Archives for March 2010

Jessica Powers‘ boyfriend works in a gallery. To make certain the magnitude of his personal good fortune doesn’t slip his mind, his co-workers have taken it upon themselves to preemptively remind him:  “Don’t screw this up.”

She does everything well, including just being in a room. When she’s in a room with you, everything else in the room (including you) has a rare and purposeful shine. Like many in her generation (a hefty portion of the 1980s took place without her), Powers multitasks as curator, organizer and critic. To each endeavor she brings the depth of her concentration.

Here’s a passage from her review of Sol Hashemi‘s Object History Awareness at Gallery 4Culture:
  

There’s a current thread in philosophy that uses the sciences (math, physics, chemistry) as tools and metaphors for explaining entirely unscientific things about the world. The opposite of existential, objects don’t need to know how they interact with other objects or events or conditions, they’re simply always doing something.

Always playing, always passing time, always in contact or out of it. This is how Sol’s art feels – it is proof that a piece of art bent or folded or creased or left to lie has just as much relation to the space it is in and the people who see it and the currents of air that pass over it and to everything within and without. If you know better, or get bumped just right, you’ll literally feel the web – the things you can do that he’s done, the things that he’s done so you don’t have to, the things that his creations (are they even his?) are doing, and the entirely unrelated clashes of conditions and events and objects on the street, in the gallery, stacked in the studio. (more)

My Hashemi review here. She’s inside the experience, while I, an incorrigibly non-participating observer, am not. She and a few friends run the exhibition space known as TARL in her basement. Rob Smith’s installation concludes there on Saturday.

Other news:

How to “wrestle with distinctive, battered American ideals” – Christopher Knight reviews American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, here, excellent as usual.

More Knight: Toyota of Hollywood faces a crises of context, here. Directly across the street from the company that makes cars with sticky accelerators and faulty brakes is the Museum of Death.

Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on thuggery against artists in
China, here.
Golden egg in hand, developers want to kill the goose as police arrest (who else?) the artists. (Support Human Rights in
China. It’s a stellar organization that works every day to move a
mountain.)

Amazing story about how lightly old journalism takes its responsibilities when on a digital platform from music critic Larry Blumenfeld on
NAJP’s ARTicles
blog:

Last week, someone pointed out to me that
they’d found a piece of mine for the New Orleans Times Picayune on the
paper’s site, but underneath the byline of some woman I’ve never met.
Huh? My inquiry was met with this:

“We “upgraded” our blogging platform in
the fall, and when we did, the bylines switched to the name of the
person who posted the story – usually XXXXX, the features online
coordinator. Impossible to correct them all. I’ll see if she can get to
this one.”

I’ve deleted her name, nor need I
mention the editor, a genial guy who didn’t take the buyout. And my
polite demand for corrections to my work (more than just the one piece)
was heeded. (What about all those other bylines that didn’t get fixed?)
I’m sure there was nothing intentional going on, but there was also no
apparent alarm at such a serious glitch. Does anything beyond “getting
the content up” matter online? This one I didn’t see coming.

Related:
Nick Simmons, son of Gene, finds the cost of alleged plagiarism is
high, thanks to the sounding board of the Web, here.

Greg.org on Gerhard Richter wallpaper, here. By a wide margin, my favorite wallpaper is Kelly Mark‘s: –  (Auden – In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise)
Finally, Kenneth Baker interviews Robert Irwin, the question addict, here.

I realized that if I stayed in the studio I’d probably just do things similar to what I’d learned to do. And I loved being in the studio, it’s a great refuge for an artist, but I decided to divest myself of all those investments I’d made. … For a couple of years, I just wandered around in the Southwestern desert because there you really can get away from objects. … One of the things I was doing was questioning the whole system of signs to which art objects belong. I’ve since been trying to make the case that the reason art gets done is to step outside the system of signs, to work phenomenologically. … Mine is really a philosophical inquiry. I’ve become a question addict.

 Jen Graves‘ article, The Vancouver Problem, continues to unfold in our lives. Although she wrote it nearly a year ago, its effects are still being felt, most recently in a panel discussion at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. (March 8, 7 p.m. at the Schneebeck Concert
Hall, free admission.)

Panelists are tip top.

1. Scott Watson, director/curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, professor in the Department of Art History and director and graduate advisor for the Critical Curatorial Studies Program at The University of British Columbia

2. Jonathan Middleton, Vancouver-based artist, director/curator of the Or Gallery, sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and a founding member of the Projectile Publishing/Fillip Review

3. Liz Magor, Vancouver-based artist and associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design

4. Rock Hushka, curator of contemporary art, Tacoma Art Museum

5. Matthew Offenbacher, Seattle-based artist and editor of La Norda Specialo

6. Jen Graves of course, art critic for The Stranger and adjunct faculty in art
history at Cornish College of the Arts

Issues will include but are not limited to:

1. Effects of governmental funding for the arts on cultural production

2. Geographical location in relation to individual and cultural senses of identity
3. Distinct relationships to the broader, global art world
4. Regional art histories and legacies

Graves suggested that Vancouver might be more of fertile terrain than other points Northwest.
Say organizers:

The forum’s purpose is to enhance cross-border communication and consider broader questions of identity in the age of globalization.

I had a few problems with Graves’ premise when it came out. Still, as a conversational catalyst, her piece can’t be beat.

Gregory Delaure:

If you are what is missing from the center of your attention, this artist is for you. (The first piece could be titled, After Robert Gober.)

Raised Catholic but think you’re put it behind you? Catholicism is like polio. If you contract a powerful case in your youth, it can rebound into your consciousness late in middle age, no matter what you think. (Like a rubber ball it comes bouncing back to you. Don’t expect Buddy Holly to sing it.)

People who live in their heads are in danger of early eviction. Their body sends a rent overdue notice: You’re flabby. You’re winded. You lack the stamina to hold Heidegger in your hands. From Chris Burden to Carolee Schneerman, performance artists in the early 1970s addressed the peril of ignoring flesh to concentrate on mind, which is, after all, another kind of flesh.

Our bodies, ourselves: In the 21st century, the legacy of 1970s
performance continues to flourish. Take Jason Hirata. Making abstract
art is hard work.

For his current exhibit at the James Harris Gallery, Hirata (left) asked Harris (right) to join him in a storage facility rented for the purpose. They jump roped, sat up, pushed up and ran in the hallway to produce the sweat the artist and dealer collected from their foreheads, backs and necks.

Hirata mixed the liquid in each container with raw Prussian blue pigment to make paired drawings – one using his own liquid as a base and the other using his dealer’s. Although Hirata says he hopes that the quality of the line is not the focus of the work’s attraction, it is the line that makes the project work. Ghostly, vulnerable, his drawings show up to the best of their exhausted ability, leaving an impression that’s barely there but won’t go away.

diamond(Hirata), 2010 Sweat and pigment on paper 11 3/8″ x 14 1/2″

diamond(Harris), 2010 Sweat and pigment on paper 11 3/8″ x 14 1/2″

Through March 27.

ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program, is back with a robust participant lineup. I was especially taken with Peter Plagens’ attempt to link Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye) with Andy Warhol – bad boys fictional and reality-based – who brought high culture down, here.

I’m a sucker for Plagens’ writing. Even when I know I’m being conned, I eat it anyway, enjoying its blunt relish. Here’s his lead:

Way back smack dab in the middle of the last century, Americans still liked their popular literature to have, if not gravitas, at least some pretentious heft and coffee-table profundity.

That’s Plagens’ version of the kind of literature overthrown by a caustic teenager. Plagens’ quotes Caulfield’s opening line:

“If you really want to hear about it,” Holden says, “the first thing
you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy
childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they
had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel
like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Plagens’ asks who that sounds like and answers his own question: Andy Warhol.

Of course, Warhol–probably destined to be known until the end of time
adolescently as “Andy”–did not actually speak like that. In fact, he
never spoke much in public at all. But Warhol, too, never felt like
“going into it.” The last thing he wanted to go into was that he was a
Czech-American, mass-attending Catholic boy from Pittsburgh. Nowhere in
his flat, crass and affectless silkscreened pictures of Marilyn, Liz or
Jackie lay the slightest hint of what his childhood was like or how his
parents were occupied before they had him or any of that David
Copperfield kind of crap.

Gert Verhoeven
Andy
Laquered steel, sheepskin, foam
L 160 cm x W 60 cm x H 70 cm
Edition of 15 (Image via)

Verhoeven’s wiggy chair is more Warholian than any line ever given to the hell-with-it hero of just-say-no. Warhol embraced and Caulfield rejected. Aren’t they opposites? Besides, what pre-Pop visual artists of that era engaged the subject of their childhoods? (Remember Jackson Pollock talking about the influence of mom and dad? It didn’t happen.)

Plagens loses the audience, picks it back up and shakes it like a puppy with a chew toy. Doubt patrols the edges of his text to keep the reader simultaneously at bay (the chew toy would get away if it could) and engaged (no help for it). In the end, however, none of his premises rings true. But art criticism has more to offer than the truth.

Francis Bacon:

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

Art is not a religion. Although there is room for the leap of faith, art is built on cognitive engagement. Plagens offers it. He roughs up his readers, challenges what they know by going too far and circles back to slap some pseudo-sense into his argument, just when it was down for the count. Who needs a gym, when we’ve got Peter Plagens?

How about an art park in a post-carny vein? (Roots, baby.) Story here.

From SherFilms, a music video for Sam Bisbee’s Oxygen.

Seattle needs all the critics it can get. In that sense, it needs Matthew Kangas, long-time Seattle correspondent for Art in America. His contribution to criticism began in the 1970s and continues to the present, with a review on Artdish of the Tacoma Art Museum’s A Concise History of Northwest Art.

Even if his byline were missing, I’d recognize his magisterial tone. His opinions impersonate facts. Because he states them, they are true. Beyond their imperative, they need no supporting evidence. I haven’t yet seen this show, but the solemn clarity of Kangas’ intelligence doesn’t carry me through this piece without a few quibbles.

First, he doesn’t think the museum’s plan to expand its definition of Northwest art to include British Columbia is sound.

The TAM Board of Trustees approved a 10-year plan for the collection in 2009 that included a “strategy” to “expand the definition of Northwest art to include British Columbia and Alaska.” Although noble and sensible in principle, this is one aspect of U.S.-Canada cultural relationships that has never been truly reciprocal. We exhibit and acquire their artists; BC art museums never show Seattle artists let alone acquire their work (their state-funded cultural policies won’t allow it). Maybe Hushka and Bullock have miscalculated in this sense: better to stick to the continental US.

The Vancouver Art Gallery owns the work of American artists. VAG’s focus is B.C. first and Canada second. That’s a focus, not a rule. Even if there were such a rule, TAM is right to consider the Northwest within a context of geographical reality. TAM is not horse trading. It’s building a record of art in this region. Leaving out B.C. is consigning the collection to parochialism.

Second, he decrees that TAM needs to rely less on donations, which he calls “hand-outs,” as if the museum had lined up at a soup kitchen, empty bowl extended. Nearly all art museums rely on donations. The job of curators is, in part, to shape those donations, inspiring patrons to make gifts of what the museum most desires. If museums had to buy what they wanted, they’d all be hunger artists.

Third, he tosses off opinions of individual artists. In this review, there are no other kind. Why does Christian Staub “stand head and heels” over all other photographers in the show? I love Staub’s work and think it’s fearsomely underrated, but in a review, shouldn’t at least one reason for its value be given?

An attack on Claire Cowie needs a little more than this:

Sky Village (2005), by Claire Cowie, seems a typically vacuous example of her thin, overrated watercolor paintings.

Yes, they’re thin. They’re watercolors. If he’s going to call them vacuous, isn’t he required to back it up? No, he isn’t. He’s Matthew Kangas, the art critic equivalent of Moses. He comes down from his mountain with the rules in his hands. Not his rules. The rules. On the other hand, I appreciate his confidence, which is not entirely misplaced. If he bothered to articulate the basis of his thinking, it would be worth reading.

Sami Khoury: Ever mutable, light limps along the edge of the Pearl River, floats in space and props up corporate power.

What: Art Klatch at Cafe Presse
When: 8-10am, Every Tuesday (drop-ins/drop-outs welcome)

Where: CAFE PRESSE – Capitol Hill, SW corner of 12th and Madison
TOMORROW’s PROGRAM…
We are pleased to have as our special guests at 8am: TIVON RICE, Ph.D student at DXARTS at the University of Washington, & KENNETH ALLAN, Ph.D, professor of Art History at Seattle University.
They will be discussing Rice’s current exhibition at Lawrimore Project, “A Macrocosmic Zero,” touching on the history of video art and new media work, the legacy of its main practitioners, and Rice’s unique positioning within the field.

Review  on this blog  of Tivon Rice’s The Macroscopic Zero currently at Lawrimore Project.

Earlier work featuring his dog, asleep. (Osteotomy 2005 CRT monitor, wood 10 x 14 x 10 inches Edition
of 3)

The oldest online visual art publication in the Northwest is Artdish, a forum for essays, reviews and DYI commentary through its forum. At its heart is a mystery. Why does it take so little advantage of what being online has to offer? It is link-free and nearly image free. Reviews appear with one small picture, if that.

The answer lies in its age. The site is jerry-rigged from an outmoded system that is falling further and further behind, even though reviews are currently supported with a 4Culture grant.

Jim Demetre is responsible for the site’s content. In response to an email, he generously provided me with the following:

Artdish is run by Eric Gould and myself. Eric is the web developer and I am responsible for the content. I have known him for sixteen years (we met at the Reflex office in Pioneer Square) and I consider him to be one of my very best friends.
Eric built the site ten years ago for Victoria Josslin and has been responsible for maintaining it ever since.

Neither of us receive compensation for our efforts and Eric has worked full time at Microsoft and elsewhere through most of this decade, so his ability to spend time on the project has been limited.

At this point I feel we need to make large-scale changes to Artdish to improve its functionality and take better advantage of the aesthetic potential of the web today.
There is currently no search function for the entire site and it is very difficult for writers to post their reviews on the homepage, let alone add multiple images or video.

Artdish is so structurally fragmented I think it would be best to simply start over and build a new site with an already existing, easy-to-use blog engine while archiving the all the existing content on a searchable database. What we have been doing instead is making slight and ineffective modifications to what is outdated or was poorly-conceived from the start.

My fear is that these problems have relegated us to the sidelines while other art websites have flourished in the public arena. When our forum page was very active a few years ago (I have over 2,500 posts there), the system should have been replaced with a more current version and moved to the less frequently updated homepage, where we were posting longer reviews. But the change was never made and we’re still using the old version from 1999.

Five years ago I had ambitions of transforming our now-shelved ‘community’ pages (with links to galleries and artists) into a modest social networking platform that could link artist pages with gallery pages and content from across the web. Today I’m just focusing on publishing reviews and holding out hope that we can create a site that lives up to basic 2010 expectations.

The real mystery of Artdish is that Demetre and Gould have run it for a decade without compensation. A big thanks to 4Culture for recognizing that cultural commentary cannot float in the air like a hair or a feather but needs support. (Unfortunately, thanks to state budget cuts that grind on and on, 4Culture itself needs support. Joey Veltkamp story here.)