Archives for September 2010

Like parade floats, mass murderers loom large but lack physical weight. Because their deeds remove them from the stream of daily life, they become unimaginable as flesh and blood. Eric Yahnker pops that bubble. His popping tools are found objects, real books whose titles were probably intended as jaunty but land with a thud in the bizarre. What’s shocking is the reminder that the ghouls in the titles sat down for breakfast, lunch and dinner, making witty repartee.

Yahnker A Full Plate, 2010. Found Books & Shelf

Yahnker is one of five artists in Playboys & Killjoys at Ambach & Rice. Its title derives from Harry Levin‘s idea that comedians can be divided into those categories. Playboys we laugh with, killjoys we laugh at.

I’m not sure either applies. Art rarely provides hilarity. The jokes it features are more of a nudge, a  knock or a confoundment. They revel in displacement, undermine the expected and charm us with deliberately false cheer. It’s possible to appreciate them without cracking a smile, let alone laughing.

William Sloane Coffin once observed that the Bible is like a mirror. “If an ass peers in, we can’t expect a prophet to peer back at him.” Yahnker whited-out everything in his Bible but letters that sequentially spell out “Beegees.” It’s the first time I looked in a Bible and thought of Saturday Night Fever.

Jokes repeated lose their humor. The crack and curdle, become red in the face, fall flat, get no respect. Depending on the teller, however, the stale can rise again, acquiring a faint patina of horror.

Sara Greenberger Raffery Rodney, 2009 C-print.

Remember those boys in seventh grade who inked battles in their notebooks? One of them grew up to be Raymond Pettibon. The arrested development of his content glows inside the fluid grace of his delivery.

Air guitar, kitchen version: Greenberger Rafferty, Testing 1-V, 2009 (Microphone stand and baster, whisk, slotted spoon and ice-cream scoop.) Detail

Pickles are never the star. (Erwin Wurm, Untitled (pickle) 2009 Cast and hand painted acrylic resin & pedestal)

If Markus Vater is not working at The New Yorker, I can’t imagine why.

Through Sept. 19.

Where did Howard House artists go, after the gallery’s demise? A few of the best have joined a few others who are nearly always unaffiliated to form a temporary online fire sale, the BBQ Biennial. Instead of $5,000 or $10,000, how about $150? How about $5? It’s a joke about art and money, with real art as its sobering punchline. Those offering their life’s work for a song are Debra Baxter, Gretchen Bennett, Jason Hirata, Jenny Heishman, Joey Veltkamp, Matthew Offenbacher, Nicholas Nyland, Sol Hashemi, Ian Toms and Wynne Greenwood.

Bennett: a mosquito, my libido, hello Pen on cardboard. 20 x 3 x .25 in.  $50
.
Baxter: Glass, sand, sterling silver, African wonder stone. 14 x 13 x 10 in.  $475

Nyland: Ceramic. 2.5 x 5 x 7 in.  $25

Veltkamp: Plaster Bunny Plaster and tint. 10 x 8 x 6 in $25 (Also available in chocolate.)

Nicola Vruwink opens a solo show at L.A.’s D.E.N. Sept. 15.

You have to be on her email list to get it. If ever a woman could benefit from Flickr or facebook, it’s she. 

Burns, Dahlias

In response to this post, Steal (download free) This Book, Marulis wrote:

Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but I always thought that Abbie Hoffman was a phony, an unethical exploiter, and a plagiarist. Try reading Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan for an eye-opener about Hoffman and Leary and the rest of those professional media manipulators.

Sure, I was only a street kid with barely a ninth grade education but even I could see beyond their phony brand of fluff.
There is no nostalgia in my mind for those guys, just memories of the damages their selfish hi-jinks caused They were preeminent A-Holes of the very first order.

Unlike, say, the blissful reaction to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, those praising the student activists from late 1960s meet stiff resistance. Even the activists from the mid-1960s disapproved of those who came later. Mario Savio was serious in the face of serious issues. Frolic disgusted him.

Hoffman was anti-war with bells on. Confronted by a bad war and everything The Greatest Generation chose to ignore (racism, sexism and homophobia), he danced at his revolution like a class clown with a microphone. What the Wife of Bath claimed for herself he could claim, that he had the world in his time.

But Lord Jesus! When I do remember me

Upon my youth and on my jollity

It tickles me about my heart’s deep root.

To this day does my heart sing in salute

That I have had my world as in my time.

In defense of Hoffman, I won’t say he was right about everything although I think he was. I’ll say he was young.

Andrew Marvell:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may…

He sported and he stood up. Was he phony? Only in the eyes of those seeking consistency. An unethical exploiter? Hell no. A plagiarist? Note the title of his book. He was a property-is-theft kind of guy. It isn’t good for anyone’s character to be so right as a teenager. Of course it went to his head. Obnoxious and charming at the same time, he never lost faith that America could one day live up to its own ideals. His mistake was that he wanted that happy time to be his time and was crushed by the country’s wide, long swing to the right.

Where did he get his faith in justice? From the Civil Rights Movement, and from reading Allen Ginsberg.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I’m sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

You made me want to be a saint….Any Catholic could have told him, saints tend to come to bad ends, and their grace co-opted to serve a corrupt institution.  Because Hoffman could not be remade in the image of the state, he has been rejected, even by those who should know better.

If cats were bigger, they wouldn’t pretend to like us… Ed Wicklander

Dead muses…Peregrine Honig

The world inside the world…Jennifer Zwick

The past that rots inside your head….Liz Magor

The last good kiss you had was years ago…Joey Veltkamp– 1977 (In Blue)

Decorating an ordinary disaster…Liz Magor

Up and at ’em….Scott Wayne Indiana

The pea prevailed….Alice Tippit – The Princess

Animal instinct….Akio Takamori

Strange fruit, medieval edition….Claire Cowie
Every nerve on end…Jason Teraoka

Before he knows it, before he hits the ground….Grant Barnhart

With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was
meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity.

Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

Abbie Hoffman was the stand-up comedian of the Anti-War Movement, beloved by everyone who appreciated high jinks in their dogma, freedom of thought in their self-evident truths. He had the misfortune of being entirely correct about racism, sexism, homophobia, the war machine, environmental catastrophe and economic injustice. His wit made him prominent, and his prominence made him a target.

(Image via)

He is no longer with us, but part of his legacy is a hilarious blueprint of his ideas titled Steal This Book, published in 1971.

Bill Hartel:
 

Abbie Hoffman couldn’t get a anyone to publish Steal This Book — thirty publishers turned it down. When the book was released, bookstores wouldn’t carry it. Newspapers, TV and radio all refused to run advertisements. But despite these set backs, Steal This Book found its way on to the Best Seller list in 1971.

 The book sold more than quarter of a million copies between April and November 1971. So where are all those copies? The Chicago Public Library doesn’t have one. Although the New York Public Library has 9,993,000 books, it hasn’t had a copy of Steal This Book for twenty years. The Library of Congress, the world’s largest library with 20 million books, doesn’t have one either.

After he published Fuck The System and Woodstock Nation, Abbie was kept informed of every sort of rip off scam. He saw that this collection of ways to beat the system could be made into a catalog for his Yippie movement “Sort of a tongue in cheek parody of the American ‘How To’ manuals that were so popular at the time,” said Abbie. But Steal This Book is much more than just a manual of survival in the counter culture world — a “Hip Boy Scout Handbook” as the New York Times called it. In between the chapters on “Free Food” and “First Aid for Streetfighters,”

Abbie’s thoughts on freedom, liberty, responsibility, self reliance shine through. His idealism echoes the sentiments of Henry Thoreau and Thomas Paine.
Abbie’s former publisher, Random House, rejected the book, as did thirty other established publishers. Not to be so easily thwarted, he collected $15,000 from friends and set up Pirate Editions. Book distributors refused to distribute the work, so Abbie arranged with Grove Press to distribute Steal This Book provided Abbie assume all the liability for the book. Abbie tried unsuccessfully to place advertisements for the book in the media (with the lone exception of the San Francisco Chronicle). Although the book was on the New York Times Best Seller’s list, they wouldn’t carry his ads.

In spite of all that, Hoffman scored a best seller. But unlike a predecessor such as, for instance, Thoreau’s Walden, it is hard to find and unlikely to be taught in universities.

Enter the world of open source.  Anyone can steal this book by downloading it for free.

(Library of Congress number 72-157115 (stolen from Library of Congress)
copyright ©1971 PIRATE EDITIONS) Abbie lives! (more)

Past tense in Seattle: the space curator Dan Cameron called “probably the most visually stunning commercial art space in the U.S., outstripping any comparable venue in either Chelsea or Culver City.”

Cameron on Lawrimore Project:

The space is huge, and, more importantly, has been broken up by the Seattle firm Lead Pencil Studios into a cluster of rooms, each of which has an extremely precise character. Tall ceilings and indirect natural light are balanced by a renovation that leaves just enough of the original building’s quirks intact so that walking into Lawrimore feels like stepping into every artist’s ideal vision of an art gallery.

That gallery, now demised, was 5,000 square feet. Last night, Scott Lawrimore opened its replacement – a white box storefront in Pioneer Square, at 117 S. Main Street. Blink and you’ll miss it. Spanning no more than 150 square feet, it could fit into his old restroom with space left over for toilet and sink.

How does it look? Lovely. Radically cool. White-on-white-in-white with high ceilings and crystalline light.  In a corner is a built-in bench with a Beuysian gray felt pad. Lawrimore’s  calling that bench his office.

Is he kidding? He’s gotta be kidding. I don’t think he’s kidding. The new is everything the old wasn’t- modest, mute, reductive, clean, cheap.

Isaac Layman had the last show in the old space and has the first in the new one. Instead of his large, pellucid previous, he offers fragmentary gestures and a few props lined up along the wall.

Seen in person, the unphotographable image below looks like a watercolor of a birch tree smeared on its edge with faint blue and pink. Instead, it’s blank photo paper he rubbed on the corner of a room.

Hallway Corner, Red Wall, White Moulding, 2010
Inkjet photo paper, interior house paint
16 x 16 in.
Lawrimore opened in 2006. Is he planning to spend his next four years in this closet? Not bloody likely. As an intermission, however, it’s a score.