Regina Hackett

Enjoying a conversation with a hospital security guard who once slammed a man face first into a glass wall for spitting on her, I missed the fact that I’d followed the line out onto Lead Pencil‘s ramp rising on a steep diagonal at Seattle’s Moore Theatre.

I’m afraid of heights. Titled Exit Ramp, the piece cut the theater in half and gave those traveling on it a new view of the space below. What that new view was I can’t say. As my knees locked, I focused on a woman in a wedding dress with gray ashes on her white-washed face who was leaning out from the balcony above and singing Mozart.

The song and the sight of her (old-worldly with a hung-in-the-closet, suppressed glamour), distracted me from an interview that came to mind at this most inopportune moment. In it, Brendan Kiley asked Lead Pencil’s Annie Han about her fears for Exit Ramp.
.

The eternal fear of structural collapse and bodily injury on any
project bigger than a man is tall.

Exit Ramp is part the Free Sheep Foundation‘s Moore Inside Out, a Saturday-night only project with 50 Seattle artists and performers that treated the whole theater as a gallery, including stairs and corridors, basement and backstage.

Thousands showed up. As Kiley wrote in his preview,

Free Sheep roots out forgotten places, their histories and memories,
and distills them into potent, one-shot events that leave indelible
burns on the city’s collective memory. Free Sheep happenings are
mayflies on fire.

Lines curved around the block to get in. Once inside, there was more waiting. Few appeared to have any idea of what they were waiting for. People joined a line and shuffled along in a collective mood of happy-to-be-surprised.

Not everybody, of course. I ran into an art historian who said, “Typical Seattle mediocrities.” She was waiting for her yoga teacher to perform and looked as if she were holding her breath.

The crowd was the thing. Seattle is frequently a place where an audience is hard to come by, which means this audience – everybody there for performance art – was heartening to itself.

Something important got lost in the self-congratulations, however.

[Read more…] about Free Sheep Foundation – Moore Inside Out (Fear of heights)

Via

The new ornate: Kehinde Wiley

The old rough and tumble: Ed Templeton (with stigmata)

Their merger: Debra Baxter – Brass Knuckles/Tongue (Hurts So Good)

Via

In the catalog for The Puppet Show at the Frye (organized by the ICA), John Bell claims that a puppeteer frustrated by his unachievable desire to control people (Being John Malkovich) the “way he controls marionettes…has nothing to do with real puppetry and is instead a misdirected metaphor about puppets: the idea that the goal of puppet performance is complete control of the object.”

The word “complete” saves the sentence, but not by much. Subtle undercurrents are not the ocean. A bottom is not a top, and a puppet directs nobody’s action, not even its own, especially not its own. One person peels the grape, the other eats it: When I say do it, hop to it.

But rules of puppetry are not rules of art. Art is not limited to the taking and/or giving of orders. It’s about doing what you can defend, which is, in this show, to muddy the waters.

Bruce Nauman’s Violent Incident (Man/Woman Segment) is puppet tennis, with actors. If violence is the ball, they bat it back and forth; both victims and aggressors.

Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija use puppets as art world stand-ins. Once artists establish a brand, can’t they disappear inside it, letting their puppets do the interviews? Who’s the puppet in this case, the figure sustained by strings or the journalist taking the interview seriously?

In Guy Ben Ner’s Elia: A Story of an Ostrich Chick (2003), the artist, his wife and two children descend the evolutionary latter to enact a drama that accurately portrays their lives – evolution as a slide guitar.

In Kara Walker’s Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, whites are slaves whom blacks generously claim, only to be exhausted by the whites’ inability to rise to the rudiments of civilized behavior. It’s a shadow play in video, but not a simple exchange of roles. The whites are burdened by white stereotypes. In the end, power does not corrupt, and oppression does not ennoble.

Nayland Blake’s Tabletop Production of the Philosophy in the Bedroom is a history of the old world, its decadence and freedom preserved in fragments. Annette Messager’s Faire Paradeis a pair of child’s pajamas riddled with colored pencils – St Sebastian for preschoolers.

If Pierre Huyghe’s “This is not a time for Dreaming” (with Puppet Heap) were the entire show, it would be worth seeing, even though the narrative cannot be gleaned without explanation. The narrative doesn’t matter. What does is the clear, haunting beauty of each scene as it slides from present to past. Art can break your heart.

That leaves, among a host of other terrific entries, the obvious one, reproduced on the cover of the catalog and with nearly every review: Dennis Oppenheim’s Theme for a Major Hit (1974).

To answer his own question – how to make performance art without being there? – he created a cadre of his own mini-me’s. Dressed in hip suits, they assume various unruffled positions till a timer goes off and they dance.

Puppets are rarely cool. They’re fall guys who are beat on the head but rise again, bits of their stuffing clinging to the cugel. Oppenheim’s make Andre Benjamin look awkward. They’re light on their feet, with a heavy-metal gleam in their gun-gray eyes.

Jaymi Durate, a Frye guard who’s spent weeks with them, winces when the bell sounds and they thunder into action. She says their charm wears out, and she could be right. Give them five minutes and leave, on the other hand, they’re hot forever. Her best-of-show is Pierre Huyghe.’s. The more you see it, she said, the better it gets.

(Previous here and here.)

Because he and his girlfriend just broke up and he remains broken up about it, a guard at the Frye cannot force himself to rotate through the gallery in which Cindy Loehr‘s two-channel video, Colloquy, runs on two monitors.

The Frye has a tight crew. Other guards are covering for him.

He’s not the only one who backs away as if the gallery’s a gun. Loehr’s pair of talking hands with rhinestone eyes and mouths that move in the crack between thumb and palm recite a text that anybody who’s not extraordinarily lucky has already heard and/or spoken.

Only one hand talks, and it’s a massive utterance.

In their search for closure, the garrulous cover their targets in wounded projections. They lay out what the other did wrong and how (even now) the rift can be healed (baby, don’t go), if only the silent would speak in confessional detail and profess revived devotion.

Loehr’s silent, soon-to-be ex expresses misery with small, downcast quivers. No frog spreadeagled in a high school biology lab suffers more. The text tells itself through hands manipulated into expression, which makes those hands puppets. The videos that feature them are in The Puppet Show, a traveling exhibit from the ICA.

At the Frye through Sept. 13. Previous here, more to come.

I did not hustle to see The Puppet Show from the ICA when it opened at the Frye last month, partly because (already been chewed) puppets are everywhere. Pretty sure the exhibit plucked a few stringed bodies from the contemporary image stream as easy-to-chew crowd pleasers and sorry more compelling explorations tend not to travel, I filed it under an ever-receding-into-the-future to-do list.

I should have listened to Jen Graves, review here. (Mine in multiples soon to follow.)

The Puppet Show is killer good, and so is its catalog. Catalogs for crowd pleasers are either too jolly or too academic, good for their show lists, images and quotes from artists. This one, like Poussin, can truly claim to have thought of everything.

Below, jewels plucked from its various crowns, otherwise known as quotes from essays, beginning with the anchor piece by ICA curator Ingrid Schaffner, which provides an essential history of.

The art of bringing dead things to life is how Kiki Smith, who was once a busker with a Punch and Judy show, relates her work as a sculptor to puppetry. Or half-life, since part of what makes puppets so compelling – and, to many minds, creepy – as objects is that they always appear to be as much dead as alive.

The puppet that opens its eyes after everyone has gone to sleep…

(About Calder’s Circus, from 1961:) The sight of a big old bear of a man playing with tiny childish objects … encapsulates a lifetime’s effort to make art as gratifying as a toy.

fingers tangled in strings…

In the creation of art, it is the puppet one makes of oneself that is most important. (Harold Rosenberg)

Jane Taylor: Big points for resuscitation of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which was always too big-idea for me, and whose virtues have receded through
the lens of nephews and nieces, who unanimously reject it.

‘Stop.
Will you. Stop Dave. Will you stop Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid Dave.‘ 
These are not questions, nor are they appeals. They are chains of
signifiers.

[Read more…] about Prelude to a puppet: the catalog (Hello Dave)

Via

Theodore Roethke, images Charles LeDray. From Sperone Westwater except portrait of the artist.

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

After Chase Bank bought the failed Washington Mutual in 2008, Chase found itself with more art than it had space for, as Chase’s Washington Mutual is a slimmed-down version of the disgraced original.

What happens to roughly two-dozen paintings, drawings and sculptures by veterans of the Northwest mainstream that Chase decided not to keep? (Including Alden Mason, Joseph Goldberg, Jeffry Mitchell, Robert Sperry, Frank Okada, Doris Chase and Gaylen Hansen.)

Earlier this week, Chase staged a give-away. Museums were invited to choose what they wanted, followed by other selected nonprofits. The Seattle Art Museum confirmed that it participated but declined to say what it picked, as those choices are dependent upon approval from an acquisitions committee.

Rumor has it SAM chose the Sperry and nothing else. Other museums didn’t want to confirm the giveaway at all, as they believe Chase wants to remain anonymous.

Chase could have sold everything anonymously and cashed the check, although the gap between the work’s appraised value and current market value could be large, making tax deductions a better financial option. Whatever the motive, there are worse things that could happen to art than landing in a museum.