Regina Hackett

Bert Long colors his.

Dale Chihuly fills his with neon.

Tavares Strachan doesn’t want his to melt (death arrested).

Neither does Marc Quinn, who made his from his own blood.

That leaves Jeppe Hein, whose work currently assays the puddle state in the center of the main gallery at Western Bridge, as part of its new exhibit titled Underwater.

In every way I prefer the Hein, for its modesty, rigor and purity. Next to it, the others seem to have dressed for a costume party nobody was holding. Truth to materials is an old-fashioned idea. When it works, it can still knock the competition off the board.

Debra Baxter is not interested in her early work, which features clouds. She posts no images on her Web site. Neither Howard House nor Massimo Audiello, the galleries that represent her, allude to it in any way.

(Baxter’s current show here. My review here.)

In the interests of getting me to leave her alone, however, she sent me a few images from her old world, created late in the 1990s into the mid-2000s.

The first I saw were made of powder puffs sewn together. They loomed with lumpy grace out from the wall, obviously clouds and something else too, carriers of an antique feminine code – the gangster’s moll who powders her nose as men plot murder.

Powder puffs beautify their owners while being themselves quickly
stained and discarded, just as despoilers of the land, made rich, move
on.

Quickly following were another series of larger, more imposing
powder-puff clouds, caught in the act of transforming themselves into
something more substantial, maybe the white cliffs of Dover.
When they mutated again, they had taken on an ominous cast, spreading
along a ceiling and down the seam of a wall like a fungus, a powdery
decay.

At the end, she was back to beauty in a big way. A single cloud hung
from floor to ceiling in the Platform Gallery. Made of silk tissue
paper, it billowed with a dainty grace in spite of its bulk.

 An exhibit
at Gallery 4Culture titled, The Cloud That Fell to Earth, was a tribute to Walter Tevis’ 1960s novel about a man who fell to Earth, too alien, tender and talented to thrive here.

The massive cloud made of cotton and felt clung to the ceiling as if it
feared falling. Wrapping itself around the gallery’s industrial air
ducts, its intensity was spineless. This pendulous portent, this baggy
monster, wanted to retreat and had nowhere to go.

In Spent, her cloud is a loogie hawked out of the sky to land with a muffling
thud on a pine tree. In the photo that pretends to document sky’s
insult to land, the pine tops a mountain, with white air surrounding
the tree as a kind of reverberation.

In a series of small photos collectively
titled Portable Weather System, a cloud tries its luck in a
variety of settings and yet remains a stranger. It’s
strange on a lonely road, strange at the ocean and strange indoors.
Apparently, loony clouds can lose their place in the natural order.

Me and My Cloud portrays Baxter as a nurse taking her
ailing air mass for a walk.

Via

(Note: Mistaking it for a multiple, I deleted the first version of this review after posting it, which is a good trick. Now for my second trick: recreating the piece from memory, or what’s left of it.)

Art consists in going the full length. If you start with drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
– Ravel, quoted in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Debra Baxter began with clouds. She tracked the drift of distant fairy palaces even as they fell splat onto a tree, like a gob of spit hawked from the throat of a hostile sky.

If the sky was going to spit on her, she might as well return to her studio, which she did, ending career as a landscape artist.

The objects she makes now bear a direct relationship to her body. (At Howard House through June 24.)

Suck it Up (carved alabaster and quartz crystal) 2009

Jeff Koons began in similar territory in 1985, with Aqualung.

His is a generalized emblem of failure. Hers is intimate. One need not be in trouble to put on a life vest, but to blow into a paper bag requires a panic attack.

Baxter’s sculptures are the dead end of romance. If jukeboxes played visual art, Baxter could turn Jerry Lee Lewis inside out: You broke my will, what a thrill.

You Turn Me Inside Out Like a Glove. carved alabaster, 2008

The lavish praise parents heap on their grown children cuts the heart, as it betrays an anxiety the child might otherwise not know the parent feels for her future.

So Proud of You, 2007

The partner who asks for a time out has all the power.

Time Out. Glass, sand, sterling silver, African wonder stone, 2009

You can say anything to a loved one. The open channel of heart-to-heart communication seals the deal. Right? What could go wrong?

Speed Bag (Love Tap) 2007

The artist paring down for purity might, depending on her materials, release slivers that burrow into her lungs, making the process of making art a fatal attraction.

Dust Mask (Catching My Breath) alabaster, sterling silver 2009

There is nothing wrong with this exhibit save for the exhibit itself. Heidi Hinrichs, the great master of the material forlorn, is in the front gallery, Baxter in the back. To counter the spell Hinrichs casts, the second artist has to engage the work by batting the ball back or be so completely different than comparisions don’t occur.

Baxter can’t take either route, and she isn’t helped by the long brown ugly table on which her sculptures appear, as it makes her work look puny. Outside the context of the Howard House show, however, she’s golden.

Lot of this going on. Not art on a table, but table as part (or entirety) of the art.

Little lamb if you are able
Turn yourself into a table
– fragment from Irish fairy tale

Here’s three that deserve more play.

Jesse Durost

Andrew Keating:

Saya Moriyasu

Via

Making is thinking. When the conclusions of the process are shown, it’s thinking aloud.

Andreas Bee considers the meaning of shelter at Suyama Space. (Beth Sellars curator. Through Aug. 14)

His floating sculptures on thin, bendable wooden-strip supports resemble hats, umbrellas, clouds or pup tents. They are shelters deprived of function, as there is no sky in a gallery and no need for protection against the elements.

They are intrusions that slid into space with the grace of a ballet dancer pretending to be a butler. The audience is free to wander where it wants, but everywhere it goes, it is in relation to the structures hanging high or low throughout the expanse. When people stand under one, they perceive themselves wearing light like a shawl. Those on the outside see those inside as torsos with stylized cloud heads. At the opening, it was hard to keep talking. Instead, attention gravitated toward Bee’s wordless thought bubbles, how they slowly swayed in the room’s air currents, took up all the space without dominating it and served as advocates for the Herman Meville school of art, promulgated in 1851 in Moby Dick:

Do not reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow in and through, endlessly, like music.

Martin Puryear is a member of the Melville School, which advocates thinking without words, through materials. In their myriad-minded manifestations, so are Robert Irwin and Cris Bruch. For starters.

Via (Click to enlarge.)

Continued from this post.

Vital 5‘s Arbitrary Art Grant ($500) in the performance art category went to somebody who showed up to check it out.

From Dino Martini, gallery dealer on the scene:

Many, many people driving or walking by of course believed it was a “real” protest against performance art… In the end, a protester by the name of Garrett Hobba took the prize of $500 in $5 dollar bills. He showed up to see
what the situation was and ended up winning. (Vital 5’s) Greg (Lundgren) let his intern pick by using a rifles scope (minus the rifle) from across the street. Whoever she pointed
at first won.

Lundgren sent the images below. Only in an arbitrary world would Hobba, a musician, top these visual artists in their own game. No wonder they’re protesting. No justice, no peace. Click to enlarge.

Other performance art protests that were in the end, performance art, include Kelly Mark’s Demonstration in Toronto in 2003 (restaged in front of the Henry Gallery in 2006) and Anna Halprin’s Blank Placard Happening from 1968, restaged in Portland, Oregon, last year. In the photo immediately above, FlatChestedMama restages Halprin and Mark, proving that something can come from nothing.

Mark’s Web site here. Her version of pointlessly rousing the rabble came equipped with blank slogans:

What do we want… NOTHING!!!
When do we want it… NOW!!!”
Hell No…We Don’t Know.

When he was exasperated, which was often, the voice of long-time PI A&E editor Duston Harvey carried across the newsroom. Even though I sat next to him, he regularly forgot to lower it for a private exchange.

Harvey: Jesus Christ, Regina. Your lead is dead.
Me: Don’t you admire its conceptual rigor?
Harvey: Even if there were hope, which there isn’t, I don’t have time for CPR.

Although (and sometimes because) he could be abrasive, sarcastic, impatient and a tough sell for an art critic, I remember our time together fondly. He could find clarity in a muddle and never lost sight of the ultimate goal: to connect to a general audience without losing the interest of the already on-board.

Before Billy Howard moved his gallery (Howard House) to Pioneer Square, he was unhappily in Belltown. Howard had grown sick of the intrusions of the drug trade and asked me to write a story about it, here. The day it appeared, a member of the community he deplored approached him on the street to suggest he and his ilk were displeased by the tone of the coverage. Then the dealer in drugs punched the dealer in art in the face.

While expressing sympathy for a bruised friend, I felt a secret and shameful thrill. Drug dealers are reading art stories!

One day on the Vashon Ferry, I saw a woman pick up the PI’s entertainment section and page through. She read Gene Stout (rock) and William Arnold (movies). Theater she treated with a once-over-lightly scan, and classical music she skipped entirely. Her eyes fell on my page. I waited. She read the headline, looked at the picture and passed me by. Had I been sitting closer, I might have tried to talk her into reconsidering. (Ok, the lead’s slow, but you might be interested in…)

If I connected with any public outside the previously committed, I’m not aware of it, but I appreciated the decades-long, never-say-die chance to try.

Time to say die.

Art magazines and art blogs are the journalistic equivalent of studio art, while an art review in a newspaper is like public art. Anyone from any background might happen upon it.

Where I write now does not exist in a generalized public sphere. A street sweeper on coffee break will not happen upon a leftover copy of this blog and be drawn into a review. A woman getting her heels buffed won’t find it on the empty seat beside her and be motivated to see an exhibit of which she might otherwise not have heard.

For an art critic, the death of newspapers is the death of potential connection to wider worlds. Everyone who reads this blog has a preexisting condition, otherwise known as an interest in art.

On the other hand, there are notable benefits. Where I’m writing now, nobody tells me what to do and nobody derides my blog just because it’s a blog.

Below, the thoughts on blogs from the final three (in the final two years) PI A&E editors.

Duston Harvey (my favorite by a mile): You’re wasting too much time on that blog.
Emily White: I hope you don’t think I have time to read your blog.
John Levesque: I hate blogs. (Big sigh)