Archives for 2010

The Frye is Rip Van Winkle with a sequel. It slumbered through the 20th Century and woke up in the 21st. Here’s the sequel: After striving mightily to keep its eyes open, it’s once again nodding off.

Little that Charles and Emma Frye acquired rises to the ranks of first-rate. Charles Frye saw Modernism as an unworthy aberration. Ida Kaye Greathouse, who followed her husband Charles Walser as the museum’s head, was if anything more conservative, although I am fond of a core of her late 19th and early 20th-century American purchases. Yes, she was after big names at reduced prices, rather than the best possible examples of same, but even so she managed to snag some great pictures. 

Senior curator Robin Held sees it as her job to present the collections in the best possible light. She even brought on staff a specialist in the so-called Munich Secession, to help her. Fine, I thought. Let Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker handle the mixed-bag legacy and allow Held to focus on the contemporary moment. That’s her strength and the reason the Seattle audience  developed high expectations from a dubious little institution.

Instead, legacy is in the driver’s seat. Everything now on view dares to be dull.

First up, Ida Kay Greathhouse: A Tribute. Where are her American greats? Not on view.

John Singer Sargent must have been short of cash to paint the vacuous flattery known as Mrs. Frederick William Roller from 1895. Those to continue to see him as shallow can bolster their viewpoint at the Frye.

Thomas Moran did his best work at Yellowstone National Park. He’s a large part of the reason we have national parks. In Venice in 1908, however, he turned in a poor imitation of Turner.

Greathouse adored the Russian expatriate Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin. I imagine she had her pick of that market. Below, Lady in Pink (Portrait of Natalia
Podbelskaya), 1912.

Onward to another Greathouse tick: Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska, featuring  Jules Dahlager, Ted Lambert, Sydney Laurence, Fred
Machetanz, Theodore Richardson, Cleveland Rockwell, Jonathan Van Zyle,
and Eustace Ziegler.  They’re not all terrible painters. I like Rockwell, but why these painters? And why didn’t she pick better examples? Most of the ones she brought home are bombastic at best.

That leaves
Tête-à-tête: 150 paintings from the Charles and Emma’s overexposed, profoundly mediocre holdings; Fred Machetanz (1908-2002) photos lithographs of the standard sublime in Alaska, and the somewhat interesting A Day in Skaguay, filmed by Burton Holmes (1870-1958), who in 1904 coined the term travelogue to advertise travel lectures with projections of hand-painted glass-lantern slides and early films. Interesting that everyone was fashionable and white in Alaska during those early years.

Out of kindness I’m skipping the exhibit exclaiming over Charles Frye’s entrepreneurial efforts. (He was a meat packer and landlord.) Museums need to remember that’s it’s OK to take the money, but they don’t have to kiss the customer on the lips.

The Frye picks up the pace in the fall.

Opening Oct. 9, still more about the Munich Secession: Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult, but there’s also Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why, featuring sculptures, costumes, props, masks, video- and photo-documentation of
selected past performances of the Seattle performance group as well as a new performance created for the Frye. That could be good. Who gets the catalog? Keller and his swooning ladies, of course.

The casual unfolding on the street, the elaborately effortless ritual, the bit with the dropped paper (working with accident), the deep friendship, the art of the body in motion: I love these dancers and this video. (via)

Dancers: No Noize (red jacket), Man (back jacket), BJ (striped shirt), Dreal (white shirt).
Directed and edited by Yoram Savion, Music by Erk tha Jerk!!

Imagine that the three top contestants on Work of Art were felled by injuries. A sad situation would have ensued. On So You Think You Can Dance, the talent was far deeper. Even though the top dancer (Alex Wong) and two close seconds (Ashley Galvan and Billy Bell) were either taken out or compromised by injuries, they left the show in good hands.

About those injuries, here’s a reasonable comment from Sara Marsh:

The intensity has doubled for the contestants this year, which is
something that the judges have regularly mentioned. Often, we hear that
it’s amazing when a dancer performs well in a new style, because last
year the dancers weren’t expected to be at the same point. There were
twice as many of them, and the learning curve was lower. Each contestant
danced half as often as they do this year.

I wonder if the new
format – picking only the top ten (or eleven, in this case) instead of
the top twenty dancers from Vegas week – is taking too great a toll on
these young dancers. Injuries like the ones Alex and Ashley sustained
are not trifling; these kinds of injuries can get in the way of a
dancer’s potential and career. (more)

Judges on both shows had problems (here and here), not that frustration with those in charge is anything new.

Gabriel Cornelius von Max – “Monkeys as Judges of Art” 1889 (via)

For the finales, both sets of judges pulled themselves together and made a case that they deserve to be there.

Lauren Froderman won So You Think. Any of the top three would have been good choices.  Abdi Farah won Work of Art. By no stretch is he a stellar representative of who’s out there, off the major career track and deserving a spot. I was rooting for most of the season Miles Mendenhall but could have voted for Peregrine Honig.

It’s true Farah stepped up for the final show, pushing past his insularity and conventional aesthetics to get a toehold into the plausible. Considering the artists working across the country without any particular notice who could have delivered on the show’s premises, the original question remains: Who picked these people?

The moment I saw John Travolta walking to a Bee Gees’ beat down a Brooklyn street, I began to take pop-culture dance seriously. Looking back, the movie is weak in the way all but the best dance movies are. The plot’s creaky to the point of unendurable, and that’s not counting the ’80s clothes and hair. Travolta’s dancing still shines. Thirty years after the fact and trapped in a bad movie, he works silence into cheap dazzle to get gold.

He the man, but what hung over the dance floor continues to make its appearance in art. Below, the disco ball as contributory influence on discards, broken lights, dead planets and chandeliers. Echoing behind all is the music of their sphere: You can tell by the way I use my walk… Rhythm, ladies and gentlemen, rhythm, even when, in David Thompson’s phrase, playing torch songs on dead batteries.

Jabu Arnell Disco Ball #2,3 and 4 2009

Will Rogan

Banks Violette

Sasha Frere-Jones

Lee Bul

Arnaldo Pomodoro, DISCO bronze with gold patina, 36 inches in diameter, 1966, second artist’s proof from an original edition of 3 (via)

Chris Burden Medusa’s Head (American, born 1946)
1990. Plywood, steel, cement, rock, model railroad trains and tracks, 14′ (426.7 cm) in diameter.

Dan Webb

Jack Pierson

Sam Baron

Heide Hinrichs

Gretchen Bennett, The dull flame of desire

Dale Chihuly

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

Samuel Beckett

Birth was the death of him.

Alice Tippit

SuttonBeresCuller – Working for a living

Alex Schweder – Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice…

Adam Satushek – a cup to lip problem

Brian Tolle– building your home on family values

Hans van Meeuwen – We’ve got to get out of this place

Fred Muram– romancing the unavailable male…

Mark Mumford

Edward Curtis, 1958-1952

More from those who are not afraid to go back in order to go forward.

Dan Carrillo, Jason Hirata, 2010

Luis Gonzalez Palma

Carrie Mae Weems

Deborah Luster

The Quileute on the Northwest Coast did not anticipate hordes of visitors would seek them out to say they are way cool. How could they? Previous to the Twilight saga, they were not exactly on pop culture’s radar, and now they’re bright lights based on false information. Yes, in Quileute mythology they dervive from wolves, but not (crucial difference) werewolves.

Wolf headdress, late 19th-early 20th century, Quileute, wood, paint, hair, 6 x 13 x 5 ½ in., Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution

Working with Seattle Art Museum’s Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American art, the tribe has decided to let its objects tell the tale. Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves opens August 14 with a performance by the Quileute tribe, (1-3:30 p.m.) with an exhibition blessing at noon.

Brotherton

A small Native community, knit together by ancient beliefs, living in their ancestral homelands–a remote coastal village, ringed with primordial forests and in the shadow of Mt. Olympus–seems like a fitting scenario for a supernatural story line. Cast as shape-shifting werewolves in the Twilight saga books and films, opposite a band of sophisticated vampires, the Quileute really do have ties to wolves–but not werewolves!

Quileute oral traditions trace their distinguished ancestry back to myth time when the powerful transformer, Kwa-ti, changed a pair of wolves into the first Quileute people. Thus began a long association with the wolf. I don’t know if Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, knew this but her mention of the mysterious Quileute tribe and an ancient treaty with vampires catapulted their small nation into notoriety.

From my point of view, they have shown remarkable poise in dealing with their new-found fame. In fact, they have collaborated with the museum for the last several months on a special exhibition of their art, most of which has been in the storehouses of major museums, in order to tell the authentic story of their wolf connections.
The wolf headdresses, sculptures of spirit beings, rattles, drums, and other objects–some more than 100 years old–were collected at a time when Quileute traditions were suppressed. What you will see when you come to the exhibition at SAM are those old traditions but, more importantly, how they have been kept vital and alive.

If an art critic wrote that he/she was startled to see a work of genius made from found objects, that critic would be consigned to the school of out-of-it. Since the early 20th Century, reworking found objects has been a staple. Needless to say, that critic would not be employed by the New York Times, where Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Ken Johnson and Michael Kimmelman set a higher standard.

Dance criticism is another matter. The school of out-of-it is in session at the Times whenever Alastair Macaulay ventures into the contemporary. In ballet, Macaulay has few peers. He conveys the depth of his understandings with clarity and even elegance. And yet contemporary reminds for him a mystery. Remember that he is the only full-time dance critic one of the only full-time dance critics employed full time at a newspaper in America. (There’s also Sarah Kaufman.)

Here’s Macaulay’s opening sentence for a  Mark Morris review:

It’s startling to see a work of genius composed largely from movements as basic as walking, running, hopping, skipping, lying down and the like. (more)

Startling?  Dance made of ordinary movements is, like the found object in art, ubiquitous. More than that. Following Paul Taylor’s Esplanade from 1975, it has become the single most important element in dance of the last 35 years. In her review, Arlene Croce heralded Esplanade as conferring “a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives.”

 I saw it in 1975 and was struck dumb by joy. That version is now available on YouTube, with the endlessly great original dancers.

…more is better. Stacked, clumped, stored and piled. Below, a dip into the ocean of those who use repetition as an aesthetic principle.

Jannis Kounellis
UNTITLED, 2006
Found wooden tables, bowl, knife, red fish
32 x 172 x 179 inches

Ann Tuominen

Chris Engman ABANDONED CRATES, 2007
Archival inkjet print
40 x 49 inches
Edition of 6, and THE AUDIENCE, 2004 Archival inkjet print 40 x 48 inches

Anissa Mack

Matt Sellars

Zelig Kurland File Room, Multnomah County Courthouse
2004 chromagenic print, edition 8

Colleen Wood, Pencils via I’m Revolting

Ed Wicklander He loves his kitties and has the carvings to prove it.

Kate Ericson / Mel Ziegler
Statue of Liberty, 1988
Etched glass jars and paint on metal shelves
72″ x 5″ x 5″

Jonathan Seliger Stretched Snowman, 2007
Automotive enamel on aluminum
99″ x 28″ x 26″

Hart Boyd

(For more of similar, see Things Organized Neatly.)

Will Rogan