Regina Hackett

Arts patron and irrepressible character Max Gurvich died at home in Seattle at age 94. (Seattle Times obit here.)

Board member and donor (with his wife Helen) to a variety of Seattle arts groups, including the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Gallery and Cornish College of the Arts, Gurvich’s lasting legacy might be a hideous pair of woven, window-blind style metal sculptures that rise 22-feet out of the water at the west end of the Evergreen Point Bridge, which connects Seattle to its  Eastside suburbs.

I wrote a story for the PI when they were installed in 2002. Here’s a recap:

Seattle’s rules for who can place what art in what part of the public sphere are rigorous, and yet Gurvich triumphed over all that to install his creations in a prominent spot, where 130,000 cars drive by them each day.

Here’s the good part: He didn’t say he was the artist to anybody who needed to approve the placement. Instead, he spent a year getting a permit from the Department of Transportation and the go-ahead from the majority of nine community clubs and six cities on Lake Washington.

They didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell.

Tom Lentz, Department of Transportation assistant regional manager for maintenance and traffic:

I thought Max was the
patron, and he had an artist working with him. I guess I should have
asked, but I’m an engineer. I looked into the engineering issues.
Rarely do people offer to give us something. I found it refreshing. Max
got support from the city’s art commission, and the state’s, too.

Actually, he didn’t. The state, King County and Seattle arts
commissions all said they had nothing to do with it.

When Lentz went back to his files to figure out what happened, he found that the DOT contacted both city and state arts commissions, and was told by
each it wasn’t their baby. Not on city property, said the city. Not
through our funding sources, said the state. 

The
sculptures, titled Aurora Borealis, look like early ’60s room dividers from a suburban den
joined to make inverted pyramids. Seven years after their installation, their kitsch exuberance has run its course.

Seattle curator Vicki Halper:

You have to hand it to him. He did it all. He should have been
stopped, but he did it all. 

Via

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Everybody’s got something to hide ‘cept for me and my monkey.
– John Lennon

Andrew Miksys:

Miksys won his first bingo game at 11, collecting $280. In high school he delivered a newspaper his father published, Bingo
Today, to veterans halls, fraternal associations, churches and sports
clubs in Seattle.

He knows the people he photographs in bingo halls, most of whom are dead and don’t know it. The routine of the game keeps them in a pretense of motion. They
stare are their cards the way the empty eye sockets of skeletons stare
into eternity.

Below, their stash.

Matt Browning:

Politicians infantilize the audience by reducing its members to first
names and jobs, as if everybody is a waiter in a cheap restaurant,
always on duty.
(Joe the Plumber.) Artists do the reverse. Instead of gassing up a stereotype till it
rises like a parade float, they use absurdist intensity to bring it to ground where it can be examined, ridiculed, celebrated and/or fractured into
the particular.

Take Matt Browning, who explained himself in his debut exhibit at Seattle’s Crawl Space late last year:

Men typically engage in bizarre competitions and intrepid
behavior during their lives as a means of bolstering machismo and
camaraderie. Instituting male pedagogy, identity and peer acceptance in
suburban America can, for example, take the form of climbing the
tallest tree as a child, asserting athletic prowess in adolescence, and
winning reckless drinking competitions in early adulthood. My work
illustrates the simultaneous presence of lunacy and beauty in these
types of testosterone-laden behaviors.

He digs to the root of male desire and
finds it wrapped in baseball, beer, pot, skate boarding and the blunt end of taking things
apart:

Leave no trace, review here.

Liz Magor:

When she was a child, she liked to slip into a forest near her
home in search of a kid-size weasel hole. She thought if she lived
there with a dog and a bag of potatoes, the silence of the natural
world would replace the ruckus in her head. Her work is about the folly of aspiring to be in a hole, and the cultures that become one.

Hollow

Laura Fritz:

Fritz thinks inside the box, where she finds fragments of your inner life. When you were otherwise engaged, what was private became public and subject to experiment. Her merger of science and art involves video, mechanical contraptions, cast-polyester molds and a tendency to surround images with thick slabs of silence.

Like Larry Bell, her boxes are all about light, but unlike his spare volumes that trap light on their surfaces through a variety of coated films, her light needs the light in the larger room shut off to be seen at all.
In the dark, when her fuzzy and uncertain pulses are the only illumination, they slide around you and take you in. In Section 4, a cat’s shadow appears inside a box, lit by the milky glow of her video screen. The cat hesitates at the locked door and bows its head.

Section 4

From Ms.C, my favorite monster (where high gets low), photo of Muro by Raquel Paiewonsky. C-Monster commentary: “Boobies!” Who says art criticism on blogs is not of the highest order? 

Click to enlarge. (Previous from me, Breasts at work and play here.)

Topping the charts (again): Holland Cotter with his review of Light of the Sufis, here. Cotter is where I go to shop for images.

Two from Sufi review:  A 17th century Indian painting he describes as “an ego reduced by love to an ash on the arm of God.” Nobody with as wide a view of art writes better:

A Koran page handwritten in light — that is, in gold and silver inks on
a sheet of parchment dyed deep blue — is the exhibition’s oldest work,
dating from the 10th or 11th century. Seen by candlelight, the words,
which describe the rewards of Paradise, would have glinted against the
dark ground like constellations in a night sky.

Also, Cotter on Giacometti, here:

These portraits are laborious, noodling things, their lines repeated
over and over as if Giacometti were determined to create something
solid from nothing, then to obliterate that something. Far more relaxed
— and surely Giacometti drew as compulsively as he did to relieve
tension — are the drawings that look incidental, on the fly: an empty
studio interior, apples in front of a window, a pot of tulips, a tree.
Heaviness lifts; anxiety is dispelled. The faint lines of the tree fly
outward and upward like flames, evidence of a lightened-up, fly-away
artist that some part of Giacometti may always have wanted to be.

Most dutiful plod: Kenneth Baker’s review of Lords of the Samurai. He tells anecdotes from the catalog and calls it a day.

Also insupportable: Baker’s contention that Ansel Adams tops Georgia O’Keeffe in SF exhibit. No matter what’s on view, this isn’t possible. Baker doesn’t bother to try to prove the impossible either. He just asserts it. What’s happening to one of the best art critics writing inside the dying empire of a newspaper, or, what’s your frequency, Kenneth? Working for a living, taking what you’re given? Your slumber-while-typing depresses.

Dress up the skin of your life: With infections, here.

Speaking of food and art, Toi Sennhauser is a deeper sea diver. At art festivals, she has served bread baked with her vaginal yeast as starter, here, and made edible candy portraits of her family, here. (Her husband is a stick-to-your-teeth kind of guy, and her mom’s got a sour exterior.)

Energy in the technicals: Paul Levy gets specific about Howard Hodgkin, here.

Verbal tennis at the Houston Chronicle: Douglas Britt gets it right in a platformed response to The Art Guys, sadly,  here and here. How do I know, since I didn’t see it? That’s the beauty of video documentation, here. If the AG of the 1980s met the AG of today, the former would tell the latter to stop messing with the legacy.

Hooyman here via Kate Speck, who graduates from high school today. (Hi Kate Speck!) Hooyman’s title should be, global warming on the way to the grocery store. Love the hat.

On the question of why live at the end of the earth, two things fall squarely in the plus pile: In Seattle, I get personal letters from my bar and spring greetings (below) from my funeral parlor.

Dear Friends:
Seattle is a wonderful place in the springtime. The grass grows thick and technicolor green and flowers and trees burst with vibrant color. Rhododendrons unveil purples and pinks, yellows and red, daffodils and magnolias and cherry trees line the streets like pom poms. Spring is in full swing and boy is it a colorful affair.

Lundgren Monuments enjoys this parade of color. So much so that their monuments often sparkle with the same dazzling colors of nature. Think of how the cemetery landscape could change with glowing swatches of color sprinkled upon it’s landscape. Think of how a burst of color can remind us of the magic in life, the sheer refusal to exist in shades of grey.

We wanted to share two new projects from Lundgren Monuments. The first is a bright pink arched top memorial. We set it up this afternoon and couldn’t help but smile as we walked around it. It looked like a giant piece of candy, a tall glass of lemonade, an electrified flower pedal. Strangers passed by to get a closer look. “Is that a…” Well, yes it is.

The second is a family memorial we installed this morning in Floral
Hills Cemetery in Lynnwood, Washington. This rising moon/setting sun
theme consists of a solid block of Butterfly Blue granite, capturing a
300 pound, four inch thick cast glass disc. The sun/moon element will
change color and luminosity morning to evening and season to season.

(Click to enlarge)

We hope you are enjoying the spring season and that sunlight and color brighten your day.
Sincerely,
Greg Lundgren.

Lundgren. head of arbitrary art foundation (Vital 5) here.
Lundgren,  bar owner (The Hideout) here and here.
Lundgren, performance artist (member of PDL) here, here and here.
Lundgren, leader in boutique death movement here.

We are what we eat but also what we reject, admire and aspire to be.

I.D.: Individual Demographics
at Seattle’s Greg Kucera Gallery is about self, an identity that’s imagined, implied, cataloged, remembered or projected outward like a fog machine.

For Anne Appleby, color carries the world. In Faded Sweet Pea (oil/wax on four panels, each 16 inches square, 2008) there is a homage to the dying in the layered mutations of her shadings, impossible to see reproduced.

Nola Avienne is not interested in elegies. As she notes in her artist statement, some collectors buy art because they want to invest in a brand, which presumably has a good chance of rising in value.

If the artist has become a commodity why not circumvent the art altogether and literally own a piece of the artist?

Step right up, folks. Her Donor Wall Project features small blood portraits of 72 artists. Framed in white and hung in a grid, these expressive abstractions range from light-struck to the darkly clotted.

I love Alice Wheeler‘s large color print titled, Kathleen Hanna at Home, Olympia, 1993.
Light makes a halo around her red henna hair, and the look on her
beautiful young face is pensive. On her chest, however, she scribbled
the word, “incest,” followed by a question mark.

Wheeler’s subjects confront the dark but stay jaunty. There’s an
up-and-at-’em vibe to her work that constitutes a world view. Neither
rain nor sleet nor snow nor incest can keep a good girl down.

Matt Browning investigates the rituals of his skate-boarding, pot-smoking, beer-chugging and male-bonded suburban youth. Leave No Trace is a small wooden box he carved for a secret stash. The original must have been strictly utilitarian, but its recreation carries the ethos of the moment lightly, when he and his buddies huddled around a ritualized object, seeking a (collective) high.

Browning’s work proceeds from the most basic questions: Who am I and where did I come from? His story is common, but his delivery is rare.

In the horizontal green yellow and red colors of the Ethiopian flag,  Jack Daws created a welcome mat. Set in black lettering across the front is a qualification on the invitation: INTEGRATORS WELCOME.

Who’s on the out looking in? All the hetros who hang with heteros only, and the reverse. Also not welcome are men who don’t want women at the party, the young who shun the old, the white who know no others, the rich who would not hobnob with the poor, the fleet-foot who look down on the lame.

What about those who count as friends no one covered in feathers, scales or fur? No one who swims, flies or runs on four legs?

Scratch out their names.
That’s pretty much everybody. A welcome to all becomes welcome to the few who live on the wild side of inclusion. Thus, a door mat is a rallying cry to expanded consciousness, and what’s flat on the floor aspires to higher ground.

Leigh Bowery was the king/queen of the London club scene in the early 1990s.

[Read more…] about Individual Demographics: New You Machine

The supple line Tom of Finland (Touko) is entirely devoted to
articulating the robust bodies of young men. Always hung, hard and
willing, they represent a state of imperishable bliss.

In the gap between the artist’s
idealized fixations and the reality of flesh, the audience for Tom of Finland’s
drawings live. The drawings arrest time, which ticks onward. They are a
time out that never ends, all coming and no going, all light and no
dark.

Some who disdain his work
are homophobic, but there are other reasons for giving it a
pass. The artist created a heavenly world, a place where, in Wallace
Steven’s phrase, ripe fruit never fall. If there were such a thing as a wave forever hanging at its
crest, surfers would shun it.

Heaven is where the
imagination goes to die. Even in the literature of the faithful, hell
is where the action is, which is why scholars say
Milton was of the devil’s party. What do mine eyes with grief behold?
asks Lucifer, Milton’s fallen angel. It’s easy to love Dante’s Inferno while failing to finish (or start) his Paradiso. 

Tom of Finland refused to acknowledge that joy must end. Aesthetically, he is saved
from irrelevance by the elegance of line. If painters of
perfect flowers are minor, then he is minor. His interest in youth never faded in the eternal sunshine of his mind.

Set
in the political context of his
time, however, the artist who died in 1991 at age 71 is a hero. To
delineate a version of the beautiful
which mainstream culture rejects is a brave act. Just as a
single man in 1989 stood up to the tanks in Tiananmen Square, Tom of Finland stood up to hatred by articulating its opposite. His art is the
flower that anti-war protesters in the late ’60s placed in the
business
end of National Guard rifles. Make love, not war.

A suite of his drawings is on view at the Greg
Kucera Gallery as part of a group exhibit titled, I.D.: Individual
Demographics. (More on ID soon.)

Wednesday night at 7 at the gallery, Blowing Up Demographics,
a discussion moderated by Mary Ann Peters, features playwright
Ki Gottberg, and artists
John Feodorov and Margot Quan Knight.

Via