Regina Hackett

When Alison Elizabeth Taylor was the subject of feature story last year in the New York Times, Tyler Green asked why:

In the last year there have been probably 100 Chelsea shows of
35-year-old-ish artists with so-so CVs. So why has the New York Times
decided that one Alison Elizabeth Taylor is worthy of a long profile?
(Note that I’m re-creating the NYT’s HTML coding, ha ha.) I mean,
there’s nothing wrong with Taylor or her work (which appears to be the
lovechild of Fred Tomaselli and Stephen Balkenhol), but why her and not
100 other artists?! The Carol Kino-penned story never makes that clear.
If the paper of record is going to declare one artist whose history is
indistinguishable from scores of others worthy of this kind of
attention, it should explain why.

Purely within the context of newspaper realities, I attempted to explain, nothing against Ms. Taylor.

Green’s not asking about reviews. He’s asking about human interest
stories with an art angle. What is it about this particular human —
Alison Elizabeth Taylor — that inspires press to scribble in a
notebook and arrange for a photo shoot? Green knows the answers but,
idealist that he is, must be hoping they aren’t true. They are. Always.
One size fits all. Every feature story in the mainstream press about an
unknown artist scores in at least one of these categories. (Story here)

I ended with this:

Extra points go to artists if they or their subjects are glam. Back to
Alison Elizabeth Taylor, which is, by the way, a great name for an
artist. She’s female, young, got a gimmick and is lovely, which is why
everybody runs her picture. If she weren’t spotlighted in the nation’s
top newspapers, she’d have every reason to complain.

Glam?
She’s not only lovely, she looks terrific posed next to her work, her
hair being the same color as part of the veneer behind her. (New York
Times photo.)

Taylor is included in Supramundane at at Ambach & Rice through the weekend, with Chainlink from 2008.

Curated
by Elizabeth Burke, it’s an excellent show (more later today) off the
deep end of the unruly expressive. The context throws her craft roots
in high relief, where they stifle her narrative content.

Taylor’s
inspiration began with a visit to the Met, where she was struck by 15th
century Italian marquetry, or wood inlay. Using techniques she mastered
from the period, she creates bleak landscapes with a charged
psychological content reminiscent of Eric Fischl.
What saves Fischl from being swamped by the inherent drama of his
tableaus is his paint handling, which is nervously silky. His content is his paint handling and the reason his edgy dramas continue to haunt.

Taylor
was raised in Las Vegas but is not interested in high rollers. She
focuses on what is bleak and dying in the sun, the trashed grounds and
working poor piling up around the edges of reckless high hopes.

She
calls her wall pieces paintings, which they are not. If she finds a way
to make the meticulous refinment of her production work for her
marginal narratives, she’d be unstoppable. What doesn’t work as a
painting could as a functional object, and she appears to be moving in
that direction. (Click through to Room, here.)

How about boxes that are boxes, or, as Marianne Moore
put it, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”? She needs real
toads, real functionality. Her solution comes from Jasper Johns:

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

A factor in Seattle’s cultural DNA is the tendency to underplay. While a steady (and welcome) influx of people from diverse cultural backgrounds has made this inherent aversion to fuss less noticeable, it remains a key factor in the city’s identity. In art circles, working hard to get noticed is still perceived as lamentable.

In Greece, the same thing is known as avoiding the evil eye. If two Greek mothers meet on the street, one might say,  “What an ugly baby.” The other might reply, “Yours also.”  Praise attracts the jealously malign. Self-praise secures it.

Before seeing S’abadeb — The Gifts: Pacific Coast Salish Art and Artists at the Seattle Art Museum last fall, I imagined the city’s aversion to fuss had roots in the large number of people who live here with Norwegian and Japan ancestries, where the trait is dominant.

In fact, the source is a older.
From my review:

By choice and by circumstance, Coast Salish peoples are silent partners in the internationally celebrated style of Northwest Coast Indians. Intimate instead of assertive, their art is overshadowed by the colorful bilateral geometries carved and painted on masks, boxes and totem poles of the peoples from the north, including the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Bella Coola, Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit.

The Coast Salish were living in Seattle when the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855 drove them to the outskirts of their territory and later failed to deliver a range of promised compensations.

Coast Salish art is Seattle’s root music. It’s the basis for what came after, even when the people behind it were no longer dominant on the scene.

Call it the poetics of the handyman. Everything is for use, and the sacred reveals its nature in its refusal to make a fuss. If gray was good enough for a goat, a carefully crafted gray is good enough for a weaving made of goat hair.

Just how good is that weaving?
The best are very good indeed, among the finest in the Northwest, although a traditional Coast Salish weaver wouldn’t say so.
Why puff up? The quality of a dress woven in soft cedar bark or a blanket of animal hair speaks for itself.

Instead of totem poles that advertise the power of a clan, there are house posts carved in a fluid, naturalistic style that can’t be found anywhere else in the lexicon of Northwest Coast art. Coast Salish cultures don’t have clans. They have family groups linked to other family groups, and their potlatches (gift exchanges) continue to be homey instead of extravagant.

Back to Derrick R. Cartwright, 47, director of the San Diego Museum of Art since 2004 and soon-to-be director of the Seattle Art Museum. (First story on his appointment here.) Before that, he was director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the Musee d’Art Americain Giverny in France.

(Photo, Howard Lipin/ Union-Tribune)

His Ph.D is in art history from the University of Michigan, where SAM’s press release says he specialized in American art and architecture and 19th-century French art, as well as the history of photography.

That’s not specializing; it’s sampling. While not the usual path for a scholar, his range of interests (he has since added one in Asian art, historical and contemporary) prepares him for life at a museum such as SAM, with its wide-ranging collection base.

And his (quiet) passion for art precedes him.

Susan Muchnic noted on Culture Monster (LA Times) that in San Diego, Cartwright “is credited with building the Balboa Park museum’s international reputation, reaching out to a diverse community and enhancing the exhibitions and publications programs.”

Before him, this border town museum had no gallery devoted to Mexican art. Now it does, along with programming focused on the Hispanic community’s cultural interests.

After Cartwright was hired in San Diego, the art critic Robert L. Pincus wrote:

Though he is highly personable and
easygoing, he possesses both an underlying intensity and vision of what he
believes to be the role of the museum director in the early 21st
century.

[Read more…] about High hopes for Seattle Art Museum’s new director

(Photo/Alex Stonehill)

In October of 1980, marinating in joy and alcohol, I staggered down the cobbled streets of Pioneer Square right after I’d scored a job at the paper and sang softly to myself, “I’m in the PI.”

Only the PI would have hired me, an instinctive fantasist with no prior newspaper experience. I  learned from the staff how to be one of them. Today, if somebody asked if there’s a journalist in the house, I’d feel comfortable raising my hand.

Following its March 17 demise, the PI continues online as a ghost of its unruly and hard-hitting self. A small team of real reporters still work there, but what they do is strangely not featured and even hard to find on the site, where cute puppies and hot chicks get clicks.

The demise of the paper is now a documentary short (It’s In The PI) being screened Friday night as part of the Seattle Film Festival. I heard about the film for the first time today from Facebook. I’d feel strange to be so outside the loop, but Curt Milton (former PI page designer) didn’t know.  When the paper was a paper, he knew everything.

Brief clip from the brief film here, featuring Joel Connelly quoting Edward Abbey:

When the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about.

On a more positive note, there’s a community tribute to the PI on June 3 at Town Hall Seattle. Free admission. Both laid off PI people and the online-only PI people will show up to pretend everything’s peachy. That should be fun.

The Dogon believe that women hold up the sky.

As graces, they also hold up Duke Ellington. (Robert Graham.)

In mapping, they are the heart of any geography. (Jena Scott)

They are the focal point in a field of flowers. (Jennifer Zwick)

They make the landscape more beautiful. (Susanna Bluhm)

Even in shadow, they dominate. (Pinaree Sanpitak, suggested by Gala Bent)

Once you’re looking for them, you see them everywhere. (Jennifer Campbell, suggested by Marianne Wu.)
Carrying that kind of cultural weight makes them ripe targets for the fetishist. (Woody Allen, from All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, 1972)

Bruce Guenther, senior curator, Portland Art Museum:

More than a decade ago, I saw a photo of of this tattoo and distinctly remember it being horizontal lines wrapping the torso. Subtle but all-encompassing. Turns out, instead of Agnes Martin, he’s celebrating celestial navigation?  Pure abstraction? Cracks in ice? Himself, while his flesh remains well muscled? As he ages, he can be his own collapsing star.

In a time when finances are the major issue in the museum world, SAM‘s press release on new director Derrick R. Cartwright doesn’t mention the subject. If he’s a fund-raising wonder, he has declined to say so.

As the director of the San Diego Museum of Art, he repeatedly described his job as presenting vital, challenging, aesthetically rewarding and socially relevant works of art.

From SAM’s press release:

Over the past five years, Cartwright’s leadership has bolstered San
Diego Museum of Art’s international reputation as a nexus for deep
scholarship, thoughtful exhibitions and a dynamic permanent collection,
while developing close ties to the community it serves through public
outreach and engagement. Under his direction, the museum has increased
its traveling exhibition and permanent collection loan programs,
established a strong publications program and added more than 1,000 new
acquisitions to the collection.

The San Diego Museum has little relationship to the art he says he admires most, however, the challenging and social relevant. Instead, it’s a once-over-lightly assortment from all periods, with no particular strength in contemporary. It seems like a place that is loath to challenge to anybody.

As a much bigger museum with depth in African, Asian, European decorative, European/American art after WW II and growing depth in American historical,  gives him a wider field of engagement, and it can use his interest in connecting with regional communities.

Back to money. With the failure of Washington Mutual, with whom SAM shared space, the museum lost nearly $6 million annually. That’s along with the losses all museums are  experiencing in this economy. (Story here.)

I could find no negative stories about Cartwright and few positive ones. In his mid 40s, he’s largely unknown but respectable. Mimi Gates retires June 30, and Cartwright starts in the fall.

Whatever else artists draw, paint, photograph, build, whittle or glean from industrialized rubble, the subject of the human form is a constant, both in and out of the mainstream. Outside the mainstream, then, where the secondary market rarely exists and price points on transactions are not covered in the New York Times, here is a small list of portrait artists of whom few have heard. From none do I get the I’ve-seen-this-before feeling.

(Click to enlarge.)

Billy King, from his first gallery show in 25 years. He paints as if he’s carving wood.

Heidi Anderson, Night Eyes.

Walter Robinson. As a painter, he defines deft, but his incredible mouth keeps his work from getting the credit it richly deserves.

Margot Bergman:

Fatima Allotey:

Judith Page:

George Chacona:

Marco Zamora:

Via

And speaking of Mr. Elston, here’s his response to this post about Boy Scouts, art and homophobia:

My own experience with the Boy Scouts was formative. In 1967 I returned to Spokane, my hometown, coming from L.A. and on my way to Montreal. I was invited to participate in an anti-Vietnam War action by my good friend Jed Irwin, who was then the Curator of Art at Cheney Cowles Museum. The Boy Scout Jamboree was being held at Farragut State Park, Idaho.

A small group was going to leaflet the visiting international Scouts.
When we arrived, we were immediately surrounded by Boy Scouts. We had not even removed the leaflets from our bags. As soon as we began distributing, the leaflets were ripped from the hands of our recipients, and we were soon surrounded by angry and threatening American Boy Scouts.

It was clear that they were prepared for our arrival, a fact which became clearer still when we returned to our cars and discovered that, of the several hundred cars in the parking lot, our 5 cars all had slashed tires… I do not have much tolerance for romanticized depictions of the Boy Scouts. 

Related: the California Supreme Court fails to do the right thing, here.

At Davidson Galleries through Saturday.

John Grade – New Works, May 2009 from Davidson Galleries on Vimeo.

Visions of Virtual Culture, on FLYP:

John Temple, the editor of the Rocky Mountain News, who recently presided over the end of his print edition, speaks with the voice of grim, very personal experience, but his message is neither defeatist nor gloomy, despite all he has just been through.

One astute reader of Temple’s comments wrote: “You could take most of John’s comments, substitute the word ‘museum’ for ‘newspaper’ and the word ‘curator’ for ‘journalist’ and it would be equally true. How can museums and traditional print media learn together how to navigate a future in which services are divorced from traditional sources of income, and users expect to share authority and content development?”

Hit the link above to hear David A. Ross moderate a discussion on the future of museums with Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Speaking of David A. Ross, who bills self as a recovering museum director: His most recent piece on FLYP, Bearing Witness, is extraordinary.

On Art Fag City: Paddy Johnson tosses off art criticism as if it came to her while she was waiting for the bus. That casual stance is an illusion. She packs more content into a few sentences than most critics achieve from going on and on. Here she is on John Houck:

Houck’s photographic series To The Things captures the physical properties of the spiritual and logical, as well as many of their mechanical elements. Light may resemble higher reasoning in one photograph, and in another it acts as one of many products used to manufacture such an effect.

From Translinguistic Other, The Campfire in the Closet: Yes, more in Seattle about Zack Bent and the Boy Scouts, homophobia and art. I semi-regret my part in it (discussed in this essay) and would have improved it had I the chance to do it over, but, I gotta be me now that I don’t have any PI editors to prevent it.

From Best Of, Joey Veltkamp tours the MFA show at the University of Washington. His affable approach to the new strikes the right note.

From Looking Around: Richard Lacayo discusses the art being purchased for the Obama White House.The new team appears to be concentrating on artists of color and women who are senior (or dead) and comparatively under the radar, instead of the usual blue chip.

As for the public areas, the president and his family can make
proposals for what to show there, but those have to be approved by the
White House curator and something called the Committee for the
Preservation of the White House, which sounds like it was formed to
protect the place from Damien Hirst’s shark.

Nobody asked, but my way under the radar recommendations include Oliver Lee Jackson, Raymond Saunders, Weldon Butler, Marita Dingus, Preston Singletary, Joan Snyder and Elizabeth Sandvig. Using the new guidelines and removing the age limitation if there is an age limitation, the White House could be filled with wonders.