Archives for 2010

Into every life advice falls. Few things are as unwelcome, except if it comes from an artist who wraps it in spin. Such messages can be comically explicit, fearsomely obscure or rooted so deeply in banality as to turn on the light inside a cliche. (Previous post expanding on the theme here.)

What follows is a small survey of artists whose visual exhortations and aphorisms deserve to be cited.

Dave McKenzie, Self-Help Hyperventilation Bag, 2002 (Image via)

Shawn Wolfe, Panic Now

Zack Bent, 2007

Charles LaBelle Exterior Song, (detail) Hollywood, (Cracked Actor), Alley W Fairfaix N Beverly 2003

Scott Wayne Indiana

Jason Hirata, Untitled, from video, 2008

Marc Dombrosky Get Signatures/Drop Tub 2009, Embroidery on found paper, 5 x 3 inches

Squeak Carnwath, Good Ideas, 2006, Intaglio print, ed. 24, 12 x 12 inches

Mark Mumford, Break it Down, 2004 Color Lamda print, 40 x 29 inches

Allison Manch, Wink

The Art Guys

Grant Barnhart, Beg For It, exhibit announcement card, Ambach & Rice

Hoping to best whatever the present day offers by way of minotaurs, Man Bartlett, son of Seattle painter Bo Bartlett, approached midtown Manhattan this morning as if it were a maze and set out to walk it in less than 24 hours, from 59th and Lexington to Times Square and back. Follow him on Twitter, here. He expects his own personal minotaur to be waiting for him on the red stairs.

His map:

Another view of the confrontation, Michael Spafford‘s Minotaur & Maiden I, 1987, oil/paper, 28 x 18 inches. (Note the red stairs.)

Assume since 1915, the bride has grown weary of being stripped bare by her bachelors. There are the conventional methods of fighting back, including broken promises, failure to deliver, failure to appear and failure to care.

The more daring brides turn their bachelors into spectacle.

In 1999, Maurizio Cattelan taped Massimo De Carlo to a wall. The following year, Cattelan talked Emmanuel Perrotin into spending a month dressed as a pink phallus.

Making a spectacle of one’s dealer has taken a more intimate turn in Seattle.

Susan Robb‘s DIGESTER (2008) is six 55-gallon drums designed to extract methane from human waste to make energy. The waste in question came from her dealer, Scott Lawrimore of Lawrimore Project. (Waste not, want not.)

Opening February 20 at the James Harris Gallery are the line drawings of Jason Hirata, made by mixing sweat with raw Prussian blue pigment.

James Harris:

To create the works on view in this exhibition, the artist and gallerist worked up a sweat doing jumping jacks, sit-ups and push-ups, jumping rope, and running down the hallways of a storage facility that Hirata rented for just such purpose. As he has done in the past, Hirata collected perspiration in two containers to use as a painting medium. The artist and gallerist collected their own sweat by scraping it from their foreheads, necks, and backs.

(Hirata left, dealer right)

Bob Dylan’s text prompts in Don’t Look Back (1967) are the most famous part of the documentary. (That’s Allen Ginsberg on the left, a celebrity non sequitur.)

Euan MacDonald‘s headless tribute (the video, Where Flamingos Fly, 2005) has no similar loose ends. MacDonald eliminates what he can, including, on occasion, the point.

At the opening of MacDonald’s exhibit at Western Bridge, A Little Ramble, bewilderment prevailed. The question in the air could be succinctly summarized as, What?
MacDonald’s work is full of narrative, but its connections with
hundreds at a party are hard to discern. He makes sense one on
one. In a crowd, his work is mute, even when it’s taking up almost all
the room.

One
on one, however, a mood emerges. The birds have eaten the bread crumbs
leading out of the forest. No, they’ve eaten the forest. It’s there and
not there. What swells around the consciousness of the solitary viewer
is anti-climatic. The artist who isn’t there is a tour guide to a
mystery. In his absence, he left notes for a reassuring brochure. These
notes might be helpful. They look as if they are intended to be
helpful, but they’re in code.

[Read more…] about Euan MacDonald – the banality of art

Few objects signify as quick a trip to the bottom. Besides the slippery peel, there’s the flesh, which is on its own personal bullet train from ripe to rotten.  

SuttonBeresCuller

[Read more…] about The banana downfall – a visual survey

Whenever you are, you’ve gone the wrong way. (Via)

Caleb Larsen’s Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is on view at Lawrimore Project, but it sold on e-Bay earlier today for $6,350. Auction over? No. This auction will never be over.

Review here. Frquently asked questions below.

• Q: Doesn’t the first sale doctrine prevent you from collecting further payment past the initial sale of the item?
  A: In order to be recognized as a work of art the contract must be
  adhered to, and regards of who owns it and who buys it the contract
  remains between the artist and the purchaser, not between buyer and
  seller.

[Read more…] about The endless art auction on eBay

The art world is always saying next, please. I’m bored with your dead tiger shark and live nudes, your singing museum guard and your fallen Pope. The shark that is never dead is the art world itself, which, as Woody Allen explained in Annie Hall, has to keep moving to stay alive.

Those who work in that world shovel the present into the past as a kind of necessary clean-up. For market reasons disguised as aesthetics, key power players determine who among the previously celebrated remains a live wire. The rest will be regulated to the heap of has-beens, to be humiliated and disappeared. Only live wires make the market hum.

Even as they rose like surface to air missiles to art world’s stratospheres, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. lived with an undertow of detractors, those who thought somebody was being exploited here and it could well be them for taking this project seriously.

How could it be taken seriously? The odds against it are impossible.

In 1981, when collectors were drinking pink champagne out of glass slippers at the Mary Boone Gallery, a serious student of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey and Joseph Kosuth stepped off the subway in the South Bronx to the smell of the burning garbage.

[Read more…] about Tim Rollins & K.O.S. – courage, vision and durability

Zinn died Wednesday of a heart attack. He was 87. Boston Globe obit here.

If American history is hard to read, it’s because the country’s aspirations fall so far short of its practices. Textbooks tend to respond with cover-ups, but not ones written by Zinn. A People’s History of the United States is a courage teacher. Not only is it scholarly, clear and elegantly written from
original
source materials, its focus is justice: how and when it was denied and
how and when it was achieved. His outrage is accompanied by his
hope, wit and patriotism.

Below, a scene from Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller’s fine documentary titled, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
(To purchase, go here.)

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Unlike the other major members of the Northwest School, Kenneth Callahan did not seek transcendence. What was on earth was good enough for him.

He started out strong as a figurative painter in the 1930s. Forging a
silky yet monumental style, he created men to match Northwest
mountains. He liked muscle-bound grandeur but released the figures who displayed it from the confines of gravity. Full of light, many hover on the edge of floating away.

By the 1940s, he had pinned his figures to the ground with webbing.
There are excellent paintings from this period, but by the late 1960s, he was more interested in abstractions. By the 1970s, his work had taken a brazenly ugly turn, with hot strokes of
orange against blood brown and crinkled masses of shadows.

Bad taste is a fatal flaw in a decorator, but in an artist it’s
neutral. Artists who fully inhabit their bad taste take it to
another realm, where taste is irrelevant. Callahan inhabited his whenever he chose. There were moments in his career when his work was highly prized and edging its way into national prominence, and moments when even in the Northwest he was overlooked. The Northwest School’s Big Four (Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey and Callahan), evolved into the Big Three, with Callahan missing. If he cared, he did not let on.

A small survey of his career is currently at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, from the 1940s through the 1980s. (He died in 1986 in his early 80s.) All the best work is missing, but what’s here is swell. The exhibit is light on the abstractions that lost him so many fair-weather friends and concentrates on what everyone admires: his sumi inks, oil portraits of animals and small, florid landscapes.

North Lake Camp, early 1950s, sumi ink. 35 x 46 inches. Imagine that the image the gallery supplied is on white paper in black ink. The sepia tone appears to have arisen from the process of transmittal. At any rate, the fallen cabin on the left belonged to Guy Anderson. Callahan sketched it soon after its demise, when the snow that brought it down had started to clear. The trees moving in and out of focus have a skittery grace. They lean into the light as if they’re starved for it.

[Read more…] about Kenneth Callahan – painting the earth