Regina Hackett

From Carol Diehl’s Art Vent, Daniel G. Amen’s idea that a

pathological aversion to paperwork could indicate an imbalance in the prefrontal cortex. Amen’s prescription? Hire someone else to do it.

In other words, those with a paralyzing reluctance to fill out anything resembling a form are not just self-indulgent procrastinators but victims of their chemicals. Reading this, I was awash in my own Cherry Orchard moment, a feeling that, in the future, advances in medicine will make it possible for the formerly slothful to be tidy and timely. No more drifts of unopened mail obscuring the work space on their desks.

Chekhov’s characters believed in the future. They believed that in time the ability to work would make everyone free, when the truth of future was Stalin. It’s the single greatest example of history deepening the meaning of art, instead of the reverse.

TROFIMOV. The human race progresses, perfecting its powers. Everything that is unattainable now will some day be near at hand and comprehensible, but we must work, we must help with all our strength those who seek to know what fate will bring. Meanwhile in Russia only a very few of us work. The vast majority of those intellectuals whom I know seek for nothing, do nothing, and are at present incapable of hard work.

And Trofimov, again:

Believe me, Anya, believe me! I’m not thirty yet, I’m young, I’m still a student, but I have undergone a great deal! I’m as hungry as the winter, I’m ill, I’m shaken. I’m as poor as a beggar, and where haven’t I been–fate has tossed me everywhere! But my soul is always my own; every minute of the day and the night it is filled with unspeakable presentiments. I know that happiness is coming, Anya, I see it already. . .
ANYA. [Thoughtful] The moon is rising.

EPIKHODOV is heard playing the same sad song on his guitar. The moon rises. Somewhere by the poplars VARYA is looking for ANYA and calling, “Anya, where are you?”

TROFIMOV. Yes, the moon has risen. [Pause] There is happiness, there it comes; it comes nearer and nearer; I hear its steps already. And if we do not see it we shall not know it, but what does that matter? Others will see it!

In what must be one of the least satisfying copyright suits ever filed by a major artist, Dale Chihuly resolved his 14-month-long copyright dispute with glass entrepreneur Robert Kaindl more than two years ago. Earlier than that, glass art’s main man settled a similar suit with glass blower Bryan Rubino, who had worked for Chihuly for nearly a decade.

Both Rubino and Kaindl had counter sued. Suddenly, all suits were void, and terms of the settlements sealed. At the time, Chihuly said if it had it to do over, he wouldn’t.

To sue or not to sue. That is the question. I’m not the kind of person who wants to sue somebody, and yet I did. I got kind of fed up.

What was he fed up with?

I recently saw an ad for Kaindl in a luxury goods magazine. Here’s a piece from his Web site, followed by one from Chihuly’s. (Click on images to make them bigger.)

That’s not all. When Chihuly Inc. announced its suit, press coverage
tended to be sympathetic to the defendants (underdogs) rather than the
plantiff (top dog).

The worst offender was the Seattle Times. After six months of digging, the paper produced a bloated and inconsequential three-part Chihuly series.

 It suggested grave wrongs were being uncovered at Chihuly Inc., maybe just over the hill of the next paragraph.

As written by investigative reporter Susan Kelleher and art critic Sheila Farr, there was nothing but smoke over that hill. My favorite headline in the tell-all wannabe series was “Chihuly Benefits from his own Philanthropy.” Who doesn’t?

Here’s how the ST framed the idea of the suit:

Headline: Chihuly turns up heat on competing artists.

Subhead: He’s been guarding his artistic style for years, warning others not to copy shapes and techniques he claims as his. But some say he’s gone too far with a copyright lawsuit.

That’s fair and balanced. Welcome to Seattle’s version of the no-spin zone.

My Chihuly profile here.

Fashion designers are more or less resigned to knockoffs, but artists aren’t. After Jeff Koons floated a basketball in a half-filled fish tank and called it a sculpture in the early 1980s, nobody rushed to market with the same idea. But Chihuly straddles two worlds, both art and craft. Like fashion, craft gets copied. Who hasn’t seen an imitation Tiffany lamp or an imitation Charles Eames’ chair?

What got lost in all this was art, but what chance does art have when conflict is on the table, along with juicy personal information and the opportunity to scorn a homegrown celebrity? None at all.

Time to move on. Chihuly has. But as I held Kaindl’s ad in my hands, the injustice of the outcome rankled.

Early in the 1990s, Richard Billingham rewrote the rules of the visual memoir, documenting his family with an appalled affection.

Billingham’s disreputable dad Ray has a mirror personality in Scobie from Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, first book:

Scobie is getting on for seventy and still afraid to die; his one fear is that he will awake one morning and find himself lying dead. Consequently it gives him a severe shock every morning when the water-carriers shriek under his window before dawn, waking him up. For a moment, he says, he dare not open his eyes. Keeping them fast shut (for fear that they might open on a heavenly host or the cherubims hymning) he gropes along the cake-stand beside his bed and grabs his pipe. It is always loaded from the night before and an open matchbox stands beside it. The first whiff of seaman’s plug restores both his composure and his eyesight. He breathes deeply, grateful for the reassurance. He smiles. He gloats. …

He places his wrinkled fingers to his chest and is comforted by the sound of his heart at work, maintaining a tremulous circulation in that venous system whose deficiencies (real or imaginary I do not know) are only offset by brandy in daily and all-but lethal does. He is rather proud of his heart.

Billingham went from shooting pictures of his nearest and dearest to photographing at the zoo, not a large leap. He’s in the current exhibit at Western Bridge.

Good art gore post on Modern Art Notes, here. MAN’s Tyler Green went looking for intestines at the Philadelphia Art Museum and found plenty.

One of his comparisons, however, doesn’t quite make the grade – Jeff Wall’s
Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) with Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas.

Dave Hickey forged the link that matters between contemporary art and Caravaggio’s Incredulity in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty from 1991, long out of print and now available in a reissue, here. Specifically, in a chapter titled, Nothing Like the Son, Hickey compared Incredulity with Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of a man sticking his finger in his penis. (Images and text of this chapter here.)

Wall’s work is remote. That’s its signature. It’s cold to its core. In contrast, Caravaggio’s painting and Mapplethorpe’s photo are all about touch. Both are as perverse as they are seductive.

John Berger wrote about Caravaggio’s voluptuous intimacy two decades before Hickey, the electric charge of the boy Cupid’s wing resting his thigh, but Hickey found its present-day equivalent in the work of an artist not credited with it. Before Hickey, Mapplethorpe was seen as stylishly meticulous. The kink in his content didn’t change that, but Hickey did.

The pre-Hickey view of Mapplethorpe was instantly out-of-date. The book was a game-changer, plus big fun to read. Back to intestines. In art, a writhing form is a writhing form.

(Click images to enlarge.)

In Sabrina Small’s Duality, intestines are the equivalent of umbilical chords:

In Michael Spafford, they’re a fatal form of father-son bonding:

In Kris Martin, they’re present in their absence.

In  Masami Teraoka, they’re octopuses.

In Karen Liebowitz, a horn.

In Claude Zervas, they’re a river.

In Leo Saul Berk, deep space.

In Lindsey Nobel, specimens in a jar.

By Ryan Molenkamp, painter and security chief at the Frye Art Museum, printed his insider top 10 list with his unfortunately unlinkable story, Basic Training for the Avant Guard, in Seattle City Arts, April edition.

10. What is the most expensive piece here?
9.   I should show my art here; can I see the curator?
8.   Did you ever see Night at the Museum?
7.   I’ve got this painting. (Describes work vaguely, typically forgetting the artist’s name.) Can you tell me how much it is worth?
6.   Why is it so hot in here?
5.   Why is it so cold in here?
4.   Do you get bored?
3.   Why can’t I bring my coffee in?
2.   Has anyone ever stolen anything?

And, of course:
1.   Where’s the bathroom?

Molenkamp’s Web site here.

Pick a neighborhood in North America, from Newport Beach to Newark. Walk its streets at night, you’ll see the flickering colored lights of televisions talking to each other in living rooms, dens, kitchens, bedrooms and baths.

The cathode ray light that saturates most of the world didn’t exist until Philo Farnsworth invented it in 1928. Because he believed that corporations could be trusted, his career was a sad one. The honor they didn’t give him came after his death, when Nam June Paik in 1974 turned what Farnsworth had wrought into art.

Although Paik is interested in everything about television, its shape and sound qualities, its pretensions to realism, its hallucinatory snows, blips and flickers, Seattle’s Tivon Rice is interested mainly in Farnsworth’s light.

Rice’s focus differentiates him from most of the major light artists who precede him, such as Dan Flavin (fluorescence) and James Turrell (fictionalized ethereal).
From the specific, Rice moves from the spectacular and down to the humbly interactive – tube as church and tube as intimate companion.

Pink Noise: From a finger  (2008) is part of his current exhibit at 911 Media Arts Center. Rub the fleshy screen under the single digit and another will appear to do what you’re doing, from gentle massage to nervous scratch.

Through Tuesday at 911. All Rice images from Lawrimore Project. More images here.

Could this be the reason?

Or, more recently, this?

Whatever the stimulus package, the harvest is bountiful.

Gregor Kregar is into maintenance men.

Kerry Skarbakka tries (and fails) to defy gravity.

Hugo Ludena celebrates gay marriage in a community setting..

Matt Browning and his friends toy with black-out drinking.

Mark Newport represents sold craft values. With boyhood heroes gone, he continues to knit their empty suits.

Julian Schnabel is one of those artists whom critics feel obligated to disdain personally. The list changes, but once artists are on it, they’ll be pricked by kicks for some time to come.

Even sanest man in art criticism – Richard Lacayo – goes mildly nutty at the mention of Schnabel’s name. Here’s Lacayo’s drive-by Schnabel hit in a discussion of Guest of Cindy Sherman by Paul H-O:

Paul comes off as a somewhat goofy but implacable guy who has a way of
getting his foot in the door and a sense of humor about himself. He’s
not afraid to show us footage of artworld blowhard Julian Schnabel —
who (no surprise) does not have a sense of humor about himself —
telling Paul that his tv show is “a sort of masturbatory exercise in
stupidity.” (Careful Julian, that’s a pretty good description of your
entire career as a painter.)

Really? His entire career?

Another must-kick artist is Dale Chihuly. He could make mountains dance, and critics would turn away in disgust. The most recent addition to the critical no-fly zone is Shepard Fairey. Damion Hayes of the street art blog To Fear It Is To Know It is obsessed with disrespecting Fairey. How bad is it? Hayes backs AP over Fairey. That’s a disgrace. Today, again.  (A rational view of the case here.)

Artists do not poison waterways, start wars or send the economy into free fall. Rigorous criticism is essential, but personal insults degrade the critic who tosses them off.

I started reading Thomas Albright in the SF Chronicle in college. He later wrote a book about Bay Area art. It’s good but not great. Albright was master of the 10-to-15-inch review in a newspaper. In that small space, he did it all: close attention to the work in question and a sweeping sense of context paired with decisive judgment, all in his confident, smart, no bullshit style.

He died in his late 40s in 1984. At his funeral, someone said that Albright’s attacks were formidable but never personal. In his reviews, Albright called no one names, not even the SF art dealers who once bought space on a billboard to say, “Fire Tom Albright.” I believe they included an exclamation point.

Jason Teraoka’s aging women have the predatory weight of Jose Clemente Orozco’s, especially the upside-down blonde at the bottom of the frame in a mural in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

Like Orozco, Teraoka knows how to take the air out of a room. He knows how to paint glamor after it’s gone and everybody’s time is borrowed.

His women can eat you whole; his men have nothing to say and nothing to say it with. Teraoka grew up in Hawaii watching movies interrupted by commercials on late night TV.

He paints with acrylics in wet glue:

A few years ago, I became really frustrated with this painting I was working on. So I took a bottle of glue, squirted it all over, and applied more paint on top of that. I liked what it was doing, so I kept developing this method. The wet glue absorbs the acrylic paints in a certain way, so I feel like I can get a nice skin quality. I guess it’s a psychological thing too – I can really ‘feel’ the skin texture as I’m painting. As it starts to dry, it repels. That’s how I get the washes in the background: I get this foamy mix, and as I paint it over it separates, creating these interesting effects.

-from Toyoko Art Beat, full interview here.

His background is in graphic novels. If he were what Pop Surrealism were about, I’d be all over it. Instead, too often, it’s illustrative fantasy, skillfully drawn.

Teraoka is at James Harris through Saturday.