Regina Hackett

They are illustrators. Hear them roar in numbers too big to ignore.

Illustrator militancy is relatively new. Formerly, the breed took its second-class status for granted. If illustrators were discussed, they were the ones talking. In the art context, nobody  gave them much thought. Illustrators were around (some good, some clever, most bland or annoying), illustrating things – advertisements, company announcements, greeting cards, t-shirts, comic strips.

Cartoonists proved the most unruly. Between R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, they battered the opposition into a puddle, becoming a rising tide carrying all (drawings of) boats.

The question now is not whether it’s illustration or art. It’s what kind of illustration it is, and what kind of art.

Friends of the Nib at Vermillion Gallery features the drawings and prints of 31 Seattle illustrators (mostly cartoonists) who  meet weekly “to chew the fat and scratch the
paper. “

As a group, they’re a wonder.

Take David Lasky: His ultimate graphic novel is one page, six panels. Lasky draws as if his pen swallowed a ball. All of his lines have bounce. What’s really distinctive is his writing. He channels Kafka by way of Donald Barthelme – pared to the bone, funny with a low-grade fever of the tragic.

Then there’s Kaia Chessen, busting out of the frame but with a feeling of heirloom. 

Nobody puts Ellen in the corner. For big, clean and sexually charged graphics, she can’t be beat.

Through March 4.

How do animals see? Depends on whether they’re predators with eyes front and center, or prey, with eyes on the sides of their heads for an inclusive span.

Paul Berger became interested in the visual world of prey animals after reading Temple Grandin, who redesigns slaughterhouses to take away the terror. According to Grandin, prey animals do not feel anxiety or regret, but they have a fast trigger on fear. When nothing is wrong, they are calm as Buddha, even when seconds from their death.

McDonald’s hired her not because the company is swell in every way but because calm animals die more quickly, more cleanly. Also, with her on the payroll, McDonald’s has something to say in its own defense when criticized by animal rights groups.

Back to Berger and his wide span. (PANORAMAS SERIES, 2008-2010) He offers something rare those whose vision is selective in its focus. In his photos, the world shifts, becomes elastic and enlarged beyond the frame with which we were born, the narrow frame that helps us zero in for the kill.

Berger:

 I have been exploring extended synthetic
panoramic imaging, wandering into a kind of “bovine vision” of visual
horizon grazing between 240 and 360 degrees. It is the camera vision of
choice for those who scan the horizon wide, eschewing the specificity
of the pointed gaze for the more generalized awareness of a uniformly
focused peripheral vision.

Technically, this series, as has been
the case with most “straight” photography in the past, at first appears
to be a seamless, straightforward transcription of the three
dimensional world. However, they are, in fact, the result of a highly
processed data stream. This stream begins with a sequence of seven to
ten wide-angle (24mm) individual photographs, taken with a digital
camera attached to a tripod on a head that allows for rotation about the
“nodal” point of the lens. The resulting images are merged, in
software, into either a cylindrical or spherical digital space. After
adjustments, a two-dimensional frame is imposed within this space (the
final “photograph”) and the result is exported back into a conventional
digital file.

Contrary to this post and possibly contrary to reality, unless she has a trust fund or a sugar daddy,a friend of Laura Castellanos (bunny artist) has a message of good cheer taped to her refrigerator:

Volume, volume volume. I feel for YouTube. Its empire is massive and hard to police. Should it take an anything-goes attitude, the government will step in. On the other hand, over-control incites outrage from the suppressed.

Cast in point. Fabulous video artist Amy Greenfield was kicked off the site for “violating community standards.” Whoa. Protest letter from the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Electronic Frontier Foundation here.

Money quote:

For all of their pronouncements in favor of free speech, Google and other Internet intermediaries are fast becoming the new arbiters of morality – and setting the tone of what is acceptable and what is not. There is no First Amendment to protect our speech in such communities, but that is why it is much more important to get involved and express our outrage when artistic expression using a female body is booted off the site – or put in a special X-rated section – as pornographic and offensive.

Matt Sheridan Smith had one of those 3-minute Shakespeare installations that Western Bridge now features. Besides a central exhibit, Western Bridge has taken to offering now-you-see-them, now-you’ve-missed them exhibits upstairs. They last two weeks. Considering that Western Bridge is open Thursday to Saturday, that means the audience has six days to hop to it or regret its choices at its leisure.

I saw Matt Sheridan Smith’s Flotsam and Jetsam late Saturday afternoon, the last day. It was riveting, but fortunately for those who failed to stop by, his is the kind of riveting that can be appreciated online through images. One of Sol LeWitt’s better gambits was to bury a drawing, refuse to say where but offer a certificate of ownership to whoever was smart enough to snap it up. Of all his drawings, this is one I think of most, the one I never saw.

Flotsam and Jetsam is a remake of a sculpture Smith presented at Lisa Cooley in 2009,
Self-portrait (golden sections). Reviewing that show, the astute Marie-Adele Moniot is worth quoting:

Self-portrait (golden sections), the “heart of the show” according to
the gallery’s press materials, is a series of pedestals arranged in a
sort of postmodern Stonehenge in the center of the room. Smith made each
pedestal according to the “golden ratio,” measuring the proportions of
his own body and transferring them to plywood. Though he literally puts
himself on display, the various shapes and sizes still seem to conceal
something essential about the artist, his process and the works’ import
as stand-ins for the body. (more) 

At Western Bridge were the same arrangement of pedestals:

This time out, however, they’re going down. In the corner of the room was a sack of cement.

At the end of the day on Saturday, as the exhibit drew to a close, Smith mixed the cement, opened the pedestals and poured it in. Two he dumped in the Sound, as jetsam. One might have been rescued, to serve as a bench in front of Western Bridge. (Flotsam.) Whether he’d dispose of the final pedestal or recycle it had not, late Saturday afternoon, been determined.

As with his exhibit in New York, the pedestals served as stand-ins for his body.

The shift in meaning, from last year to the present, when the recession grinds on and opportunities for artists to make any sort of living recede before us, is haunting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:
(via)

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Unlike Gatsby, artists are rapidly losing faith in that future. They see losses – what they can no longer afford, what they’ll never have, what they’ll have to do to survive and continue to be artists. Will they jetsam their work or park it to be retrieved later, like flotsam left after a wreck?

D.W. W.D. Snodgrass wrote in a similar vein about his child, following a bitter divorce:

Heart’s Needle,  Part 5

Winter again and it is snowing;

Although you are still three,

You are already growing

Strange to me.

You chatter about new playmates, sing

Strange songs; you do not know

Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding

Or where I go

Or when I sang for bedtime,
Fox
Went out on a chilly night,

Before I went for walks

And did not write;

You never mind the squalls and storms
That are renewed long since;

Outside, the thick snow swarms

Into my prints

And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,
Dark cowbarns, huddled, still,

Beyond to the blank field,
The fox’s hill

Where he backtracks and sees the paw,

Gnawed off, he cannot feel;

Conceded to the jaw

Of toothed, blue steel

And while on the subject of the melancholy passage of time, the invaluable, essential Western Bridge is six years old. When launched by Bill and Ruth True, they said they saw it as a 10-year project. Recently, they speculated that it might conclude at eight. That leaves two years. Tick, tick.

Via

In the West, even artists are rugged individuals who tend to go it alone. Although those who find strength in numbers are especially rare in Seattle, they’re gaining ground.

Here’s a history of who stands out.

1. Buster Simpson: In the late 1970s, he was key to coming up with the public art concept of the design team. Now that the concept is ubiquitous, it generates more than its share of  timid art, but Simpson’s version continues to stand out. He changes partners with nearly every job and makes the process of collaboration part of his performance.

Vertical Planters. (Image via)

2. The studio glass movement is nothing but teamwork, yet a single star almost always tops the credit line. Not in Flora Mace/ Joey Kirkpatrick‘s studio. Life and art mates, they have made it work for more than 30 years.

After the debut of Mace and Kirkpatrick, years went by. Not a peep from anything close to a successful team. Then, in 2002, a couple appeared who named themselves after a tool known for its usefulness in first drafts.

3. Lead Pencil. (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo) Skating on the line edge of art & architecture and claiming both. Like Mace and Kirkpatrick, life partners.

Under the Surface, 2008, charcoal/paper, 72 x 60 inches

Since 2005, more good collaborators have been making their mark than at any time in the city’s art history. Aside from two artists who joined forces briefly, these new group thinkers are all male. Not a female in the bunch, or even a female on a team.

4. Sutton/Beres/Culler: (John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler) Comedy from the heart, formalism from the brain: Their performances, documentary photos and installations are moving them onto the national stage.

Dumanish 1 2009 – rowing on a local river that makes non-musical use of the term, heavy metal.

5. Eli Hansen. Because Hansen made his Seattle debut working with his already famous brother, Oscar Tuazon, many felt he was little more than Tuazon’s assistant. Two Seattle galleries (Howard House and Ambach & Rice), offered to represent him, but only if he brought his brother along.

Here is where Scott Lawrimore (Lawrimore Projects) shines. He is not distracted by resume. He could see right past Tuazon’s glow to Hansen’s gold. Lawrimore offered Hansen representation by himself and with any partners he wants to take on. So far, these partners have included childhood
friends Joey Piecuch and Herman Beans.

Notes Hansen on the LP Web site:

We are
brothers and friends first, artists second…We know each other’s
weaknesses, sadness, and confusion…We work in the same way we have
always worked together–as a community and as a family. 

Hansen and Piecuch, I’m not paranoid because I’m high, 2009

6. Fred Muram and Mike Simi: They want to be art partners, but it’s hard when they each do their best work alone. Unlike its members, this team has yet to prove itself. If they do, it will have to be by long distance, as Muram has moved to Chicago.

(Muram left, Simi on ladder. Image via)

7. Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata: Brilliant both alone and together. The James Harris Gallery recently picked both up, but as individuals. Harris said he isn’t interested in collaborations, which leaves the pair free to work together wherever else they choose.

Hirata & Hashemi, The Dirty Shed Project.

Know others I’ve forgotten and/or missed? Please note them in the comments.
Thanks!

Can use them as a personal shield. (They work even when read upside down.)

Fred Muram, from his series, Kissing the Ceiling.

Art

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