Don DeLillo/Grant Barnhart – make history
DeLillo, from Pafko At The Wall:
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
Barnhart, at Ambach&Rice through Jan. 24.
Joseph Brodsky/Henry Taylor – space & time
Yuki Nakamura – old light
Yuki Nakamura is interested in old, hand-blown electric lights. So is Chris Burden, Sheila Klein, Jim Hodges and Jeff Wall, among others. Because there is no more than a genetic hair’s difference between us and chimps, Terry Pratchett thinks electric lights are more interesting than stars. We swung down from the trees to cast our light against the dark.
Nakamura, Filament Drawing, porcelain, DVD projection, 2010. The dark bulb is stage set for the electronic drawing, a line that advances, coils and disappears to reemerge for another try – let there be thin, fragile lines of experimental effort.
Light Bubbles (porcelain, plexiglas) depends upon conditions in the room, either projecting rabbit ear shadows or pooling its darks at each bulb’s base. Her plexiglas bases evoke Robert Irwin‘s, but with more of a back story. Her bulbs are containers for the thing contained, our history from torch to gas to common glow.
Nakamura is a kind of landscape artist, interested more in emblems than places, in maps that explore the meaning of the destination.
At Howard House through Jan. 30.
Juan Alonso – help for Haiti
From Best of:
(Cuban born painter) Juan Alonso
wants to help out in Haiti but like a lot of us, he isn’t in a position
to donate a big wad of cash. Instead, he’s donated a beautiful piece of
his art called Sent. You have until Friday at noon to bid on it. Currently, the high bid is $550. All money raised goes to MercyCorps. More information here.
Sent, 2005, color pencil on paper. 19″ x 14″ image / 33 ½” x 28 ½” framed
Beauty and the beasts
I want to give beauty its due, but I’m a sucker for the beast.
The beauty:
Dale Chihuly, glass ceiling, Victoria And Albert Museum
The beasts:
Auroa Robson, from discarded plastic bottles, via
Judy Pfaff, made from whatever’s at hand.
Whose art is it?
If a writer inserts a couple of paragraphs written by someone else into an essay without attribution, the end result is not called a collage. If an artist does the equivalent, it is. Art is an omnivore. It will eat anything. The law calls the practice fair use, although the protection the term implies exists only on a case-by-case basis. Since the 1980s, the art world has called it appropriation. The practice predates the movement by a century: It’s hard to imagine Modernism without it.
Even so, Bill Eppridge‘s outrage is understandable. (Via C-Monster)
Eppridge, Barstow to Vegas Motorcycle Race, 1971
Seattle’s Deborah Faye Lawrence, The Mysterious Allure of Rural America, 2008
Undeniable, from Eppridge:
The artist used my work to make her collaged work look better.
Debatable:
I risked my life many times to make photographs — in this case I was
standing on the skid outside a helicopter at 500 feet. Seeing my work
stolen in this manner just flat-out offends me because the artist used
something that she didn’t earn or create for her own benefit.
That’s cowboy logic. It’s true that you can’t rope a steer from your desk, but you can make powerful art without breaking a sweat.
Back to undeniable: Great image, Mr. Eppridge.
Justin Colt Beckman – myth as false memory
Life is cheap on TV. Cattlemen, town mayors, grocers and gunslingers are always going down in Western reruns. They slide to the floor in a bar or hit the dirt on Main Street, arms blow wide like Christ crucified or clutching their chests like Fred G. Sanford setting-up his guilt-trip line, “I’m coming to join you, Elizabeth.”
Whoever is left standing is the dream man, the American version of Mao. We celebrate not him but his parade-float iconography. No matter that cowboys worked long hours in menial jobs, like miners only in the open air and on horses. They’re remembered as rugged individualists, not trigger-happy alcoholics.
Justin Colt Beckman is always willing to play once upon a time as long as he can mess with what follows the intro. In his photos and video at Punch Gallery, he impersonates the familiar in order to undermine its credibility. Although his square-jawed good looks tip us that he’s the hero, when he goes for his gun, he does what TV cowboys never did – bungle the draw.
Sometimes he’s fairly subtle. Striking a Roy Rogers/Dale Evans pose, he and his wife are so close to the real thing (the real TV thing) that memory collides with doubt. Who are these people? Don’t we know them?
Beckman makes the commonplace rare. A bullet-ridden can? He painted it silver and serves it under glass.
He’s the man firing over his shoulder, the light on his white hat. But because he shot his face in shadow (like a bad guy) and the flesh of his hand flattened, as if it’s pressed against the glass of the TV screen (screaming fake), he revels in his scam. In the heart of the he-man ideal, the hero cuts himself off from the past and charges blindly into the future, where he will, if the camera followed him, fade from view. Beckman’s version doesn’t ring entirely true, and that’s what’s good about it.
Through Jan. 30.
David Nordhal, 
