Regina Hackett

When Jen Graves wrote on Slog that she was seeking an intern, Seattle artist Ken Marulis (look under February in his name’s link to see his work) replied with the following, which he posted on Artdish:

Firstly, I thought it prudent to list my shortcomings. I’m a two finger typer who gets worse if someone is watching. I’m ignorant, I have almost no schooling and I come from a strictly blue collar background. I’m sixty years old, uncomfortable to be around, have a stupidly perverse and immature sense of humor, sometimes emit dense male body odor and have been known to say the wrong thing at the wrong time (and usually to figures of authority).

I can be a troublemaker. I like to peek down woman’s blouses and a nice ass will make me lose my concentration. I avoid being politically incorrect but if you look into my eyes you’ll see the truth. I may have been barred from entering a couple of galleries but I’m not sure yet. I love Artists more than I love critics. I like to drink sometimes.
I know there are more than a few items missing from the preceding list but you can point them out to me when we begin working together.

On the plus side, I love art and I think I may be interested in writing something, and as stated before I’m ignorant and would like to learn a few things.
Oh, and the answer to that question: If I could go to any art show in the world this very minute it would have to be a café somewhere, an art town maybe, and see the work of the best ignored Artist that that particular area has to offer. Some hidden jewel of a painter that the entrenched have chosen to ignore because he/she does not come replete with a following. Aside from that, maybe I’d like to see Al Held’s studio.

Thanks, Ken Marulis

To nobody’s surprise, including the artist himself, he did not get the job.

In response to this post, Ries Niemi wrote:

Mostly, it’s the system.
First, a jury, with perhaps one artist on it, and, usually, an
architect who feels any art is an intrusion on his genius, plus a few
laypeople who are convinced the budget would be better spent on giving
them more days off.

Unless you have been on juries, …you have no idea the horsetrading, educating, and
politicking that are involved to get any but the blandest, least
threatening, beige art selected.

Although I am an artist who competes for these projects, I have
served on several juries over the years, and most every time, the
strongest artists with the most personality are voted out in the first
round, despite my protests.

Jury composition is an art- in the legal system, there are
consultants who charge hundreds of thousands to help on jury selection
of big cases. And this is one of the biggest weaknesses of a weak arts
administrator- not timidity, but the inability to find, and cajole,
great people to serve on juries. Generally, the administrator must sit
on the sidelines and manage process, not lobby for favorites.

Then, the even bigger problem is the politicians or beaurocrats who
must say yes before checks are signed- the main reason for dumbing down
of ideas.

In the recent Dan Webb/Olympia dustup, it was the elected
politicians who shot down the idea, not the artist who was timid- and
this is very very common. Which leads professional artists, ones who
have been around the block once or twice, to avoid pitching that x
rated day glo pink giant reptile eating human cadavers amidst a pile of
crack bags. Self editing is what you are talking about, not timidity…

In any field of endeavor, there is a difference between being timid and just tossing out expletives for their shock value.

Nope, Vito has never proposed that he would masturbate under the stairs for a project for a new convention center…

Comment on obituary, here, from curator Brian Wallace:

I can’t say “I’m thinking of you Mary wherever you are” because I think
that when people die they die; this one hurts because despite her age I
really always thought I’d see her again. Also, and, sure, this is
inappropriate, but what the hell, smoking pot with Mary was a total
hoot.

Related: From Family Guy on Hulu, Bag of Weed.

Via (Click to enlarge.)

Jonathan Jones at the Guardian thinks the public can’t be trusted to have anything to say about public art, here.

Public art is not a matter for the majority – people should simply cough up and stand back as talented artists indulge themselves.

How very monarchist of him. The problem with public art is not the public. The public is part of the challenge. The problem is lazy-ass, timid arts administrators who don’t bother to engage the communities who will interact with the art on a daily basis. Too many artists in the public realm are also timid. They go for the safe and bland.

All this is the public’s problem? Offer good art and sell it to those who are going to see it regularly as they go about their business. Critics who have nothing but contempt for public art are also the problem. They need to be using different criteria to evaluate what Lawrence Alloway called “focal points for an undifferentiated audience.” Instead, they bring only their studio art gasbag of tricks. 

What the well-dressed bank robber will wear: (Freddie Robbins)

Culture Grrl (Lee Rosenbaum) blames the victim, here, in a post about the beleaguered Rose Museum and heroic director, Michael Rush, not heroic to CG, however, who rewrites history to knock him.
 

Michael Rush, whose directorship at the museum ends June 30, told (Geoff) Edgers:

The Rose, as we have known it, is closing…

…or at least the Rose as HE has known it is finished. My hope that a new director, arriving in Watham without the baggage of an acrimonious relationship with the administration, will find a way to preserve the Rose’s collection and its status as a full-functioning museum, while making a more effective effort to communicate its necessity and importance to Brandeis officials, the broader university community and the general public.

Catching up: Excellent Aldrich director Harry Philbrick interview last Februrary with Robert Lazzarini in his New York City studio here.

HP: Do you own a gun?

RL: Well, I own that gun [the one reproduced in the artwork] the original, simply because that’s my process, and I had to go through an FBI check and all that stuff, but I don’t shoot, and it’s not that I don’t want to. I’ve been to a firing range in the city because one of my assistants was a gunsmith, and he worked at a firing range so I’d go there and shoot there. But it’s really loud, even with ear protection on you’re like “wow, that’s loud!”

HP: So not your thing.

RL: I prefer stabbing.

I love Photo Shop: Erik Johannsson, Road Pull

In honor of my dad, whose first book is titled “The Cardboard Giants,” a small roundup of where we are in materially fragile figures. (Click to enlarge.)

Scott Fife: (Bob Dylan)

Oliver Herring: (Patrick)

Ana Serrano: (Chalino)

In response to this post, Zack Bent emailed me the following, used with permission:

I appreciate your candor and your perspective in the post you put up. To round out the discussion, my purpose was not to glorify (Boy Scouts of America) but to investigate scouting as a type of American survivalism that is wrought with complexity- and is far from innocent.

I was hoping to use the notion of a ‘trace’ as something that remains in a person, something that is experienced. To me a trace in itself doesn’t denote either positive or negative traits, it just IS. This is where my investigation began. I wasn’t trying to romanticize the scouts, though I do believe there is a romanticism inherent in scouting that is tied to an old American idealism.

I do find it curious that you didn’t address the work/images in my show that dealt with tension, ambiguity, and failure: the deer carcass, the jar of tears, the hatchet with a cast, the tree full of bird houses – why only show the images that seem romantic?
Here is bit from my show statement: “Though earnest in these attempts, the BSA have failed in both areas (conservation & social responsibility)…. my aim has been to reference scouting traditions (honor, merit, first aid etc) while allowing my family to become a tribe of scouts that aims to understand its own limitations in relating to each other, to the natural world, and to the divine.”

Good points. Bent and I discussed this show as he was working on it. He emailed me to say he’d taken my thoughts about the BS into account. The first time I saw the exhibit, I didn’t focus on those ambiguities. Second and third time, after he drew them to my attention, they became apparent, as well as the insufficiencies of my original review.

It’s not my job to review anybody’s politics, but it would be disingenuous to pretend politics don’t matter to me, that I can separate out the aesthetics and focus on them exclusively.

Raised Catholic and unable to separate myself completely from a church whose social agenda I find reprehensible, I should have been more sympathetic.

Here’s what Paul Schmelzer had to say on his excellent blog, Eyeteeth: A Journal of incisive ideas:

Having just seen Zack Bent’s scouting-inspired mixed-media exhibition in Seattle, I’m floored that Regina Hackett can’t move past her fixation with the evils of the Boy Scouts to actually examine Bent’s art; while her critiques of the Boy Scouts are fair (if over-emphasized), she ignores some of the most poetic pieces (I’ll be interviewing Bent next week). A counterpoint: “How different is teaching children to learn the positive lessons embedded in the loaded framework of scouting from teaching them to function in American society (which is, well, fundamentally war-mongering, greedy, and all the rest)?”

Being himself a bit of what he calls a procedural artist, Claude Zervas delineated the mainframe and branching subspecies of the group in a little-known manifesto he filed under art bollocks.

These types of artists stress a linear or algorithmic process method during the generative, fabrication, or performance phase of artmaking. The method is an important component of the conceptual framework that underpins the artwork, which often requires explanatory text to make this clear.
The exercise of naming artists is left to the reader.

The Transducer:
Makes {phenomenon/artifact/system} X {seen/heard/felt} [, with conceptual basis C].

The Transliterator:
Performs a literal mapping from semiotic system X to formal system Y [, with conceptual basis C].

The Translator:
Converts semiotic system X to Y [, using process P] [, with conceptual basis C], preserving the original semantics as much as possible.

There’s more.

Here’s the artist doing his best not to kill anybody.

Considering how many versions of the chandelier are in play (one of my favorites here), the dearth of mobiles is surprising.  After Calder and possibly Lee Bontecou, nobody comes to mind.

Beth Campbell backed into the form. She makes drawings that diagram the branching connectives of a thought – My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances –
and noticed that if their shape was airborne, its drift would reflect another layer of consciousness.

Her mobiles are a kind of calligraphic drawing, a lattice that flirts with its own shadow. Maybe because there’s a mobile hanging over the heads of nearly every baby whose parents have the funds to provide one, the form is considered trifling. Campbell’s have nerve, urban wit and slippery grace. Infants might love them, but what parent would allow one to inflect their view as they lie, helpless, in their cribs? Her version has a dangerous edge, like spiders descending in mass.

At James Harris Gallery with a suite of drawings through June 6. More on Campbell here.

Via. His work in part of a group show at Vermillion Gallery, Desmadre: Fresh Latino Perspectives in America, through June 7. (Click image to enlarge.)