Regina Hackett

From Rachel Shimp in the Seattle Times, reviewing Stephanie Syjuco at the James Harris Gallery:

What if you opened your cupboard one morning, and among the usual cereal boxes, a tiny slum had developed?

Right to the point with an arresting image. I have no idea who Shimp is, but she joins a team of good writers covering visual art for the Seattle Times after the ST dispensed with its staff position. I wrote about this interesting twist of fate in an earlier post titled, “Eliminate the art critic. Result? More and better art criticism.” Shimp could be the best of a promising group.

David Bonetti, writing on staff for the Post Dispatch, is seasoned and smart. There’s more to his review of Claudia Schmacke’s installations than Shimp’s review of Syjuco, but his lead baffles, because it’s not true.

Having grown up in Germany, Claudia Schmacke can’t be expected to know the Dylan Thomas poem “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.”

Thomas was Welsh. Why would one European be less likely than an American to be familiar with the work of another European? Because Thomas wrote in English? Most of the Germans I know speak it well. Whenever I’m there, the fluent include taxi drivers, hotel clerks, waitresses and museum ticket takers. His lead was a moment of asleep-at-the-wheel. Late blooming reviews are unread reviews. Blow the first sentence, and the wandering eye moves on.

Responding to this post, about the value of acquiring an MFA, Seattle artist Steve Veatch observed that “there is no such thing as a self-taught artist, just as there is no such thing as the self-made man:”

 Whether you go to art school or not, you will only learn by doing the work yourself and being guided by someone. “Self taught” artists can’t operate in a critical vacuum. And if you don’t go to art school, and you go to museums and galleries and turn to books and magazines for instruction and insight, you will have to ask what their academic connections are. “Self taught” is just a marketing device, as is “outsider”.

Steve. Of course there are self-taught and homemade artists, artists who never set foot inside an art museum or read an art magazine. Some didn’t go any kind of school, never mind art school, and  they created all by themselves, without a community of like-minded others.

As an old man, (1) Bill Traylor started drawing on pieces of cardboard while he sat on the street. Born deaf and mute, (2) James Castle drew in spit and dirt in Idaho, using whatever paper or cardboard he could find. (3) James Hampton was a solitary janitor. After his death, his landlord happened upon his masterpiece.

Who taught them? A lot of artists in this vein say God did. I think art might be genetic to our species. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

(Click images to enlarge.)

If guns were Delftware ceramics, warring states would be art collectors. (Charles Krafft)

Back in the world where guns fire and grenades turn their targets into pink mists of pulp, small gestures count and may be useful. (YaChin You)

Ruth Trevarrow: Chicks Dig Me and Mine, thanks to F. Lennox Campello

Rebeca Bollinger
Untitled (Beverly & Fairfax No. 1), 2006
C-print on aluminum panel, edition of 6 –
28″ x 32″

Dan Webb, Hiker. Pack up all my cares and woes.

 Anne Mathern

[Read more…] about I Believe I can Fly – the Icarus question

The best thing about these new sculptures standing next to the east wall of the Paramount Theater is they are fenced in. When the chain-link fence is removed, and there’s nothing between us and them, everything that makes them bad (bad idea, bad imagination, bad motives) will oppress us like the heated talk of a man, a poet, who is excited by the sun of his own inspiration.

I love this paragraph from Charles Mudede, who is the poet of whom he speaks, excited by the sun of his own inspiration. Note he doesn’t mention the artist, Ries Niemi, or the name, rank and serial number of the piece, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry.

Neimi responded by signing, under his name, bad idea, bad imagination, bad motives.  Jen Graves added in a later post, “I’m sorry, Ries. But I really can’t countenance those things.”

She noted that the sculptures have been removed to “make way for the next phrase of light rail construction.” She didn’t say the sculptures were commissioned by Sound Transit START Public Art Program, which means they’ll be back.

Images: Click to enlarge. First image from SIMS Conference, 2008, second from Slog.

I’ve got nothing against the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, here. As Anthony Tommasini noted in his NYT review, YouTube could have chosen to present the “YouTube International Basketball team.”

Greg Sandow, on the other hand, found it more than a little suffocating, here. But everybody seems to agree it set a good precedent. What precedent?  YouTube chose to play in a concert hall, instead of organizing an event that made sense only online, where it lives.

Playing for Change has already done just that. It collected a great team of musicians from all over the world and linked them through headsets to each other’s contributions. No artist left his or her village, city square or mountain top, and yet everybody was in sync.

Divided by geography, they’re united by the rich tapestry of music they’re hearing as they make it. Had you passed by one of them, you would have seen a solo act. Only online is the global magnificence of the project apparent.

I posted it on ArtsJournal’s main page earlier in the week, but if you missed it there, here it is, a major smack down to those who think life online isolates its audiences. Here’s to the new world, more fun than the old.

From Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World:

Since the 1960s, MFA degrees have become the first legitimator in an artist’s career followed by awards and residencies, representation by a primary dealer, reviews and features in art magazines, inclusion in prestigious private collections, museum validation in the form of solo or group shows, international exposure at well-attended biennials, and the appreciation signaled by strong resale interest at auction. More specifically, MFA degrees from name art schools have become passports of sorts.

Leslie Dick, the only writer with a full-time position in the art department at CalArts, told Thornton he asks students the following question:

Why come to grad school? It’s about paying a lot of money so you can change. Whatever you thought was certain about how to make art is dismantled. You wobble. You don’t make any sense at all. That’s why you are here.

Dave Hickey told her that he doubts the value of that process.

My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse. They privilege unfinished, incompetent art… If you’re not sick, don’t call the doctor…
I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.

I’m with Hickey on this one. Doesn’t Dick sound a bit like a cult leader? If you’re not sick, don’t call the cult leader. Paying a lot of money to study a collective version of the meaning of meaning might make sense in flush times, for those inclined. But for those who don’t have family money and are going into debt for the privilege, I think its virtues are overrated.

I’ve been thinking about this since Todd Simeone opened at the James Harris Gallery. Simeone was showing in Seattle before he got a BFA from the University of Washington in photography in 2005. By the time he left town to get an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he was on the regional charts with a bullet, ready to hold his own in a larger context.

He believes that graduate school helped him focus, and that may be true. What’s also true is that it appears to have (temporarily) killed his spark, his juice, the thing that made him singular – a commitment to imagery that makes an electric connection between audience and art, allowing them to rearrange and enlarge their understanding of the world of things.

I also think, for someone like Simeone, interested in a progressive version of the landscape, there’s a lot more going on in that vein in Seattle than Chicago, where he is now and his Seattle dealer advised him to stay.

[Read more…] about The MFA: 20 years of schooling and they put you on the day shift