Regina Hackett

As Tyler Green noted today, American historical art is popping up all over:

The National Gallery, the Met, the Huntington and the Nelson-Atkins have all opened major American presentations this spring. (The Met isn’t done: Its American paintings and sculpture galleries open in 2011.)

Opening next year in Arkansas, Crystal Bridges (collections link here) is sure to transform the field.

In the meantime, Green wondered the following:

On a morning when an American president born in Hawaii to a Muslim
Kenyan father and a Kansasan mother is speaking about Islam, Israel and
the United States at Egypt’s Cairo University, while back home a Latina
visits Capitol Hill to drum up support for her landmark nomination to
the Supreme Court and while New Hampshire becomes the sixth state to
offer state-level marriage equality, does it make sense for our art
museums to present American art galleries that present American art as
it might have been considered in 1935?

Really, 1935? There wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm for historical American in 1935. Let me first say I’m happy to have a dog in this race. When the Seattle Art Museum reopened in 2007, it was (for the first time) with an American wing. What is old hat in this material on the East Coast is less so in the West and especially in the Northwest, where its absence has been nearly total.

The problems in building these collections are dramatic. American historical art is now a big crowd pleaser. With the best material increasingly hard to come by, it’s tempting to offer second tier work from stars rather than shake up the field with first-rate work from lesser knowns.

Because it apparently went for the former, Christopher Knight found the Huntington lacking, here. So did a well-informed blogger going by the name of Los Angeles County Museum On Fire, here. (Who? Who knows? On the Web, nobody knows if you’re a curator at one of the institutions you deplore. Or not.)

(For this topic, we need Robert Hughes back at his peak. Failing that, we can reread American Visions.)

SAM shines in the quality of what it has collected. Starting late, it came on strong with the best material.

[Read more…] about The American historical art boom. Is it a bust? Not in Seattle.

I haven’t seen Ethan Hayes-Chute‘s Hermitage, which the Boston Globe describes as a  “life-size re-creation of a hermit’s two-story wooden cabin, made with materials salvaged from dumpsters, construction sites,” but boy howdy have I seen it.

Whiting Tennis offered something similar a couple of years ago titled Bovine.

Some hard-scrabble hermit might have built either one from scraps and lived in it for decades, picking his nose and peeing out the door. Good luck to the guy. (I might be joining him shortly.) As art, however, both sculptures reek of frontier nostalgia and trade in wild West stereotypes. They’re shabby chic without the chic.

My favorite grow-your-own art project was Patrick Holderfield’s in the 1990s. Without interrupting the processes of decay, he made rugs and chairs from plastic tubes filled with rotting food. (No visuals of them anywhere on the Web.)

Artists who insist on posting only current work on their Web sites miss the opportunity for their work to be considered across their careers. Some spit on that opportunity. They want their old work to disappear from this earth. It’s the new them that interests them. Requests for images from critics who want to look backward will be ignored.

Ignored is not the worst option. Was it something I said? After I noted on this blog that Holderfield’s Web site would not release images into the image stream, Holderfield shut it down entirely. I hope it was a coincidence. At least reproductions of old work could be seen. Now there’s only the small version of what’s current at the artist’s gallery.

Holderfield’s rugs and chairs slimed their way out existence with a magnificent stink, which can’t be said for Allison Kudla’s experiments in a similar vein.

Her delicate wallpaper continues to evolve, as do her tiles.

Kudla recently got a Gap Grant from Artist Trust. For a list with links to recipients’ work, go here.

(Related post here.)

While on the subject of dangerous waste, James L. Acord deserves a mention.

(Below, portrait of the artist in his hasmat suit, via.)

Prominent in Seattle in the 1980s, Acord moved to Richland early in the 1990s to hob-nob with engineers on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. His aim was to make sculpture from nuclear material, more specifically, to transmute a radioactive isotope of technetium to a stable or
nonradioactive isotope of ruthenium and incorporate it into a stone and
advanced metal alloy sculpture.

Determined to shed his old identity and become somebody with whom
engineers might identify, he frequented Richland’s Goodwill store, buying
the kind of suits, ties and shirts engineers wear.
His hair he cropped down to a military crew cut. His shirt pocket sprouted a pen protector. As he said at the time:

The less you
frighten people, the further you get. People here tend to
think of artists as the enemy. Conversation bump along on square wheels, but they bump along.

If artists are the enemy, they’re not the kind of enemy Richland
residents need to worry about. In his time there, Acord found few others. When he was featured in a
two-part profile by Philip Schuyler in The New Yorker (October ’91), he was unable to find the magazine on sale in the Tri-Cities area.
(Acord’s project covered in the Guardian here.)

In 1993, after endless negotiations with the Department of
Energy, Acord became the only individual on the planet licensed to
“own and possess” nuclear material. To mark his triumph, he had the
license number tattooed on the back of his neck, regrettably
undercutting his efforts to pass for a local.

Alchemy is the age-old dream. I want to render high-level
nuclear waste harmless and use it in sculpture.

If nuclear waste can be rendered inert, why isn’t it done? Expense is
the reason the Department of Energy gives, but Accord had other ideas.

The Department of Energy is like the Catholic Church in the 12th
century. It’s a fully mature bureaucracy. It’s
committed to the dogma that waste should be buried in the ground. It
has 30 years of studies worth billions of dollars saying that waste
burial is good. Getting it to backtrack is hard.

(Anyone with current info on Acord, please post in the comments.)

Taryn Simon, photo and text, from her American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: contaminated ground in watery blue light. Always nice to see how the Evergreen State strikes artists from elsewhere. (Bio from Gagosian.)


Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation
Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy
Southeastern Washington State.

Submerged
in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel
nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they
contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States.
The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the
electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off
energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The
temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The
pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing
one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of
radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.

Takako Araki,  Bible in the Sand, ceramic, 1979:

(Another version)

Emily Pothast, The Holy Bible:New American Revision  (By crossing out everything that did not pertain, she found a text within the text devoted to violence and cruelty.)

Detail: (Click to enlarge:)

I like what Elie Wiesel told a man who boasted of keeping a Jewish friend’s Torah safe in Berlin during the war. Learning that the friend did not survive, Wiesel told the man he should have kept the Jew safe and let the Nazis have the Torah. There are always more where that Torah came from, but in the Jewish tradition, if you save a life, you save the world. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. It’s true: Jews are more sensible than Catholics.

Another accidental exhibit at Seattle artRESOURCE: 7 ceramic sculptures by Mutsuo Yanagihara, dating from 1966-67, when he taught at the University of Washington. By the time I was writing about art in Seattle, more than a decade later, his name didn’t come up in a local context. I hadn’t realized he lived in Seattle for a year and was featured in an exhibit at the Henry Gallery.

The opportunity to see in Seattle a sample of his early work is invaluable. (Click images to enlarge.)

An elderly man entering a hospital for tests is asked about his food
preferences. “I eat anything,” he responds, which turns out to be
untrue. He eats anything within the narrow range of what his wife
serves him.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it’s easier on the digestive tract.

Art
critics say they make aesthetic judgments about art, not about whatever
political content might serve as its subject matter. This stance is
easy for the typically leftist critic, because virtually all art with
overt political content comes from the left. It’s against the usual
negatives (war, racism, sexism, concentrated wealth, wasteful carbon
footprints) and in favor of the usual affirmatives (civil rights, human
rights, economic justice, social diversity and so forth.)

Happily I proceed, unchallenged, until considering the work of Charles Krafft. (Or, recently, nostalgic/romantic art
about Boy Scouts.) In both cases, I find that I am not as open-minded
as I think I am; that when it comes to political content, I am not
open-minded at all.

Krafft is having an accidental career survey at a resale gallery known as Seattle ARTresource, with a dozen paintings from the 1980s onward and 18 hand-painted ceramic plates from his Disasterware series.

Seeing
a fair sample of Krafft’s plates together for the first time in years,
I was struck by their secret narrative. They are an extended version of
the artist’s self-portrait, featuring the prickly ground of his
compulsion to offend. 

To a Nazi-loving skinhead who told the artist he was his hero, Krafft replied,

I can’t imagine why. I’m making fun of you people.

More accurately, Krafft is making fun of everybody, including himself.

In 1992, when he had his last exhibit in a mainstream Seattle gallery (Davidson), Sam Davidson told me he was troubled by his own insistence that one of Krafft’s Disasterware plates not be in the show. After taking a look at the censored plate, I said, “Good call.”

[Read more…] about Charles Krafft – the private meaning of public outrage

Via

From the admirable Brian Chin, a member of both the old PI and the new online-only, arts averse version:

Two-and-a-half months have elapsed since the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication. Its passing has been commemorated through private parties, radio shows, documentary films and countless news stories.
(Photo via.)

This Wednesday night, the community gets its chance to say farewell. Journalism organizations from around the region are co-sponsoring a free public tribute to the newspaper and its contributions to Seattle.
The program will include a multimedia retrospective of the newspaper’s 146 years of publication, a musical performance by Heidi Muller and appearances by special guests including historian John Hughes and author Bruce Barcott. P-I favorites such as David Horsey, Art Thiel and Regina Hackett are scheduled to appear. Ken Schram will emcee.
The event will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 3, at Town Hall. Admission is free but reservations are required. Call 206-331-1276 or e-mail seattlepitribute@gmail.com.

I’ve been asked to read a couple of letters to the editor about arts coverage. Arts coverage? Let’s not bring up arts coverage. In the new PI, there isn’t any.