Regina Hackett

Unite and make something! The irrepressible David Shrigley‘s video for Pringle jumpers on Pacific Standard Time.

Spiders decorate their webs.  

Guidelines for dealing with book (or gallery/museum) assistants, via Paul Constant.  

Art criticism for the stupid: From the London Times Online – Behind the smile Mona Lisa may have suffered from high cholesterol. It’s a painting, people. Plus, everybody knows Mona is made of coffee.

From Amy Goodwin

The nicest-possible-way-of-writing-a-negative-review award goes to Roberta Smith for her non-appreciation of Lynda Benglis’ recent efforts.

But all innovative, driven artists — of which Ms. Benglis is definitely one — have comfortable ruts they periodically fall into, or pitfalls they need to avoid. This show emphasizes hers, while giving notice that in all probability she will soon be working her way out of them.

Related: From NewsGrist – Ten most scathing reviews of last year. (Howard Halle, whoever that is, is dead wrong about Emily Jacir.)

The under-appreciated art blog award goes to John Perreault, whose Artopia is on ArtsJournal. Perreault’s last two entries, How the West Was Won: Fetish Finish and Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced Art? are among the best things I’ve read anywhere about anything in the new year. Perreault refuses to rush his posts. Once a week or less is all we get from him, but he makes every word count. His complexities are polished to a rare clarity.

Most-patronizing-post-from-an-art-blogger award goes to Tyler Green for his ruminations on Byron Kim. First Green says that Kim’s Synecdoche is not a great work of art. Green follows with the incredible opinion that the National Gallery of Art was right to acquire it anyway, in the interests of diversity.

Synecdoche, the Byron Kim installation acquired by the National Gallery of Art late last year, is
not a great work of art. It is closer to the end of every art
historical precedent it engages than it is to the beginning: abstract
painting, the use of the grid, monochrome painting,
abstraction-as-portraiture, minimalism, even its use of art world
insiders as models to help the work ‘get over,’ WWE-style….

Still, it is a worthwhile acquisition for the National Gallery of Art,
a mostly federally-funded institution that should be collecting works
of art that engage the most prominent American philosophical
conversations. Synecdoche, which Kim began in 1991 and to which
he has added ever since, is one of the better examples of American
artists engaging with with the 1980s and 1990s debate about
multiculturalism in America.

I don’t agree about the piece, but if I did, I wouldn’t praise the National Gallery for buying it. Green seems to be supporting affirmative action for unqualified art works. Few things could be more insulting to artists of color.

More Green: I admire Green and read his blog daily. Learn a lot. Appreciate his hustle and intelligence. But his arch attacks on Jerry Saltz are getting old. As Green reports, linking to an ARTINFO blurb, Saltz used what Green calls “a four-letter epithet” in a facebook post. It’s fuck, by the way. Saltz typed the word fuck. Big fucking deal.

Stefano Catalani is now director of curatorial affairs/artistic director of the Bellevue Arts Museum, a promotion he earned. Working in an impossible building in a crafts niche, he has made his shows matter.

Michael Brophy’s paintings have good lungs. They expand to fill a sky with room left over for the land, which is frequently dark save for moonlight on water.

During a residency last year in Reykjavik, Icleand, Gretchen
Bennett noticed that, as in Seattle, people in Reykjavik tend to hang
onto their holiday lights way past the occasion. Till sluggish, dazed spring approaches, colored light strings hang in doorways and along the edges of the windows.

Walking
home one night, she saw smashed beer bottles in the street, pieces of glass
held together by the adhesive of the label beneath them. Reflected party lights turned them into jewels. The stars she could see were
not in the sky but under her feet.

Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars, 2010 glass plastic bag

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams, early in the 20th century. Early in the 21st, the idea continues to have resonance.

Bennett is interested in decay and repetition as an affirmative position – an eroded X marks her spot. Like many in her generation, she offers an open-ended approach to materials instead of a specific style, in her case especially materials that have kicked around the edges of urban cultures, such as fake wood grain and skateboard decals. Her drawings in colored pencil are based on images that are past their technical prime and have been reproduced nearly to death, frayed and blurred instead of specific.

The Dull Flame of Desire, 2010, prisma color pencil on paper 22 x 30.5 inches

Ghost Dog 2010 prisma color pencil on paper 26 x 26 inches

Her current exhibit at Howard House takes its titled, Community World Theater, from a movie theater in Tacoma, Washington, that served as a pivotal site for dozens of punk concerts in 1987 to 1988. An earlier series of drawings treated Kurt Cobain as a kind of J.M.W. Turner weather-event – atmosphere overtaking concrete form.

In Iceland in a semi-permanent gray dark, she began to think of a culture whose recesses could be staged. In the dark, stage light is the sun. A generous use of it includes all the ordinarily lost moments. It can celebrate not just a performance but the moments after, when even a lost soul who may have fallen into an empty drum set gets up again and stumbles toward the folds of stage drapery, looking for an exit.

The Dull Flame of Desire 2010 felted panels, prismacolor pencils on paper, installation, dimensions variable

Her question is not, what is new? It’s what can be stitched together and born again.

Through Jan. 30.

From Evagee via This Isn’t Happiness

Benefit for Haiti’s Yele Fund. All prints 8 x 10 inches, $50.

Including, Jason Hanasik, Untitled, Two Lemons, 2008

Via

SculptureCenter curator Fionn Meade took the title of his current exhibition, Leopards in the Temple, from a story by Franz Kafka that reads in its entirety:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the
sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it
can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.

In his review, Ken Johnson praised what he took to be Meade’s refreshingly modest claims for the artists in his survey:

Fionn Meade, the show’s organizer and the SculptureCenter’s curator,
says in an essay that he is under no illusions about which kind of cat
he’s wrangling. The artists he has picked, he writes, “return to
distinct formal vocabularies and art historical trajectories,” and they
are intent on “borrowing and unsettling rather than wholesale attempts
at either remaking or deconstructing.” In other words, while working
with familiar elements of style they mix and match their sources of
inspiration in new but not shockingly novel ways.

Mr. Meade is describing the essence of contemporary academicism, and
while he puts a positive spin on this, it could be read as a
devastating critique. These are not the bestial vandals so beloved by
myth makers of the modern. It’s rare for a curator to assess his
artists in such honest terms, and in a sense Mr. Meade is operating in
the gap between curator and critic. At a time when curators too often
function more like smooth-talking hucksters than independent
intellectuals, that is good and refreshing.

Meade’s claims are only modest for those who still accept a modernist trajectory that peaks with destructive originals. Behind these tigers trail house-broken copycats, footnotes in someone else’s story.

But what if the artists in Meade’s show do not seek to despoil new frontiers but instead chose to acknowledge that the ground on which they stand is occupied?  What if they want to make art out of an old ceremony rather than create a new one? What if their aim is not to shock but to unify? What if, in other words, they are not academics of old struggles but pioneers in new harmonies, ones with roots in the chaos of old scores?

Installation view, Leopards in the Temple:

Meade comes from Seattle, where Ezra Pound’s injunction to “Make it new” matters less than E. M. Forster’s “Only connect.”

The artist statement of an exhibit at Tacoma’s now defunct Helm Gallery, Second Peoples, is worth quoting in full:

We have coined the name ‘second peoples’ to describe the people who
arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance,
after the traumatic event, after everything’s been said and done,
after, even, the end. We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are
too.

This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We
inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational
noise. Our corner of North America-these mountains, that timber, this
rich land-belonged to someone else. Our popular culture-those TV shows,
that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they’re cool-belonged
to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald
Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position.
How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened
before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in
our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in “Second Sex”, we think we
should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined
to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn
second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy,
presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We
think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught
activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures
created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position,
a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

Johnson again, about Meade’s show:

No one here, however, is likely to topple the current regime of art,
and in that respect these artists stand for the majority of
contemporary strivers. They are resourceful, alert and eager to please,
but are not wildly imaginative. Call them the mild ones.

Note the verb topple. Artists need not make war on their predecessors to qualify as major. Back in the 14th Century, Chaucer cast tributes behind him: “Out of old fields comes all the new corn.”

Jeff Antebi in Haiti before the earthquake:

I was in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, wandering at the edge
of a marketplace as the sun went down. Whole swaths of the city are
without electricity, government services or security. Things become
spectral, as areas heavily trafficked and lively by day transform into
deserted, nightmarish landscapes. I navigated for several miles using
distant bonfires like homing devices.

Cite Soleil, 8 x 10 inches

Antebi’s  photo-portrait of Haiti here. All proceeds from the sale of Cite Soleil go to Doctors Without Borders and OxFam, earmarked for Haiti. To purchase photo, email Wall Space Gallery at <mailto:gallery@wallspaceseattle.com>.

Note from Seattle writer Dean Patton Paton about his son, Jesse Hagopian, used with permission. (Donate to Mercy Corps here. For information on text donations, go here.)

Photo, Dean with Jesse at Jesse’s wedding

Some of you know this; some of you don’t: My son Jesse, his wife Sarah and their young son Miles went to Port au Prince, Haiti, last Saturday and were there when the earthquake devastated the country (Sarah was there to do HIV trainings, part of her work with the University of Washington).

Half of their hotel, the Hotel Creole, collapsed; the half they were staying in remained standing, and they are physically okay. Somewhat miraculously, Sarah had come home from work uncharacteristically early, five minutes before the quake hit, so they were all together.

In the hotel was a nurse, and because of this the Hotel Creole was turned into a kind of de facto hospital. For the past two days Jesse has been this man’s deputy, first going through the hotel to strip sheets off of the beds and tear them into strips; then breaking apart furniture to use as splints; finally doing what the nurse told him to do, resetting broken bones, splinting, applying tourniquets, trying to stop bleeding and cleaning wounds. We were all relieved to learn the hotel had a supply of rubber gloves for Jesse and the Nurse to use as they worked on the stream of patients. Yesterday, despite what seemed a complete blackout of telephone and Internet connections, Jesse managed to find some unexplainable iPhone pathway through Miami and was able to call several of us; he said everything was awful, there was no medicine, no gauze, no hydrogen peroxide, no ibuprofen.

“Everywhere people are screaming, crying,” he said. “People come up to me and say, ‘Doctor, please help my child,” and I say, ‘I’m not a doctor, I don’t speak Creole, and we don’t have any medicine. I can’t help you, I’m sorry.” He told a story of a man who managed to get out of his house, but his son remained trapped. After a day, he managed to dig out his son and he brought the boy, with a head injury and a bone poking out of his leg, to the hotel because he had heard a nurse was there doing what could be done. Jesse wrapped the boy with the torn sheets, to staunch the bleeding and do what he could to straighten the leg and clean up the young boy’s skull, “But then,” Jesse said, “he died. We couldn’t save him.”

[Read more…] about Haiti – a note from a friend

Artists come and go from galleries all the time. Usually, it’s the
former dropping the latter. Artists either get
better opportunities or they just can’t stand to work with their
dealers a minute longer.

Gallerists drop artists too, most
frequently because the artists prove unreliable. They miss exhibition
dates and leave the dealer hanging, sell their work on the side in
violation of an agreement or trash talk the dealer on a regular basis.
If a dealer is found chained to a radiator after an S&M session
that went badly, he won’t look kindly on his own artists spreading the
word.

Dealers may feel certain artists have failed to evolve. When Linda Farris
found herself in the position of representing too many artists whom she
felt had not delivered on their early promise, one of the top reasons
she closed her gallery was to avoid cleaning house. She loved all the
artists in her lineup but didn’t necessarily love what their work had
become.

Closing for that reason is rare. Also rare is for
dealers to drop an artist for sales reasons if they continue to
appreciate the product. Bruce Nauman sold badly until fairly recently.
A dealer who let him go due to a paltry economic return (and I don’t
know of one) would be covered in shame. If dealers think a particular
artist is top of the line, they hang in through the thin hoping to help
create the thick.

On the other hand, if the artist’s rise proves
meteoric, the loyal dealer might well be dumped in favor of one who couldn’t have cared less during the lean years. That’s a painful payoff, intolerable in other business
contexts, but gallerists are more than business people. They can never
be great if they keep both eyes on the bottom line.

Enter the
recession. Solid artists sell little or nothing. Trade that was once
brisk has slowed to a trickle. Unless dealers have a trust fund or
represent at least a couple of recession-proof cash cows, the price of
mounting shows they couldn’t have sold in flush times becomes more of a
mental burden.

Case in point: Seattle gallerist James Harris recently dropped Glenn Rudolph. In terms of Northwest art, it’s similar to a New York dealer dropping Nauman twenty years ago.

Rudolph is a poet of the post-apocalypse. He likes to photograph
bad news once the news value has faded and people are making the best
of their diminished circumstances. He favors those who live it up on
the margins of society, in a bizarre social club (the Duct Tape
Warriors in the Kent Valley), the artificial splendor of a suburban
housing development (Kent, again) and his own neighborhood in North
Seattle.

[Read more…] about Galleries look at their narrowing options