Archives for April 2010

Now that journalism has succeeded in removing the journalists, losses are slowing and newspapers are at long last carrying on. Staffs are smaller, but the work goes on, not, of course, at the newspapers that folded early, such as my own, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, RIP March 17, 2009.

With 10 (or is it 8?) journalists replacing a staff of around 200, the PI continues online as a delusion of itself. This shallow but sprightly mirage continues to attract traffic. In doing so, it’s shaping up to be a financial success and a journalistic disaster. Why should publishers continue to pay (and put up with) writers, photographers, editors, artists and support staff who expect real salaries and health insurance, not to mention vacations and sick leave? Now there’s an alternative: a bare bones group with a bare bones compensation. What they can’t cover in their overheated work day can be covered by freelancers. The new meaning of freelance means you work for free.

The anniversary of the PI’s demise drew comment from former staffers. One thing you can say about journalists. They continue to type, even after their platform is gone.

One of my favorite PI reporters, Andrea James, now works in finance. From her new dollars and cents perspective, she finds her old paper lamentable. Her blog post, A well-run business it wasn’t, argued just that. What she left out is everything that mattered. In spite of shrinking resources, the PI that folded was the best version of itself in my more than two decades of employ there. The infusion of tough-minded young staff inspired those who’d been jogging in place to walk back into the world of who/what/when/where/why. The PI had the best chief editor I’d ever worked for, David McCumber, and a sane publisher, Roger Oglesby. (Sane publishers were not a given at the old PI.)

The wrong paper folded, leaving the fat-cat Seattle Times. Fine reporters work there, but the culture is one of Panglossian self-congratulation. Unless you piss Kool-Aid into the cup, you won’t be hired. To secure a slot you have to be blind to the egregious faults of the right-wing bully in charge, Frank down-with-death-taxes Blethen.

Nobody had to swear allegiance at the PI; in fact, skepticism was prized. A good newspaper is not a religion. Leaps of faith are discouraged. Instead, there is the daily hunt for big-game facts, for stories that are as accurate and fair-minded as the humans producing them are capable.

Where are we now?

What I think of as the PI Brain Trust is operating online as Investigate West, run by the great Rita Hibbard. The Seattle Post-Globe has turned into a good local news source. Plenty of former staffers have blogs, and the Post-Globe links to them, including my own.

A recent addition to the former PI staff blog roll is D. Parvaz’s well-named Something to Say. Fresh from a Neiman, she’s an Iranian-born Maureen Dowd: an enemy of cliche and advocate for clear thinking. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her voice until I started reading it again. Referring to new research on suicide bombers, she wrote:

As it turns out, strapping a bomb to oneself and killing others in
the process of detonating it isn’t anyone’s first choice.

Thought that Allah and the 49 promised virgins covered the topic? Reading Parvaz will take your mind to the gym. Her blog is my one-year anniversary present to myself, evidence that my peeps are everywhere, doing good work.

The question of hotness is not fruitfully addressed to art galleries. It pitches the discussion below the level of substance and implies that galleries have nothing better to do than titillate the fickle. Hotness runs in the same circles as buzz, a word I heartily dislike unless bees are doing it.

An exquisite example of the hotness-and-buzz genre is Tim Appelo’s Charlie’s Charge in City Arts Magazine, Seattle edition. I appreciate Appleo Appelo personally and enjoy his writing, but in visual art, which is not his forte, his insouciance is grating.

Appelo:

Why is Seattle’s most-buzzed art scene in Ballard instead of Pioneer Square? Only one Seattle gallery sent artists to December’s big Miami art fair (sic: Ambach & Rice was at NADA), and only one in the whole Northwest went to last month’s New York Armory Show: Charles and Amanda Kitching’s Ambach & Rice in Ballard. “Howard House had it, James Harris had it, Scott Lawrimore has had a long run,” says one gallerygoer. “Now Charlie is the new hot thing.”

Galleries are like Darwin’s finches. Those who find a niche are the most successful. Beyond that, whether Ambach & Rice is in Ballard or Pioneer Square, it’s part of the small community of Seattle art dealers who represent artists who matter.

Back to Appelo’s article. Ambach & Rice did not “raid” another gallery. What are artists in this construction, the loot? The artists in question came to the Kitchings, not the reverse. Then there are the personal remarks:

Charles Kitching has got youth, sharp looks, savvy and savoir faire. So some resentfully dismiss him as “Charlie Ka-CHING!”

That’s two anonymous quotes from the school of buzz. Unless there’s a compelling reason, everybody in a story should be on the record, including the casually snide.

Not that everybody on the record scored this time out. Assuming Portland dealer Elizabeth Leach was quoted fairly (I am going to assume that, given Appelo’s solid record in journalism), she offered a great example of double-speak: the official position first, followed by what she really thinks.

“It’s easier to be jealous,” says Leach, “but it makes more sense to be
supportive. Northwest galleries that go to fairs are ambassadors for all
of us.” She does think hard times have made the Armory “less
competitive. One could get into the Armory if one applied.”

Who is this “one” who could get into whatever fair one wanted?

Appelo appears to take a similar position:

How come other galleries didn’t go to the Armory Show? One reason is money. “It costs easily twenty to thirty thousand dollars to go,” says top Portland gallerist Elizabeth Leach.

One reason is money. Appelo doesn’t mention any others.  Assume for a moment you’re a high school senior with a B average. You’re considering Podunk U or Harvard. One reason you’re not going to Harvard is money. Can anybody think of another?

[Read more…] about Jesse Bernstein – Secretly An Important Man

A Concise History of Northwest Art opens with Michael Brophy‘s clear cut along a logging road: 

January, 1997. Oil on canvas, 78 x 95 ½ inches.

How brilliant it would have been to pair it with a Kenneth Callahan clear cut from the 1930s. Brophy has the sky drifting across mud furrows, the mountains serene in the distance and the exposed face of a cut tree shining low like a setting sun, but Callahan has the forest world convulsed, with no reassuring grace notes. 

The Tacoma Art Museum does not have such a Callahan in its collection or it would have made an appearance. (Nor could I find one online.) Organized by the museum’s senior curator, Rock Hushka, A Concise History draws entirely from the museum’s holdings, which are impressive in their range and depth. Instead of a Callahan, what hangs beside Brophy is a meek Sidney Lawrence, probably from the 1930s, Mt. McKinley, Alaska, doing Lawrence no favors.

Hushka would have been well advised to give Brophy the entry wall. Experiences on the same frequency tend to fuse or spark. Lawrence is overwhelmed and deserves better. (His own space or a more sympathetic companion could have brought out his subtle delicacies.) 

What a smart title. The word concise tends to cut off the inevitable complaints: Why not x? Surely if you have y, you need w. My only real compliant is that Huska didn’t take the word seriously enough. Exhibits at the Tacoma Art Museum tend toward salon style. They’re packed to the rafters. While I enjoyed this show, its density overwhelms the particular with the general.

I like the exhibit’s  first half of the 20th Century, which favors the lesser knowns, such as Ambrose Patterson, Peter Camfferman, Charles Heaney (It’s worth a trip to the Portland Art Museum to see the Heaney’s, lamentably underrepresented in Seattle), Walter Isaacs, Zama Vanessa Helder and Kenjiro Nomura.

Kenjiro Nomura,
Puget Sound,1933. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 23 ¾ inches.

With light rimming his forms, Nomura conveys a quiet kind of Surrealism that predates Wayne Tiebaud’s. With painter Kamekichi Tokita, Nomura ran
a sign-painting business before the war. In the 1930s they managed to give some work to Paul Horiuchi, who remembered painting large hula dancers and octopuses on billboards for them. The three would go out sketching on Sunday afternoons.
By the late 1930s such excursions were no longer safe. Horiuchi said he
and Nomura were on the University Bridge one day, drawing together, when
somebody reported them to the police as suspicious characters. After
investigating, the police told them to stop sketching outside.

Nomura and Tokita were deported to camp Minidoka in Idaho, and neither managed to regain their stride as artists afterward. Nomura had a lovely, dreamy style before the war,
turning Seattle into his own kind of paradise. With their
loose, sensuous line, his softly colored hedges and buildings seem to
be only pausing in space before floating away.

(For more on the theme of Seattle’s Japanese -American artists of the World War II generation, see review of Barbara John’s Views and Visions at the Seattle Art Museum in 1990.)

The thing about major figures, however, is that they tend to dominate. Morris Graves and Jacob Lawrence own the first half of this exhibit’s the 20th Century. Claiming early Lawrence for Northwest art is a stretch, as he didn’t move to the region until 1971, when offered full-professor tenure at the University of Washington.

Jacob Lawrence, Street Orator, 1936

When you’ve got it, flaunt it. The Seattle Art Museum does not own a Lawrence as good as this one.

Graves’ Chalice Holding the Stimson Mill, also from 1936, has the kind of fierce, light-struck landscape furrows that rival Anslem Kiefer’s, in deeper and far more radiant hues. Early Graves struck his colors like a gong, and they continue to reverberate.

The Mark Tobey here (Point of Intersection, 1949) is fine if a little academic, but representations of Guy Anderson and Callahan should have been left in the bins. Getting better Andersons could not be the impossible dream.

Rounding out the 20th-Century’s first half is Spencer Moseley‘s Olympia Landscape from 1947. Moseley is best known these days for arranging the Jacob Lawrence hire at the University of Washington, but what a lively painter he was. This painting does not even hint at the bebopping astringency of his mature work, but there’s real muscle in his iced blue waters.

Mid-20th Century art grips down and wakens in Seattle, seen here in the work of Michael Spafford, Robert C. Jones, Fay Jones, Alden Mason and William Ivey.

When Chuck Close met Willem de Kooning, Close told him it was nice to meet a man who’d painted more de Koonings than he had. One of those faux-de Kooning’s is in this show, from Close’s student days in the early 1960s at the University of Washington. (Only in the Northwest does evidence of this early source live on.)

As the exhibit edges towards the present, women begin to make more than an occasional appearance, including Marsha Burns, Alice Wheeler, Claire Cowie, Marie Watt and Susan Seubert.

Marie
Watt, Tear Down This Wall, 2007. Reclaimed wool blankets, satin
binding, and thread, 61 x 64 inches

I love Seubert’s series, 10 Most Popular
Places to Dump a Body in the Columbia River Gorge, from 1998. The museum owns all ten prints.

Seubert, Lewis and Clark State Park, gelatin silver
print, artists proof from an edition of 10; 16 x 20 inches.
 
In this telling of the Northwest tale, painters rule, not only in the past but in the present. That dominance represents a selective fiction. All we can ask of fiction is that it be convincing, and this one is, at least for the duration of the show.

Mark Takamichi Miller, Untitled, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x
64 inches.

Through May 23.

Among the many responses to this post (thanks, everybody!), is Yoko Ott‘s dissection of the money involved, as well as an alternative plan for a botanical garden at Seattle Center, leaving aside the fact that there is a perfectly lovely botanical garden in Volunteer Park. I’m posting her comment here, because she is indeed good at math.

One point you keep reiterating repeatedly is the $500K in lease revenue Regina. The (more important) public-private debate aside, it’s the math I’ve been interested in. Generally speaking, I see the point, $500K/yr certainly seems better than nothing. However at that rate it sure seems like SC is on the loosing side of negotiating a fair market lease rate. Granted, I’m not a real estate agent, so I’m taking a guess here. But really, that $500K at 44K total sq. ft is about $11.25/sq ft. Being somewhat familiar with commercial lease rates I say the park has some wiggle room to leverage a more competitive rate to really bolster its income. I mean if this IS about earning the public $500K a year as you mention, and the trouble-shooting thought process is to go to the private sector–why not think the way the private sector does and NOT operate far below market value?? Which brings me to the fact that if one spreads the anticipated $20M initial TI investment, (that is cost to build the museum), across the max 20-year lease that’s 1M a year JUST to build it. Add to that annual rent and operating costs (not to mention inflation) divided by their projected annual attendance and it seems like a risky solvent venture–let alone a profit buster. (Did they talk to Mr. Allen?) So what if Mr. Wright saved some cash and gifted the park 10M in 20 $500K annual installments and the City figured out how to build the damn green space–and hey here’s an idea, a part of it could include a botanical garden, with you guessed it, a Chihuly exhibit. Charge admission to it, it would be a fair trade off.

The game of cranking up the color on old TV sets offers rich rewards. Instead of verisimilitude, pink people can be cast in a cyanotic blue, and brown ones turned golden, like toast under butter. Landscapes too change in the over-charge of artificial light, as the stately succumbs to the carnival.

Alice Wheeler never met a natural thing that couldn’t be improved upon by the addition of cheap charm.

Wheeler’s inkjet prints are part of Made in the U.S.A. at Greg Kucera, through May 15.

Rotterdam’s Ron Van Der Ende builds from salvaged wood. He paints nothing. He specializes in festishized tableaus, objects that serve as emblems of historic import.

His partial block of shotgun houses from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward floats
on the wall, the white of the wall serving as the water that carried
them away.

As Ben told his younger brother Willy, the woods are burning.

Detail:

The only other artist who makes such an exuberant overuse of tiny nails is Tony Berlant. Berlant uses his as punctuation. They complete the already completed. Van Der Ende’s underscore the futility of literal reproduction. From fragments that have outlived their original use he creates another use entirely. His sculptures float, like spirits. No matter how lumbering their presence, they are almost not there, frozen in the act of erasing themselves.

To May 2 at Ambach & Rice.

Sean M. Johnson does not, himself, defy gravity. He arranges for objects to do it for him – sofas taped to walls, chairs teetering on two legs, ladders frozen on a perilous diagonal, cups poised on the edge of their saucers. Beyond the balance he manages to strike for them, nothing holds them in place beyond the seemingly insufficient trappings of tape and pins.

London bridges are always falling down, but Johnson gives them a last
chance to impersonate the functional. The risks he takes are associated
with dance and so are his payoffs, those complete moments on the edge of
a fall. There are other artists who reassemble furniture to frame it in
a new context, including Roy McMakin and Drew Daly.
Compared to their work, Johnson’s is rough and tumble, Caliban to their
Ariel. The silence his work inspires has an undercurrent of domestic turmoil: a heavy remembrance leavened with wit and ungainly grace.

In his mid-twenties, Johnson is mixed race: white mother and black father.

Paper from its cuts, envelopes stuck on open, eyeglasses from broken frames, torn photos from the shredder. (Via)

I like Tyler Green’s three-part
look at the Wexner Center for the Arts‘ Hard Targets, especially Green’s take on David Hammons’ Champ from 1983.

David Hammons’ 1989 Champ is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the bruising, difficult way up. Fighters such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis were heroes to black America, fighters who crossed-over and had success in mainstream society. But with success came tragedy: Louis died broke, his funeral paid for by German rival Max Schmeling. The tragedy went beyond individual figures: Countless young black men hoped boxing would provide a way up but instead were merely pummeled, used as entertainment or in match-fixing schemes, as disposable cogs in brutal entertainment.

Two Seattle artists who belong in the ring are Laura C. Wright and Randy Hayes.

Wright’s Momma Said Knock You Out
(wool jacket and leather
30 x 24.5 x 5.25 inches
2008) is a tribute to Hammons with a feminist, up-and-at-’em twist.

Hayes began his career in early 1980s, painting figures who deliberately draw the hard light of public scrutiny: strippers, boxers and prostitutes. Light splatters their bodies like oil hitting a hot griddle.

As John Yau pointed out in his monograph on Hayes from 2000, titled, Randy Hayes, The World Reveiled, Hayes uses photography to destabilize whatever reality his brush manages to suggest to push his scenes into the unreliable realm of hallucination.