Regina Hackett

EMP hiring Christina Orr-Cahall as its next director did not go unnoticed by Seattle press: The Seattle Times published an interview earlier in the week (here), and the online-only Seattle PI managed a brief note, as did the Stranger.

Today, however, Tyler Green pointed out that Orr-Cahall was director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989 and canceled the Robert Mapplethorpe show in response to outrage from Congress, led by Jesse Helms.

It was absolutely the wrong thing to do. She resigned in response to the chaos caused by her decision. (New York Times story here.) As Green noted,

The Corcoran — and in some ways the art world — still hasn’t recovered.

Orr-Cahall appears to have been a big success as director of the Norton Museum of Art for the last 19 years. (Story here.) Surely her life’s work cannot be defined by one false move.

But nobody in Seattle appears to have asked her about it. The Seattle Times’ reporter quoted her saying she was interested in the “whole visionary side” of museums and wanted to – wait for it – “push boundaries.”

“I knew I remembered something attached to her name,” wrote Jen Graves, acknowledging Green’s post. Me too. I glanced at the PI story and thought, hmmm. Where have I heard that name before? Neither of us sees EMP as our particular concern. We don’t cover it. Isn’t that somebody else’s job? Somebody, anybody?

The mark of tiny town journalism is, when something worth digging into happens, outsiders do it or it doesn’t get done.

Passionate love is Temporary

Insanity the Chinese

say that day

I walked nine miles in a bowl

the hill makes coming round

and round avoiding

the road in

sane I realized a whole

week later….

– Olga Broumas, from Landscape with Loaves and Figure

At Howard House, the title of the exhibit Dearly, Madly comes from a pathetically excessive sentiment expressed in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo:

I love her dearly, madly; I love her so much that I would shed all my blood to save her one tear.

As soon as it’s said, the loved one is looking for the door. Curated by artist Robert Yoder, Dearly Madly explores the spirit of doomed pursuit. The nature of the pursuit insures its failure and seals desire into an endless loop,having nowhere else to go.

Michael Dee‘s Heartsmelt (The Panopticon) is a Jeff Koons’ on the skids. Trailing its own battered props, this party is dead and doesn’t know it.

Shaun Kardinal‘s Repose is in love with its own melancholy.

In gorgeous video performances on tiny screens, Julia Oldham imitates the mating rituals of insects. She memorized their antics and can repeat them perfectly.

If Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik did not exist, I doubt Alika Cooper would be able to invent them. She hitched her wagon to their stars, and yet hovering inside her paintings is a distinct form struggling to get out.

I’m not sure what Haim Steinbach is doing in this show. A self-possessed member of the Cool School, Steinbach has never demonstrated a flair for or interest in vulnerability. He’s the Giorgio Morandi of consumer goods, and his shelf life goes on forever.

NYT art critic John Russell once called an oil painting a “vegetable construct that changes in time.” Conservation steps in to manage change, whether it evolved slowly or happened in a second.

A case of the latter: Jeff Koons’ St. John the Baptist probably cracked its arm during a short ride through Seattle from Artech storage to the Bagley and Virginia Wright Exhibition Space in 2004.
Produced in an edition of three with an artist’s proof, Saint John is from the 1988 Banality series of large-scale, ceramic sculptures.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles from the same series is the largest porcelain sculpture ever made. Saint John is a close second, at 56 inches high, 29 inches wide and 17 inches deep.
Story about the conservation efforts that left John whole but with a scar here.

Thursday night at Cornish College of the Arts is a panel discussion with the overblown title, Eros-Bios-Thanatos: Conundrums in Conservation of Contemporary Art, at 1000 Lenora Street, 7:30-9 p.m., 7th floor.

The panelists are worth hearing: Mitchell Hearns Bishop from the Getty Conservation Institute & curator, Los Angeles County Arboretum;
Nicholas Dorman, chief conservator, Seattle Art Museum;
Claire Gerhard, independent conservator, now in Seattle recently working at the Whitney, MoMa & Mozambique, and moderator Elizabeth Darrow.

Why is it that Gee’s Bend quilts could have come from a country fair when at the Tacoma Art Museum but were brilliant in Philly?

The installation crew. The curator in charge.

Sometimes the same curator improves dramatically from first stab to second. Greg Kucera Gallery‘s present Gee’s Bend show looks much better than the gallery’s previous. Through Saturday.

Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata are undergraduates at the University of Washington. Their exhibit at the Seattle cooperative known as Punch continues to enthrall. I would have written about it earlier but had to move my books and files out of the old PI so the new online-only crew can get to work without formers hanging around, looking wistful.

Young as they are, Hashemi and Hirata have a wistful edge.
Maybe it’s because all the good positions are taken. For artists in their early 20s, the chances of doing someone else’s work without realizing it are good.
Alert, awake and aware, Hashemi and Hirata have a sly magpie sensibility. Yes, they’re recycling, and yes, isn’t everybody?

Hirata licked a canvas till his tongue bled red. (Hello, young Chris Burden.)  Hashemi sent a droopy houseplant for a ride on the top of one of those movable disc vacuum cleaners. (He’s looking at you, Buster Simpson.)

But nothing in their show is anybody’s old school. Hashemi’s light touch in the world of manufactured things and Hirata’s pathetically puny use of props celebrates a world of reduced circumstances. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back. Their flimsy take on what’s happening now is what’s happening now.

Saturday night, they’re closing with a party. Expect  fog machines.

Finalists for the Brink Award at the Henry Gallery are Matt Browning (Seattle); the unlinkable Alex Felton (Portland); Aaron Flint Jamison (Portland); Isaac Layman (Seattle); Gareth Moore (Vancouver BC), and Isabelle Pauwels (Vancouver BC).

The selection committee – Henry director Sylvia Wolf and curators Elizabeth Brown and Sara
Krajewski; Seattle artist Joe Park; Portland artist Harrell Fletcher;
Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery director, Christina Ritchie; and
arts patrons John and Shari Behnke – will announce the winner April 17, 8 p.m. at the Henry. The award was the Behnkes’ idea, which they bankrolled.

What’s the Brink? Explained here, although the Henry responded to criticism and took out academic requirements. More on the Henry’s Hang Blog Hankblog.

Mike Simi‘s version –  I Want To Make Something Beautiful But Find It Extremely Fucking
Difficult To Do So (Bowl of Froot Loops) – in cast plastic and cereal from 2009 has an undertow of tragedy.

Fred Muram‘s is robustly vulgar – a video titled Sharing a bowl of Fruit Loops with my dog, from 2008.

With rare exceptions, Matthew Picton‘s work is more satisfying to ponder than see. His ideas are rigorous, his delivery limp.

Take his Postwar Landscape, An Urban History at Howard House. These documentary urban landscapes purport to show past and present in layers, all visible at once. If Harry Potter had one that worked in his debut novel, he wouldn’t have needed those profitable sequels to understand his own story.

Anselm Kiefer paints the Nazi past as poison leeching into the present, but covering the same plot of ground and history, Picton is recessive, letting the facts speak for themselves.

Except they don’t. Below is Picton’s Berlin, 20008, in duralar, enamel paint and pins, 45″ x 55″ x 3″.

What is evoked here? I see nothing but tricky clutter. Below is another version of the same idea from Picton, and this is the one piece in his show that connects. Underneath a contemporary street name is the Hitler Platz in translucent Jello-shades of lime over strawberry: Berlin Text Work #2, 1943, 1962, 2007 – laminated duralar, from 2007.

Other Seattle critics are more favorably inclined. Here’s a Jen Graves preview of  the same show, and an Adriana Grant review.

Maps in general leave me cold. My brainy brother who refused to admit he needed glasses once pulled his car over in a rainstorm to try to read a map’s small print in the headlights as the paper puddled in his hands. Sitting in the passenger seat I thought, that’s the way maps are for me all the time.

On the other hand, Fred Muram‘s version – I’ll let you drive if I can read the map, 2009 –  is my idea of soul food.

Nearly half a century after his death, Franz Kline still passes as an abstract painter. His breakthrough was a rejection of the worn-out world of surface representations. Beneath surfaces, he found good bones that he articulated as slashing diagonals, made either in black house paint loaded onto a broad brush and applied with the whole arm or condensed into smaller spaces in ink on paper.

In a 2002 review, Holland Cotter described Kline’s “fascination with radical forms of East Asian calligraphy,” citing a drawing from 1955 that “has the explosive look of Zen thrown-ink painting.”

Kline was no Zen priest, however. His achievement is the appearance of spontaneity without the fact of it.

The recent photographs of N. P. Thompson offer evidence of what many have suspected, that instead of being purely abstract, Kline was painting the urban scene, specifically the scaffolding of tall buildings under construction.

Here’s a Thompson photo, titled Intricacies.
And here’s Kline’s small ink-on-paper, Untitled (Study for Wanamaker Block) from 1955, image from Stephen Foster Fine Arts.

The SF Chronicle’s Mark Morford logged in on Friday with a spirited defense of the news organizations previously known as newspapers and a fine sprinkling of contempt for media theorists prognosticating about the future – Die, Newspapers, Die? – linked in ARTicles.

Morford offers grudging respect to Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, because of Shirky’s solid analysis, but Morford is sick of everybody without a stake in the old newsroom calling it done for:

This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy “a mature
blogosphere will supplant old media” argument. In the howling absence
of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the
fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who
know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all
hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility — what’s
the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some
fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many
followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.

I disagree with Winer in one huge way: When the professional
news filters vanish, when you lose that vigorous center of storytelling
expertise, you don’t necessarily get a rich ‘n’ wonderful mix of
new choices. You get chaos. You get noise. Sure, it might be a boatload
of fun to read, but it’s also maddening as hell.

Of course Morford is right. Nothing has yet arisen to replace the organization of fact hunters and checkers who research and verify what sees print in a newspaper. Working without a team paid to weigh and assess every word is writing without a net. Editors can leave rope burns on copy or strangle it outright, but more often they save writers from themselves.

In spite of their expertise and devotion to the truth, however, newspapers have too frequently failed us.Take the New York Times, the best of the best. Judith Miller’s reporting on the Iraq War helped get us into that war. Those phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction? According to her, they were real. (Morford, on the other hand, got it right, early and often.)

In my own small case of online only, as a former member of a far less illustrious newspaper team than the NYT, I’m banking on readers to tell me when I’m wrong and to debate the debatable. So far,so good. Plus, change is inevitable.

Here’s Mitchell and Webb on orientation day at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Stone chippers were not amused. (Thanks to Tim Appelo for link.)