art. Rising 11 feet and higher, wearing business suits and ties and nondescript dresses, they have a spookily imposing physical presence and a clunky, cartoonish ugliness.

Roughly glazed in strident colors and made in sections that fit together like blocks in a stone wall, they could be mistaken for a species of Outsider art. Because of their size and their blank or seemingly angry expressions, they may remind you of what it was like to be a child among grown-ups troubled by incomprehensible problems. (more)

I share the conventional view, that her work was the same thing over and over, that she was a kind of folk artist living in the eternal present. Viewed in the context of mainstream contemporary art, she had nowhere to go and didn’t manage to get there.

Although he calls her a “true original,” he locates her among her peers, where her work falters. On the other hand, besides the artists mentioned below, he throws in Joan Brown and Robert Crumb.

Robert Crumb? I’d love to see Crumb and Frey together in a gallery. Crumb would be the kind of excellent sideman who makes a questionable soloist look good. Johnson’s review doesn’t change my mind, but thinking about the Crumb-Frey combination begins to. Stranded in her own company, she’s like a lonely person talking to a mirror. (No was all she said.)

A resident of San Francisco for most of her adult life, Frey belonged to a generation of artists who made ceramic sculpture a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s and ’70s. Peter Voulkos started the revolution in the late ’50s with his raw, nonrepresentational clay works made in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. Robert Arneson’s jokey narratives and Ken Price’s small, adamantine abstractions expanded the field.

Putting her work in a room with that of the endlessly inventive Robert Arneson or the “adamantine” (good word) Ken Price would do her no favors. Who else in West Coast clay from the 1960s and 1970s could use the Crumb assist?

Not the Rabelaisian Howard Kottler. He belongs with Robert Arneson, who would not be able to wipe the floor with him. (Image via)

To Crumb and Frey I’d add Patti Warashina…

And Lauren Grossman. (Like Warashina, at Howard House.)

Grossman was just starting out in the 1970s, but she would not only shine in a Crumb-Frey-Warashina exhibit, she’d make the others shine too. She’d bring out both the mournful melody of the collective theme and the relish in its depiction.

Some artists do best alone. Others need a crowd. Most need the kind of curatorial and critical attention that allows them to be the best version of themselves, to make the case that they do not deserve to be forgotten. In seeing past the opinions of others, Ken Johnson has begun the work necessary to keep Frey’s legacy alive.

Into the urban core, living on gas fumes: Gaylen Hansen

Silky as perfumed employees of the pleasure quarter: Sarah Emerson.

Why swarm?

Eggleston ( Image via)

Stephen Vitiello

Anne Mathern

Opening Friday night at the Henry Gallery as part of an open house, 6-11, is
I Myself Have Seen It: Photography by Kiki Smith, curated by Elizabeth Brown.

When Smith spoke Thursday night to a packed house, many who showed up probably thought she’d talk about the exhibit. She touched on it but turned away, saying only that she began using photographs of her work as work when she needed to fill a space and improvised the photos into a kind of serial narrative.

Instead, in a voice that’s close to music with her curly gray hair streaming around her, she digressed. Each topic became a stepping stone to different parts of her mental garden.

The University of Washington did not help. Her slides were constantly out of focus and did not improve unless she asked the person in booth to do something. The lights were too bright to see the slides well, and the microphone during the questions period was unreliable. She remained serene. Gently, she said about one slide, “I don’t think you can see it, and it’s upside down.”

Below, in her own words, random quotes from the endlessly quotable Ms. Smith.

I don’t know what I’m going to say. I hope to jar my mind into having a thought. I basically don’t have any necessity to talk in my life.

My greediness, in the end, is to show you something completely
different.

Refuse to be owned by style. Do not be strangled by your own history. Flip the meaning. Explore the facets. What holds up for you at one time doesn’t have to hold up for the rest of your life. Your work can be conflicted. I used to be interested in how much skin a body had, how much blood. I’m not as exact now.

You get to cannibalize your own work to get as much mileage out of it as you
can. While creativity is given to you freely, it’s not given every day.

The feminist moment radically changed what art could be. I looked to Nancy Spero, who worked on paper, made prints and made art out of being a woman; Eva Hesse, who made the body abstract, and Barry Le Va, who is so good at the difference between two dimensions and three dimensions. When I was young, I’d see something by Bruce Nauman and want to throw in
the towel. A few days later, I’d think, there’s still a little space he
isn’t in.

You can’t wait around for other people to want or need you work. There were times that making paperweights kept me afloat financially. I wanted to be an artist whose work would wind up (on sale) at Macy’s.

The only time my father (Tony Smith) touched his sculpture is when a photographer came and asked him to put his hands on it.

Richard Tuttle is our greatest American artist, maybe, according to me.

I hate all this junk they teach in art school, where you’re supposed to
know what you’re doing. It’s only in the unknown that we get to blossom.

Why her colors tends to be muted:

I was around the process sculptors, like Richard Serra and Alan Saret. Color seemed indulgent. That’s my American Puritanism, I think. I could change that.

On collaborations:

I collaborate with people when they do want I want them to do, people who have some
super facility in printmaking or blowing glass. They have something in their bodies I’ll never have in my body.

A few selections from her book, her 20th century. (Previous post)

Guillaume Apollinaire, from Shadow:

As a hundred furs make only one coat
As those thousands of wounds make only one newspaper article…

Siegfried Sassoon, from Repression of War Experience:

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;
You’d never know there was a bloody war on!…

Osip Mandelstam, from The Stalin Epigram:

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

George Oppen, from Route, Part 5:

There was an escape from that dilemma, as, in a way, there always is. Pierre told me of a man who, receiving the notification that he was to report to the German army, called a celebration and farewell at this home. Nothing was said at that party that was not jovial. They drank and sang. At the proper time, the host got his bicycle and waved good-bye. The house stood at the top of a hill and, still waving and calling farewells, he rode with great energy and as fast as he could down the hill, and, at the bottom, drove into a tree.

Bertolt Brecht, Motto

This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know
At least I’m still alive, as you may see.
I’m like the man who took a brick to show
How beautiful his house used to be.

Joseph Brodsky, from Elegy:

A ruin’s a rather stubborn
architectural style…

At sunrise, when nobody stares at one’s face, I often
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth “Commander
in chief.” But it reads “in grief,” or “in brief,” or “in going under.”

Irina Ratushinskaya, from Try to cover your shivering shoulders

‘You must die’ – but is that so distressing?
You just feel slightly sick,
As you enter the stain on the wall.

W. H. Auden, from September 1, 1939

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return…

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

Benjamin Peret, from Hymn of the Patriotic War Veterans

Even though I threw down my rifle butt
The Tauben still spit in my eye
that’s how I got decorated
Long live the republic

I got rabbit punches in the ass
I was blinded by goat turds
asphyxiated by my horse’s dung
then they gave me the Cross of Honor

Paul Celan, from Black Fugue

we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland you golden hair
    Marguerite…

he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
      He whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us to strike up and play for the dance…

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland you golden hair
     Marguerite
you ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air….

Celan’s poetry anchors the work of Anselm Kiefer, especially Black Fugue, with its reoccurring images of the blond German (your golden hair Marguerite) and the Jewish dead (your ashen hair Shulamith)…(Images via)

From BBC News:

Even though President Barack Obama promised during his election campaign to call a mass murder a genocide when it is/was genocide, his administration has asked a Congressional panel not to do so, fearing to insult an ally.

The Obama administration has called on a Congressional panel not to describe the killing of Armenians by Turkish forces during World War I as genocide.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold off a vote on the issue, the White House said.
She said the non-binding resolution would harm talks between Turkey and Armenia.
The resolution is fiercely opposed by Turkey, a key ally of the US.
In 2007, a similar resolution passed the committee stage, but was shelved before a House vote after pressure from the George W Bush administration.
Turkey has warned of consequences for US-Turkey ties if the latest resolution is passed.
During his election campaign President Barack Obama promised to brand the mass killings genocide. (more)

Why dredge up past evils? Given the precarious state of the world, isn’t getting along with a valued ally more important than quibbling about history’s record? There is no country on earth whose citizens can claim a history free of human rights abuse. Why pick on Turkey?

As an answer, Carolyn Forche edited a collection of 20th-century world poetry: Against Forgetting, Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, published in 1993.

Forche:

Any twentieth-century history of human rights and genocide must begin with the massacre of Armenians, then the largest Christian minority population of Turkey. Between 1909 and 1918, approximately 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by order of the Ottoman Turkish government….Historians call it the first “modern” genocide,” because it appears to be the first instance of political mass murder made possible by advanced technology and modern communications implemented by a centralized state bureaucracy.

Days before the invasion of Poland, Hitler posed a question to his military cabinet:

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Arshile Gorky, a little history:

Gorky fled (the town of) Van in 1915 during the Armenian Genocide and escaped with his mother and his
three sisters into Russian-controlled territory. In the aftermath of the
genocide, Gorky’s mother died of starvation in Yerevan
in 1919. (more)

Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (ca.1926-1936). Oil on canvas. 60″× 50″. Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art

Gorky, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life  Oil on Canvas  1944, Collection, Seattle Art Museum (image via)

Part 2, the poems, here.

If geometry were capable of taking its own rules lightly, mathematics would be at home in the paintings of Alexander Kroll.
They look as if they long to be grids but cannot pass the sobriety test.

Kroll works small, usually in oil and enamel but occasionally with some element of collage. Ambitious paintings that span no more than two joined hands used to be unusual, back when Thomas Nozkowski was consistently underrated for producing them. He said a single 16 x 14 inch painting could fill a wall but didn’t insist on having a wall for each one, and that was also held against him. (No ego, no glory.)

Since the mid-1990s, thanks in part to Nozkowski, big no longer has a corner on best. If we’re not quite at William Blake’s definition of enlightenment, to see eternity in a grain of sand, we generally accept that a painting of modest dimensions can possess an enormous sense of scale.

Some look at Kroll’s work and see nothing but sources: He owes everything to Gerhard Richter, they say. He’s Terry Winters without the seedpods. Doesn’t Tomory Dodge do this better?

A friend asked that question about Dodge at Kroll’s James Harris Gallery opening, not loudly, to be boorish, but in the spirit of evidence proffered toward a conclusion already reached: not that good. I could have said I thought Dodge leaned more toward Richter and Kroll toward Nozkowski but didn’t. What I wanted to say was an unacceptable question: What is it that you are seeing? Can you see these particular paintings? Can you forget pedigree for a moment and let the moments the paintings themselves create carry you toward their own conclusions?

Broad yet broken diagonals crisscross the surface, creating a foreground that serves as a failed barrier, a collapsed grid. Behind it is the kind of push-pull the Abstract Expressionists used to advocate, an animated, energy exchange carried by color.There’s nothing earth-shaking in Kroll’s premises, but their elaborations are a rare and engrossing pleasure.

Through March 27.

Don’t let this happen to 4Culture, the vital center of public art patronage in the city.

From Anna Callahan :
(Image via)

There are less than two weeks left in this session and we need legislation to move. If bills are not passed this year, we just heard confirmation that 4Culture is going to start planning dramatic staff, services and funding programs cuts that will begin as early as January, 2011.

This is the first this reality has truly sunk in and we’re panicking.
Since the session started in January, we’ve seen at least 6 different bills proposed that would generate the support needed for 4Culture to continue to thrive.

Unfortunately NONE of these bills has successfully moved through both the House and the Senate and time is running out.
What we need now is for every arts and heritage advocate in the state to write to their legislators with a general letter of support in the next few days.

Even if you’ve already written a letter supporting specific bills, we need one last push to make sure that legislators understand that whatever name and number you put on the bill, we need ARTS and HERITAGE funding to be secured THIS YEAR.
Please ask friends and family to do the same. Senators and Reps from all over the state will get to vote on this issue, so we need non-king county legislators to understand that their constituents are excited about strong funding.

Thursday night, 6-8, is a chance to participate in a pro-4Culture laptop rally in Pioneer Square. The 4Culture Gallery? Best guess is, it’s going down, unless funding comes through at the last minute.

If you’re out and about for First Thursday, you can drop in, write a letter and be on your way. AtCaffe Vita in the Tashiro Kaplan building, 125 Prefontaine Pl S. (How to participate without leaving home, here.)

A few days ago, idling away the time it takes to brush my teeth, I thought, Seattle Center needs to replace its now-defunct fun forest with an art park inspired by the carny world. Hence, this post, Replacing the Fun Forest At Seattle Center.

A version of that is poised to happen. Jen Graves noted today that a large Chihuly Museum is slated for the spot. In her reaction, City Council member Sally Bagshaw proves she isn’t living on earth with the rest of us:

“I took one look and said, ‘If that’s something you have to pay some money to go see, then that really isn’t right,’ because I want Seattle Center to be Seattle Central Park, where you can go even if you don’t have money.

Ever been to the fun forest, Sally? Many’s the time I’ve dropped $40 there while trying hard not to, as the children in my charge become more desperate to experience the fun they think they should be having.

Chihuly will be able to fill fun forest shoes with his own kind of carnival barker. More later.

(Image via)