Kurt Cobain – last days

Kurt at the Seattle Art Museum closes Sept. 6.

Eric Yahnker isn’t in it but could have been. The freak note would have been welcome.

This too. Nothing like a Jackson Family-Cobain mash up.

Kurt could have featured YouTube tributes in a corrdior, any corridor. My personal favorite, also, of course, not in the show, is from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Smells Like Teen Spirit traveled many miles to get there.

Wanting more doesn’t suggest a lack of respect for curator Michael Darling’s excellent product. I love this show. My review in Modern Painters. Last in, Ben Davis on ArtNet here. Davis does a fine job. Only one paragraph stopped me:

Inasmuch as there is another possibility for relating to pop culture in this show, it comes in the form of Charles Peterson’s black-and-white images of the early Nirvana onstage. Yet as stirring as these pics are, they feel like documentary, not art.

Ben: The is-documentary-photography-art question was resolved before you were born. Anyone who can look at Peterson’s version of Nirvana and question whether it’s art has a hole-in-soul. There’s death all over it, death and love.

Davis is right on about Alice Wheeler, however.

However, at least one piece at SAM does offer the sought-after spark of connection with Kurt Cobain, in spirit as well as in subject matter: Northwest photographer Alice Wheeler’s image of a young man, with bleached, Cobain-esque hair, and the whisper of a beard, staring out at us with an indecipherable intensity. He wears a Nirvana T-shirt, beneath a red-checked lumberjack shirt. The old Seattle Kingdome sits in the background (long since demolished to make way for not one, but two wasteful replacement stadiums, with corporate names), time-stamping the picture. He stands in front of one of Seattle’s tent cities for the homeless, which, you guess, he calls home. People used to knock grunge as “homeless chic.” Here things flow the other way.

Tent City, Seattle, WA, April, 1999, as the piece is called, touches on the relationship of art, celebrity and the real world, like all the other art here, but the stakes are vivid and clear. Wheeler’s photo hurts a little to look at, because you have the sense of something frail and confused and human looking back at you. But let’s be honest: Only something that hurts a little can be true to the past that this show tries to tap into, or, for that matter, to our present.