Regina Hackett

Elgin Marbles: Remember as a child when some thug who’d stolen your lunch said possession is 9/10’s of the law? It still is. Culture Grrl has the story on how the English continue to disgrace themselves, here. Don’t they want to prove there is progress in human affairs? No. They want to hold on to a tourist draw.

Germaine Greer: The doctor is not in, but I feel confident in saying this woman is crazy. She used to be deranged about sex, and now she’s nuts on art. She’s also a pleasure. Here she is on why nuclear cooling towers are more compelling as art than art, and better than nature. (Trees? She’s sick of them.)

If she were talking about Vanessa Renwick’s images of a cooling tower near her home town, Greer would have a point. More Renwick on her Web site: Oregon Department of Kick Ass. As many times as I’ve typed that title, I never grow tired of typing it again. To paraphrase what Mark Anthony said of Cleopatra, age cannot wither the Oregon Department of Kick Ass nor custom stain its infinite variety.

A realer reality: Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post, here.

The real always has been important territory for artists. The difference now is that while most of the more arty, “imaginative” options are looking tired, the “new realism,” if we dare call it that, seems to be gaining ground.
It’s as likely to tweak and distort the world as to record it faithfully. It digs more deeply than ever before into what reality, and its documentation, can mean to us.

More arty options look tired? Which options are those? Such generalizations, so attractive to critics, betray an inability to be specific. Art’s specifics eat holes in the blanket of the general, and weaselly words such as “most” and “seems” cannot provide a patch.

Still, Gopnik’s essay offers a good list of artists backed by his adequate descriptions of their work. Too bad there are no links or images. Presumably, the senior art critic at the WP doesn’t have time to make what he writes minimally useful online. It’s another example of mainstream media committing suicide.

Previous on the topic: Buddy Bunting and Mike Simi.

Unlike Bunting and Simi, Steve Davis is not on the outside looking in. He’s behind bars with his teenage subjects, serving as teacher, friend and chronicler of their experience.

Sometimes, even Davis can’t get all the way in, and an institutionally-enforced failure to communicate is the subject.

Related: Chan Chao – portraits of women in a Peruvian prison, here. They’re not nearly as good, but they’re getting all the bounce. Reason? There’s work to do, so that the Northwest’s marginalized geography is not a marginalized destiny for its artists.

Below, Davis’ Intensive Management Unit, Green Hill, 2000 . Click to enlarge.

The Twining-Humber Award (via Artist Trust) recognizes women artists in Washington State who are at least 60 years old. (Previous post, One time only every year! Art world negatives become positives, here.)

More candidates? If so, email me and I’ll post them here. Or, you can skip a blog post and go directly to Artist Trust to make your admiration
official, giving your candidate a chance. Time to take that extra
step for those who’ve labored long in the field. (Go here.)

elcomancho suggests Merrily Tompkins: (No Web site. Below, Big Tesla with grass growing out of its head. More on the link. Since then, she has made jewelry, example below.)

Mike Derry suggests Gillian Theobald:

Several decades ago, critical opinion had begun to swing against Kurt Schwitters. In a robust age, his desire to shore up discards into a version of his life looked at best minor and at worst nostalgic.

Schwitters, Merz Picture 32A (Cherry Picture). 1921

Today he’s philosopher king. Early 21st century art has a strong interest not only in recycling ideas and materials, but in trying and failing to recycle them, leaving them in tatters.

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

– Robert Frost, The Oven Bird

From Fail Blog:

Previous post, The Ice Man Cometh, here.

Paul Kos, The Sound Of Ice Melting, 1970. (Thanks to  Scott Lawrimore.) Click to enlarge.

Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo opens June 20 at the Portland Art Museum. Anybody who lives in Portland with a tattoo or got one there could take a picture of it and be considered for inclusion. Because chief curator Bruce Guenther is himself solidly inked, I posted an advance here. (How many times do we get to look a semi-nude, buffed-out curator?)

Now that frat boys think nothing of covering their forearms in morning glories, however, tattoos don’t necessarily have the edge they once did, which makes the Northwest Film Center‘s contributions vital.

On June 21, the center will screen A Scarred History of Great Britain; July 25, Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry, and Aug. 20 The Mark of Cain, tattoos from the Russian Gulag.

About Sailor Jerry. Not a lovable old salt. Here’s his list of 7 Reasons Not To Get A Tattoo, via Cookie, which hung in Jerry’s parlor. We can quibble over which is most offensive. (I’m going with #3. ) But for taking a trip down memory lane with a pure product of old-time, outcast America, his movie can’t be beat.

 A few years ago in New York, riding the bus back downtown from the Studio Museum Harlem, I found myself sharing a seat with a lean wolf of a white guy.

Three permanent tears ran down his face, which I believe could have alluded to an unfortunate encounter in prison. His white shirt rolled up with a package of cigarettes in a sleeve revealed a text: Born to Lose.The song hung in my mind and surfaced a couple of blocks later. Yes, I broke into unconscious song.

Suffice to say he was not amused. I was happy he didn’t belt me, as the don’t-hit-a-woman rule seldom applies in his circles. Later that night, tucked up in bed, I realized that the oddest person on the bus that day had a press pass.

Yes, it’s time to nominate candidates for Artist Trust’s annual Twining Humber Award for Artistic Achievement. ($10,000. Previous winners here.)

To win, you have to be female. (See Jerry Saltz for how well that’s working out, after 40 years of second-wave feminism. Here followed by here.)

You have to live in Washington State, that hotbed of visual art careerism.

You have to be 60 or older. (Old artists = forget about it.)

Yvonne Twining Humber was overlooked most of her life and distracted by the tasks that pull women away from being artists.

(Image: River Picnic, 1940. Click to enlarge.)

Yet she kept on. Relatively famous in Boston in her youth, she moved to the Northwest with her husband and promptly fell off the art map.
With the proceeds from the sale of her house, she set up this award as a shout out to other women in Washington state who find life getting in the way of art.

It was her way of saying, “You’re not alone; keep going.” Humber puts me in mind of Tillie Olson, whose stories of women buried alive under homemaking reflected her own life and meager art output.

A number of recomendations, although the output of none could be called meager. (NOTE: I deleted a few names from the original post for the excellent reason that the artists who answer to them are not yet 60.)

Sherry Markovitz

Gene Gentry McMahon

Susan Skilling:

Heidi Oberheide:

Gayle Bard:

Barbara Noah:

As a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist, Dave Horsey has every reason to feel good about himself, and he does. On his Hearst-sponsored Web site, he looks as if he’s channeling John Wayne.

At a party for the new PI, Horsey welcomed the assembled “to the revolution.”

It’s no secret that the media world is being turned upside-down, and as in any revolution there is some pain and discomfort in all the changes. But there are also incredible opportunities. Something new is being born, and I think we’re giving birth to it right here.

He was referring to the online-only PI. How can a shadow of the old be a model for the new?

Unlike more than 80 percent of his former colleagues (including me), Horsey wasn’t shown the door. And unlike the few who remain (except freelance), he did not have to give up his severance to remain employed (like Eric Nalder, directly by the Hearst Corporation). Nor did Horsey have to accept a big pay cut or lose other benefits.

Makes sense that he was favored. Hearst would be crazy to let him go, as he is the best editorial cartoonist working in what used to be called mainstream media. On the other hand, did he have to go that far in praising the ghost of a newspaper? Something new is being born with a shallow, once-over-lightly approach? Not only new, but revolutionary?

Thank God Hearst got rid of the dead weight, right, Dave? The people who insisted on asking pesky questions. Who needs them? The new PI can rewrite a press release and post that puppy before it has time to pee on the carpet.

On Wednesday Horsey aimed another kick at the departed.

[Read more…] about Dave Horsey derides his former (fired) PI colleagues

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