Regina Hackett

The Kirkland Arts Center
is a beacon in the comfortable wasteland of its locale. The KAC
mobilizes community with a wide range of courses and takes them
higher in its ambitious galleries.

On view through Wednesday is Dimensional Invention curated by KAC gallery director (and artist) Cable Griffith.

Claire Cowie:
Her pastels are shades not found in nature. Her mutant rodents grow
like vegetables in webbed ground, content to be what they are, isolated pause
points in .a mass of connection.

Patrick Holderfield heats minimalism to the point of implosion in order to turn time against itself.



Whiting Tennis slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Painter Tim Cross finds in three dimensions a mirror through which he sees darkly.

Ben Hirschkoff: His clouds explore the tragedy of the costume jewelry – all of the aspirations but none of the verisimilitude.

Patricia Hagen creates the material equivalent of ripe organics in their dying fall, leaking their lives away.

(Three exhibits at the Bellevue Arts Museum., all organized by the museum. Click images to enlarge.)

1. Lopez Island wood carver Michael Peterson begins with chunks of green fir, hemlock, cedar or madrone. He needs it to be wet, almost pulpy, so he can hollow it out with a chainsaw and shape the edges. As the piece dries, it shrinks and pulls, extending the marks of the chain into long gullies that the artist smooths by sandblasting and sometimes bleaching.

The natural world is putty in his hands, and the force he brings to bear is a kind of erosion.  When he presents them in layers, each is free, with nothing rooted or glued down.

To September 20. Peterson is represented by the Traver Gallery.

2. Portland’s Judy Hill is an artist who dares to repeat herself. For decades she has fashioned the same figures in colored glass and raku, which is not, in contemporary art, thought to be a good thing. For her, it is.

The glass looks like previously-licked lollipops, overheated and on the verge of melting. The clay is corrosive, grizzled and seamed. Her women have been through a lot, but their
confectionery, free-floating attire makes it impossible to sum them up or write them off.

Through January 3.

3.The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book : Using the Edward Ruscha rule, if Michael Peterson’s work is huh? wow!, then the artists in this show tend toward wow! huh.

Peter Schjeldahl explains:

Start anywhere. Look. Wonder why any given art is the way it is and not some other way. The artist made certain choices, producing certain effects. Walk back the cat, as they say in espionage. Perhaps read art historians and critics for clues–but not solutions. Your own pleasure must be your goal and guide. A great deal of art, of any period, is ridiculous. But you won’t be a fair judge unless you consent to regard each work as sincere and intelligent until proven otherwise. (Developing taste speeds up the process, but it’s still a process.) If you hate a work on first sight, fine. That’s an authentic response. But stick around. Keep looking. You will have further responses. You might end up hating the work even more, but with an enriched understanding of both it and yourself. Very often, our judgment evolves the other way: what we think we like, at first, disappoints upon contemplation. The artist Edward Ruscha promulgated a handy rule in this regard: “Bad art is ‘Wow! Huh?’ Good art is ‘Huh? Wow!’

About the Book Borrowers, I wouldn’t go so far as to say bad. No rule, no matter how catchy, works outside its own inevitability narrow framework. But thanks to their material invention, these artists have an immediate appeal, although there’s little in the way of a second punch.

That said, I’m extremely fond of Long-Bin Chen’s Guan Ying with Flower Crown (Ming Dynasty), 2007, carved from Manhattan white pages phone books. I do not believe that custom would stale its variety. Years from now, if I happen upon it, I’ll say, “From phone books. Wow.”

To June 14.

Vinchen via Wooster Collective.

Bingo at the Bellevue Arts Museum.

In 2005, when it reopened as a crafts center, BAM hosted Garth
Clark’s traveling show, The Artful Teapot, featuring the best in
contemporary pots. After that came a long, slow slide.

A craft museum has to take up its bed and walk. It has to assume the
burden of its niche, honor its legacy and cut a new path through the
thicket of material creation. Objects wandering between worlds, too
proud to be craft and too timid to be art, are not going to cut it.

By 2008, BAM had righted itself, although its difficult galleries were awkward hosts for the exhibits they housed. Good artists ended up looking at if they were waiting for their space to materialize and had unpacked their work in the hallway as a temporary measure.

Now, halfway through 2009, everything clicks: the art, the space, the flow, the light and the installations.

BAM is the ultimate come-from-behind institution. It’s surely the only art museum to have announced its own death, shut down and revived its own corpse a year later, in BAM’s case, with a craft-driven mission.

Like virtually every other culture institution in the country, money’s tight, but unlike so many others, attendance is a bright spot. According to Tanja Baumann, director of marketing, BAM’s first quarter numbers reveal a solid advance, from 6,338 in 2008 to 9,496 in 2009.

Next post, a review of the four three exhibits (time ran out on historic American quilts) currently on view. That leaves the lobby, where Seattle’s Paul Margolis’
I Imagined Myself as a Meter Maid (full-sized cart, 2002), made of quilted fabric (including lace), wood, metal and foam, dominates. He’s an artist/ bus driver who has previously quilted such objects as stop signs, none of which are online. He deserves a wider career.

Click images to enlarge.

Shepard Fairey elected a president. For his next act, he’s focusing on the joys of dog hair on your couch and drool on your collar. Via Andrew Schneider Investigates. More here.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s salute to the species here. Below, the ending, because I quoted from it in the headline.

The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog's life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
touching and tasting and testing everything
investigating everything
without benefit of perjury
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
a real live
	   barking
		  democratic dog
engaged in real
		free enterprise
with something to say
		         about ontology
something to say
		about reality
			        and how to see it
					      and how to hear it
with his head cocked sideways
			        at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have
			  his picture taken
				              for Victor Records
		         listening for
				His Master's Voice
	and looking
		       like a living questionmark
				       into the
			               great gramophone
			           of puzzling existence
           with its wondrous hollow horn
	      which always seems
               just about to spout forth
			         some Victorious answer
				     to everything.

The Virgin of Guadalupe lives in a mega church and also on flesh, walls, T-shirts, fenders, jewelry, key chains, postcards and sculptural replicas. Because I spent a good portion of my childhood in Southern California, I love this figure for where she’s been, for her experience, not her purity.

Via.

First post here.

Young artists aren’t hot to attend museums? (Some of the young, some of the museums.)

At least they don’t want to burn them down. Oft-told tale told again in the New York Times:

After other leads fizzled, attention turned to Picasso and Apollinaire and their gang of young, avant-garde poets and artists. This group, sometimes called la bande de Picasso, was famous for its seething dislike of the kind of stale museum art that the Louvre represented. Apollinaire had signed a manifesto that threatened to “burn down the Louvre.”

From Tyler Green:

In museums throughout America’s circa-1965 industrial heartland, Gilliams hang next to Frankenthalers hang next to Nolands. They all look a bit dated, like an end rather than a beginning.

This from an art blogger who celebrates the Western kitsch of Frederick Remington. The fault, dear blogger, lies not in our stars that we are underlings.

Gilliam:

Frankenthaler:

Noland:

Oh, the horror. Judith H. Dobrzynski on her AJ blog, Real Clear Arts, lamented the following:  Who’s Looking at Paintings? Not, Apparently, Even Art Students.

Dobrznyski:

This
entry is about art students who won’t go to art museums. Apparently,
some students today think that viewing art online is good enough or
better. That’s what I discovered reading a blog item by Laurie
Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York and is a professor
of fine arts at Hofstra University.

Dobrznski didn’t link to the Fendrich story; here it is. (Fendrich doesn’t appear to link to her sources either.)

Fendrich:

Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it’s hard
for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art.
They just can’t see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a
museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the
hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that’s posted on the museum’s Web
site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison?

They’re
both missing a salient point understood by the students. A lot of art
today is about the replication of imagery. Its aura, in the Walter Benjamin sense, is not lost in mechanical reproduction. It exists because of mechanical reproduction.

Michael Kimmelman learned this when he asked Cindy Sherman to visit the Met with him in 1996, as part of a NYT portrait series he turned into a book.
She told him she rarely went to the Met. She was in fact surprised that
paintings have a different kind of life in person than they do in
catalogs, where she’s used to seeing them. She claimed not to have
previously noticed this elementary (Watson) fact. She didn’t notice
because she doesn’t need it. That’s not what her work is about.

Sherman To Kimmelman on the history of her medium (art historians, avert your eyes):

I’m illiterate in the historical, classic knowledge of photography, the
stuff teachers attempted to bore into my head, which I resisted. The
way I’ve always tried to cull information from older art and put it
into my work is that I view it all anonymously, on a visceral level.
Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of images from Surrealism and Dada,
but I never remember which ones are the Man Rays, say, because I’m just
looking for what interests me.

Some
artists don’t go to museums until their own work is there, and some,
like Sherman, tend not to go even then. This is neither shocking nor
cause for hand-wringing.

Bruce Barcott on a disgraceful name enshrined in honor at the Seattle Art Museum, in City Arts Seattle:

My daughter and I were strolling through the Seattle Art Museum
recently, enjoying the treasures in the museum’s still-feels-new
expansion wing, when I turned a corner and saw these words: “Kerry
& Linda Killinger Gallery.”

I stood there, gobsmacked.

The Killinger Gallery: I’d never noticed it before. Donor names on
gallery walls and theatre seats are so ubiquitous that they rarely
register. But this one popped up as if lit up in Dan Flavin neon. Here
was Seattle’s culpability in the global economic crisis laid bare. Here
was our shame displayed.

Susan Robb: Her Warmth, Giant Black Toobs is in Houston. The able Douglas Britt has the story, here.

From Blade Diary via Eyeteeth: What to do with abandoned newspaper boxes:

Finally, Ellsworth Kelly (the dress) from Greg.org and Ellsworth Kelly (the interview) from Kenneth Baker. Ellsworth Kelly now, Ellsworth Kelly forever.

In spite of the expansionist frontiers of American consciousness, there are always artists who’d rather dig into a small space than dominate a large one.

EJ Hauser:

Ben Beres (detail):

Also, why stay afloat? The allures of going under, below.

Sarah Sze:

SuttonBeresCuller: