Archives for June 2010

War

Adam Helms, image via

Byron King

Polar Brokers is a series of drawings where I took the bio pics of big
oil executives and morphed images of polar bears into their silhouettes.

What if Flash Gordon went to art school?

Bryan Schoneman Communicating with the B Horizon. 2010
Aluminum foil, dirt, Plexiglas, wood, glass, steel, rye grass, video
monitor
Dimensions variable
(Flash Gordon meets Kim Jones but manages to stay presentable.)

An exhibit is the last thing tuition buys you. Using as evidence the University of Washington’s MFA survey at the Henry Gallery, the program of digital arts and experimental media is worth the dough, as is sculpture, especially ceramic sculpture. Painting is less so. Although there are artists graduating who know how to move paint around, their modes range from bombast to nostalgia. Nobody appears to have spent any time in the church of what’s happening now. (Denzil Hurley is on the faculty, and yet there’s no sign these students had the benefit of his counsel.)

On the other hand, who knows? Some artists are sleepers who wake up later, while others who come on strong are never heard from again.

Below are a few of those I hope to hear from again.

If Alwyn
O’Brien stops making art, she’ll be missed. Starting with a lumpenproletariat material base familiar from the
abstractions of Franz West, she gives us the old world radiant in decorative
ruin. I can’t think of a UW graduate working in clay who has mattered this much since Michael Lucero in 1978. 

O’Brien, image via Best Of . Objects of Unknowing: Somewhere between the Propped and the Picturesque.
2010
Slip cast porcelain, photographic decals, foam core, plaster, paper,
wood, wheel, paint, wallpaper

(Images via All My Heroes Died of Syphilis)

When in doubt, build something. Samuel Payne‘s installation is a piece of high-flying overkill, a forensic examination of an ominous black smeary thing that remains hearty, despite a laboratory’s efforts to isolate it.

Drawing Construction #2 (Shadow Boxing Compass). 2010
Sandbags, ax, jack stands, car scissor jacks, music stand, wood, light,
tape amplifier, speaker, cart, shoes, rope, hand-sewn sandbags from
clothes, canvas, paper, C.V. joint grease, tree stump, sound of chopping
wood

Hanita Schwartz took an object, did something to it, did something else to it.

Schwartz, Elsewhere under the Monochrome. 2010
Mixed media
Box: 64 x 42 x 40 in.
Print: 50 x 40 in.

Peter Nelson, still from Mr. and Mrs. Nelson. Oodles of charm here. Puppets with paper mâché heads and hands struggle through the issues of late middle-age confronting the artist’s parents. Killer text. I especially appreciate the stunned expression on the dad’s face. He thought everything was dandy but found out his wife has long contemplated an exit.

Nelson video here.

Lisa Rickey’s pillows look light as air, a la Warhol. They’re not. Kick one if you want to break your toe. Any way the Henry can buy these and leave them in the courtyard? That courtyard needs all the reflections it can get.

Rickey Pillow Talk (Reflection). 2010 stainless steel
Approximately 8-10 ft. x 10-12 ft. x 8-10 ft.
(Image via)
Lisa Rickey Pillow Talk (Reflection). 2010 stainless steel
Approximately 8-10 ft. x 10-12 ft. x 8-10 ft.
(Image via)

Maggie Carson Romano grew up in Arizona. (As the B-52s said about Idaho in 1980s, Get Out Of That State!) Using an experience she knows well, she charted the freckles that have appeared on her young body as sun damage and turned them into a sky. I love this piece, deeply and madly. (Sunblock, everybody, sunblock.)

Romano, Self-trace, for pressing against. 2010
Embossed photograph
44 x 90 in.

Romano:

 I see my freckles as an emergent physical record, mimicking
photographic film by darkening from exposure to sunlight. The map is
life scale showing the full space of my body while revealing only its
trace.
I embossed each freckle by hand, creating a relief map that can be read
by touching the surface of the image. The title, Self-trace, for
pressing against refers to my act of tracing my markings and also to the
freckles being a physical trace of my body. The title also invites the
notion of pressing against the surface of the map, suggesting that
another body could absorb my particular pattern of visual markings as
physical indentations on their own skin, amidst their own freckles.

A Biblical promise…

But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not
therefore…

is a threat in the age of surveillance.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch:

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train…

Evidence can be gathered on any life. If the state seeks, it will find, and hope of oblivion will be a romance.

Sade, from Marat Sade:

And when I vanish
I want all trace of my existence
to be wiped out…

Kevin Van Aelst tracks the trace evidence of himself, as if he were his own detective examining his own crime scene.

I first saw Van Aelst’s work accompanying Virginia Heffernan’s NYT’s blog, The Medium, her excellent examination of Internet culture which after today will be part of the NYT’s ArtsBeat, the NYT’s attempt to compete with the LA Times’ Culture Monster.

Van Aelst obliterates the distinction between art and illustration. Below is his take on the subject of art theft (Heffernan’s story here.) An illustration needs the story. Van Aelst’s illustrations are the story.

The last gasp of a dying order or the revitalized root music of American racism?

From NYDailyNews.com. Full story here.

Artists who painted a mural at an elementary school in Prescott depicting four students, with the most prominent being a Hispanic boy, were asked to lighten the faces amid taunts and tensions.
R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the Prescott Downtown Mural Project, told a local newspaper passersby regularly shouted racially charged comments at his group while they were creating the mural at the Miller Valley Elementary School.
“You’re desecrating our school,” “Get the ni—- off the wall,” “Get the sp– off the wall,” were common, Wall said. “The pressure stayed up consistently,” Wall said. “We had two months of cars shouting at us.”

Hinshaw/AP
Pamela J. Smith and R.E. Wall sit on the scaffolding in front of the
Miller Valley School Mural titled “Go on Green” in Prescott, Ariz.

Wall said his artists began touching up the mural earlier this week.
“They want us to lighten up the forehead and the cheeks [of the boy in the center], and make him look like he is coming into the light,” he said. The school told Wall they want the children to appear more “radiant and happy.”
The school’s principal, Jeff Lane, told the newspaper he asked the artists to “remove some shadowing that made the faces darker than they are.”

Lots of comments on this post. I want to thank the artists themselves, who graciously offered the most basic metaphoric response imaginable, and everybody else. 

Apocalypse Now surf scene, homemade 2010 Afghanistan update (to Gaga). Via. If we were fighting with this music video instead of weapons, wouldn’t everybody be dancing in the streets?

Blake Fall-Conroy via Wasteman Wonders

Blake Fall-Conroy Minimum Wage Machine (Work in Progress)
2008
Custom electronics, change sorter, wood, plexiglas, motor, misc. hardware, pennies (approx. 15 x 19 x 72 inches)

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.

And (good god) sexism. That’s what it sounds like when Marly Guthrie covers Nelson’s Travelin’ Man. (Via Molly Lambert, who titled her entry, Ricky Nelson never had immigration problems.)

Andy Warhol considered himself a camera. He was more like a mirror. Into his mirror the culture gazed. Every little thing about the people in it – from the soup in their bowl to the money in their pocket – is art.

In my youth when visiting friends, a photo of the host on the wall was worrying but not conclusive, especially if some other person, place or thing shared the frame and could be considered the point: a favorite haunt, horse, child, lover, dead parent. Two or more photos of the host alone? No need to ask which way that wind blew – into a full-blown case of narcissistic personality disorder. I might wrap that person up but never take him home.

Today guileless youth post hundreds of photos of themselves on Facebook. They carry themselves in their phones and on their laptops, never far away from the chance to take more photos of the subject dearest to their hearts, as if they were each their own church, genuflecting at their own altar. 

Someone peripherally involved with a struggling chamber orchestra recently confided that the problem is the music director. He tries to sell the idea that art is worth an encounter rather than the reassurance that the community already owns the art and has a home there.

Again and I know I’m being an old fart: For me the appeal of art was that it offered something greater than myself, and that by engaging it, I could find my way into the deep end of the pool.

Enter Warhol, whom I long resisted. I used to think he made the idea of the deep end obsolete, and I mourned its passing. In time I realized that he made the idea of the shallow end obsolete, that everything can open up and contain a world.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum, Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death: Andy Warhol Media Works is Warhol at his most unguarded. He loved the people represented here, and they loved him. For him, they dispensed with the shellacked smiles of the camera ready, caught the mood of their moment and reflected it back to him.

Himself he didn’t spare. Why is it that Warhol’s version of himself as an old drag queen has a Wife-of-Bath elan while Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits as aging matrons are dry at their root? Adrian Searle wrote of the series that Sherman’s work is “more durable than it looks.”  Searle is brilliant, but what does that mean in the context of now? Like Oscar Wilde before him, Warhol taught us to judge by looks.

Curated by Marisa Sánchez, Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death is a clean, straight shot of Warhol, including his Screen Tests projected large across two galleries, photobooth strips, sewn photos  and Polaroids. The man who had a lot to say about being alone was almost never alone. These are his people, his team pre, during and post Factory. On the evidence of this show, despite being shot, being the subject of endless bad reviews and in possession of many personal foibles, it was great to be him.

Only one quibble: the title. Why Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death? Isn’t that title taken already? I refer of course to Bruce Nauman’s 1983 neon circle: Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain.

Billy Howard’s gallery on the northern edge of Pioneer Square is open for its final First Thursday Gallery Walk tonight, 6-8 p.m. (Previous post on his closure here.)

Howard’s last exhibit is Patti Warashina, a pioneering figure in West Coast ceramics, one of a trio who brought Seattle ceramics to national attention in the 1970s. (The others – all from the art faculty at the University of Washington – are the late Howard Kottler and the late Robert Sperry, the latter her husband.)

Kottler had no false moves. Sperry had one great one – cracked, sea-foam surface plates. Warashina is the most erratic – across her long career scoring big and striking out. The nerve and wit of her best work derives from a fundamental simplicity. Her worst is overworked, sporting surface decoration that has little to do with the figure underneath it.

Besides being way too crowded (the gallery’s fault), the current show presents Warashina at her most festively inert.

Patti Warashina
Figure D
2010
whiteware and mixed media
22″ x 18.5″ x 17″

For comparision, consider how Claudia Fitch uses color on a ceramic figure. (There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit….via)

TORSO (2), 2006
Ceramic porcelain
13.5 x 7.5 x 6.5 inches, Greg Kucera Gallery

Through June 12.