Regina Hackett

An artist who makes a sculpture out of marzipan does not necessarily
want to see it on the menu. As Leonardo wrote in his notebook in 1470,
while serving Prince Ludovico Sforza of Milan:

I have observed with pain that my signor Ludovico and his court
gobble up all the sculptures I give them, right to the last morsel, and
now I am determined to find other means that do not taste as good, so
that my works may survive. (more)

Impersonating a cookie has risks. Janine
Antoni made art history out of satiated desire – her teeth marks
left in a 600- pound mound of chocolate. Thanks to her, addiction took sculptural form (Gnaw,
1992).

What follows is a small survey of artists who explore the
issue of food as the odious cost of staying alive.

Alex Schweder, Still-life of
Beefsteak and Cheese
Paper, Ink, & Scented Varnish, each sheet 34″ x 21.5″, 2004 (Lawrimore
Project)

Walk on this – The Art Guys (Cheese Grid,
1993)

Marc Horowitz
“brings his research of socially acceptable narcotics to more’s r&d
lab in efforts to help increase demand for and sweeten M.O.R.E.’s
services
.”

Mr. Brainwash

Cosimo
Cavallaro – from his room coated with liquefied cheese, via Walter
Robinson

Here’s looking at you,
potato eyes: Ryan Horvath – P.M.S.
(detail)
MEDIA potatoes, glass, light
SIZE 18″ x 18″ x 80″
DATE 1997
DESCRIPTION potato mosaic structure, one month duration

Also from Horvath, the
cane you can’t count on, made of sugar. Cane 36″ x 5″ x 1″ 
2004

Blast from the past:

Alfred
Gescheidt
Untitled
1949
vintage gelatin silver print

Aesthetic grandson of Gescheidt: Eric Yahnker, Berry Astonished, 2009 Colored pencil on paper

Related post from this blog – The banana downfall, a visual survey

Best known as a member of Crosby, Stills and Nash (later, briefly, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) Graham Nash is also a photographer and photography collector. In 1990 he co-founded (with  R. Mac Holbert) Nash Editions, the first major fine-art digital printmaking studio.

Music and photography he likes to conflate.

When I look at Ansel Adams’s print Moonrise Over Hernandez I can feel the basses and cellos in the shadows – I can hear the violins in the clouds. (via)

Ansel Adams. Nash is not afraid to buck the trends. The stately perfection of Adams, his pristine view of an immaculate natural world, parallels the harmonies of CSN. Both Adams and CSN are out of date but not discredited. They hold their place, ready to shine when the time is again right for their lucid reassurances.

As a photographer, Nash favors a refined Surrealism that showcases his technical prowess – more Jerry Uelsmann than Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

Nash, Self-Portrait at the Plaza Hotel, New York, New York 1974

When he dispenses with the elaborate set up and just takes the shot, however, he can be convincing. His performance portraits are pure but not corny.

Nash, Taj Mahal at the Mariposa Folk Festival, Centre Island, Toronto, 1970

Nash also has the rare ability to look beyond his own practice, which is why he’s an excellent choice to curate a survey of rock ‘n’ roll photographs at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, titled, Taking Aim. There are 96 photos from 40 photographers. The vast majority are black and white, and the majority feature musicians from Nash’s era. (His view is wide but not unlimited.) All but a few were printed by Nash Editions, which means, they’re crisp.

These photos track Nash’s story: where he started (looking up to Buddy Holly), his high points (when he knew everybody), and his appreciation of what came after (less of this). EMP says the show will travel. Great. Without knowing where, I can confidently predict it will look better there. As Frank Gehry carefully explained to the press at EMP’s opening, he designed the exterior only.

The inside is a techie-music-science fiction curio shop. Cluttered and cramped, it has one decent performance space but nothing that comes close to adequate for looking at art. Imagine an exhibit inside a Radio Shack with the batteries missing, and you’re there.

Other issues that might cause rancor: Not only are the 1960s overrepresented, so are white males, both in front of the camera and behind it.

What this show has going for it is the veracity of its inclusions, from portraits to performance shots and casuals snapped when the artists were taking a break, letting off steam or presuming (wrongly) that they were alone. Some of the photographers rate in the art world (Nash, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, Charles Peterson, Alice Wheeler, Mick Rock and Dennis Hopper). Most are working stiffs, on the scene and elbows out. The shots they took are amazing.

Barron Claiborne, Notorious B.I.G. New York, New York, 2003

Barry Feinstein, Bob Dylan, 1966 Paris (He’s signing “God Bless” as Feinstein turned him into his own personal trinity.)

Two from Seattle:

Alice Wheeler, Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, Tacoma, Washington, 2000

Charles Peterson, Crowd with body surfers during Mudhoney’s set at the KNDD Endfest, Kitsap County, Washington, 1991

At EMP through May 23. The catalog is worth having.

Thanks to painter Susanna Bluhm, Another BB has been host to a thoughtful discussion about artists writing on each other’s work, here. An excellent examination of same subject at Chicago Art Magazine is titled, Nut Up or Shut Up. That felicitous imperative belongs to Woody Harrelson, who used it when taking his big gun on the road in Zombieland.

Related: AJ TJ Norris talks about being an artist and a curator.

Art comes from art. Without the freedom to rethink and borrow heavily from the work of others, the enterprise will head for a timid dark age. Even so, there are cases when a straight-up ripoff needs to be sorted, if only with a credit line. For photographers in that situation, this is the only document they need.

In the polymorphous perversity of art,
monogamy is hard to come by. Some artists stick to what they were doing all along, new work following the old like paving stones cutting a path through a garden. Given a compelling initial vision that is not repeated but invented anew each time out, unswerving devotion to an original commitment can be an excellent thing.

Usually, however, art made by any one person changes over time. New attractions and repulsions play a role, sometimes known as the question of influences. If critics tend to make the issue sound straightforward, artists provide a corrective.

Robert Gober

The point of this post is the first quote from Gober, below. I could have posted it by itself, but I succumbed to the temptation to window dress.

Robert Gober, via

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

Giotto, Arbus or Magritte.

For an artist of Gober’s generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Magritte was an inescapable presence, visible everywhere on posters and album covers as well as museum walls. Gober’s original ambition was to be a painter rather than a sculptor. “In high school,” he recalls, “I wandered into the Yale Art Gallery. I remember looking at my first Magritte painting–the one of a man in a bowler hat. I thought, ‘I could do that.'”
Years later, when he was preparing an installation for a 1991 exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, he remembered Magritte’s 1959 painting State of Grace, which depicts a cigar at the same scale as a bicycle. The centerpiece of his installation became a sculpture of a giant cigar, eight feet long. More recently, when Gober was invited to organize an exhibition in Houston at the Menil Collection by combining his own works with objects from the collection, he included three pictures by Magritte. (more)

Or Duchamp.

Beginning in 1982, Gober executed a series of sinks that became his first “trademark” images. These look as if he might have bought them at a plumbing supply store, much like the one where Marcel Duchamp bought the urinal for his 1917 readymade Fountain. But in fact Gober’s sinks are sculptures, made from plaster over lathing and painted with enamel to simulate the look of porcelain.

In some cases he has altered the shapes of the sinks, but even where they look perfectly “normal” there is something unsettling about them, beginning with the fact that they have no faucets or pipes attached. They are conspicuously nonfunctional in a way that makes us think twice (or three times) about everything they might recall or suggest. (more)

Beginning in the diverse field of Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, the influence of comic strips on figurative artists became easy to track. Abstraction is different. Elizabeth Murray pioneered, but few followed.

They’re following now. These artists favor curved over straight lines, rebounds over splats. They seek the painterly sweet spot, a place where the ball bounces without bothering to articulate a ball. They infuse into their colored grounds the comic spirit of up and at ’em.

Karin Davie (her Web site here)

Davie is so crucial I’m going to reproduce her twice. If her paintings were particle physicists, they’d pop gum at the podium.

Claude Zervas – comic abstraction imitating a flower.

Darren Waterston – sci-fi spiritualism meets Chinese landscape painting merged with George Herriman to beget gorgeous goo.

Susan Dory: Comparing her to mid-20th century Color Field figure such as Morris Louis is useful. His transparent, overlapping mounds of color are art in art about art. Hers, less transparent, have roots in thought bubbles, Internet tubes and tunnels made by moles planning to surface in Elmer Fudd’s garden.

Omar Chacon – It’s raining in Toon Town
More Chacon, detail:

Mary Heilmann – life in a comic strip highrise
Harold Hollingsworth – When comic weather takes a dark turn, forked tongues serve as rain.

Aaron Bagley – up, up and away

Default network cognition:

It’s an
interconnected and anatomically
defined brain system that preferentially activates when individuals
focus on internal tasks such as daydreaming, envisioning the future,
retrieving memories, and gauging others’ perspectives….Its subsystems
include part of the medial temporal lobe for memory, part of the medial
prefrontal cortex for mental simulations, and the posterior cingulate
cortex for integration, along with the adjacent precuneus and the
medial, lateral and inferior parietal cortex….The default network has
been hypothesized to generate spontaneous thoughts during mind-wandering
and believed to be an essential component of creativity. (more)

Vancouver
B.C.’s Isabelle
Pauwels is the first winner of the Brink
Award. Administered by the Henry Gallery, the Brink was conceived and funded by Seattle collectors/art
patrons
John and Shari Behnke. It’s intended to offer encouragement to a Northwest artist who might be poised at the beginning of a substantial career. Besides the honor of it all, winners get $12,5000 and a solo exhibition at the Henry. Pauwels’ installation is now on view and titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/ The complete ordered field.

The title itself is unbelievable. If hers is an ordered field, chaos has competition. Her work appears tossed off – notebook entries, not novels. Instead of dipping into her subject matter – reality TV, talk shows, candid snapshots, family films and cultural documentaries – she lets it flow around her. Should she fashion a figure, it will have no spine. The viewer who is looking for a narrative thread can find it, but probably not without cue cards, otherwise known as background information.

Pauwels:

My
work attempts to interrupt the audience’s familiar reading of a genre in
order to alter its expectations of what content should do, and what its
reaction should be.

Born in Belgium herself, Pauwels’ grandparents were part of the last generation of that country’s colonials.

A little history:

Belgium itself had only been independent since 1830, prior to that it was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. By the time independent Belgium might have been in a position to consider an overseas empire, major imperial powers
already had the most economically promising territories for colonisation within their spheres of influence. Leopold II tried to interest his government in establishing colonies but it lacked the resources to develop the candidate territories and turned down his plans.
Leopold II exploited the Congo for its natural rubber which was starting to become a valuable commodity. His regime in the Congo operated as a forced labour colony, with murder and mutilation as punishment for villagers who did not collect and supply the rubber quota they were given. It is estimated that millions of Congolese died during this time, although many of these could be attributed to the introduction of new diseases. (more)

History, of course, is that nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is unable to awake. Joseph Beuys confronted his Nazi past with personal myth. Unlike Beuys, Pauwels was not a direct participant in a time notable for its horror. Neither were her grandparents. They were post Leopold II – paternalists, not murderers. They existed in a still poisonous aftermath, and she was born long after that. If she doesn’t bring it up her connection to the colonial past, nobody else will.

Her touch is so light, her subject is barely there. The gallery includes notes and fragments of notes, a grass hut with a flickering film inside, another stuttering film and other detritus. She can be unexpectedly funny. A series of postcards framed blank-side out feature only a line drawn as a cross, meant to separate the space between address and message. These crosses become a series of backs – victims of colonialism lined up and disappeared on postcards no one sent. 

Salman
Rushdie, from The Moor’s Last Sigh:

The
trouble with the English is their history happened overseas, so
they don’t know what it means.

My first encounter with this installation triggered  an instinctive and stubborn hostility. Her work struck me as glib, coded in-group and embedded with a vast sense of its own entitled worth (how blind and ignorant be our detractors).  By the second and third visit, however, I began to lose faith in my reaction. I relaxed a little inside the mental default mode of her fragile vessel.

Instead of purposefully seeking connections, I disengaged, slipping out of gear to see where viewer passivity might get me. In the end I got a kind of acceptance, an admiration for her truth to materials.  She promised no greater revelations. How close can we get to her grandparents? How close can we get to our own? For most of us, there’s nothing left besides romanticized anecdotes, a few photos, a letter or two; maybe a suit, a hat or a wedding ring. If her film stutters in its projection, so does memory’s.

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in
any case ..

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some
from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of
slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear,
learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et
decor” ..

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies,
then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home
to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and
liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never
before.
Young blood and high blood 
Fair
cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness
as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias,
trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.


V.

There
died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone
in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Back to the Brink Award: The selection committee included 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
the Behnkes. 

Pauwels continues through May 9.

Blacks them out.

Austin Kleon, Creativity is Subtraction (via)

Walker Evans – Alabama Farm Interior (Fields Family Cabin), 1936, from Now
Let Us Praise Famous Men

Stefan Steins

IMAGE DELETED ON REQUEST OF ARTIST

From Seattle’s Lucas Deon Spivey:

Remember those photos you took of your friends pretending to be the wife
and husband from American Gothic?  Or the one where you
imitated Edvard Munch’s The Scream?  Now we have a name and a website
for that – it’s called art bombing and you can post them at And Now That’s
Art.

Below, a person with a bagel next to Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun, 1969, in front of the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

Not only do they move mountains, they are mountains. Below, five ways to praise the powerful.

1. Assert it. (Carol Adelman, Self-Portrait)

2. Remember it. (Virginia Ivanicki)

3. Threaten it. (Jennifer Campbell)

4. Locate it  (Anne Mathern)

5. Acknowledge it. (Jennifer Zwick)