Regina Hackett

Galleries are a never-say-die enterprise until they do. They’re fine even if they aren’t. What are gallerists going to say? Nobody wants what we’ve got, please be the exception? A desperate vibe deters collectors, who don’t want to be part of any gallery that is overly eager to have them.

If buying art is a habit, many have broken it. The formerly flush will have extra money again, but when will their hearts swell with acquisitive desire? The kind of collectors who are capable of turning the tide (and encouraging others to join them) are motivated not just by the pleasure of owning one more piece but by standing by the artists whose work matters most in their lives as well as stretching to interact with the new. 

In hopes that their artists can provide those experiences, Seattle galleries are looking to come on strong in January.

The top of the list:

Gretchen Bennett and Yuki Nakamura at Howard House.

Bennett: The excellent text for both artists produced by the gallery.

Gretchen Bennett’s show, Community World Theater, takes its name
from an old movie theater turned punk venue in Tacoma, Washington, the
site of about three dozen shows in 1987 and 1988. Bennett’s work of the
last two years has explored Kurt Cobain as a sort of a natural event–an
eruption or a cultural moment as relevant as the first step on the
moon. In her new work, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the atmospheric
paintings of JMW Turner serve as a conceptual basis for this continued
exploration, both for their subject matter and for their connection to
1816, a year of significant climatic abnormalities due in part to the
historic eruption of Mount Tambora.

Nakamura:

Yuki Nakamura’s porcelain light bulbs, cast in antique and contemporary forms, are ruminations on light, beauty, and the history of invention and obsolescence. Thomas Edison unveiled his carbon filament bulb 130 years ago, but today this classic design is quickly disappearing, replaced by more energy efficient models. Nakamura’s evocative installations create a new landscape of an electric world. Transformed into porcelain skins and animated projections of filaments, her light bulbs are a investigation of texture, shape, and volume as well as the contrast between the bulb’s surface the exterior light source.

Justin Colt Beckman at Punch. Beckman blurs the distinction between cowboys, hillbillies and rednecks, all of them aspects of his rugged person. O give me a home, where he-man images roam….

Mark Newport and John Buck at Greg Kucera.

Newport continues to knit his way through the sagging fortunes of low-rent superheroes.
Buck continues to carve his own picture dictionary of people, places and things. (Below, detail.)

Amir Zaki and Ron Nagle at James Harris.

Zaki’s recent focus is the color-saturated purity of life-guard stations. They’re very L.A. and very pertinent to our present situation. Save us, we cry. Nobody’s there.

After half a century, everything Ron Nagle does is new. No false moves for this wily old clay master.

Michael Brophy at G. Gibson. The painter from Portland wants to be alone.

Marc Dombrosky at Platform.

Michael Jackson died on the day that I both started and lost my job in Las Vegas.

Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in Say Anything, 1989:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Robert Francis Zvernia as himself, from email sent, 2010:

I guess I’m what you’d call a new media artist. I work primarily in digital photography and video and have been distributing my work online since 1997. I’m no Luddite but I am concerned about the inclusion of cell phone art and the like as appropriate media for submission in the below call for public art proposals. Here’s why:
Public art by definition should be free and accessible to all. Cell phone art and the like violate this basic principle by requiring the purchase of equipment and/or services from commercial interests in order to access the nominally public work. While the incorporation of fee-attached technologies may be acceptable in private settings, any work which is publicly funded and located should be self-contained and present no financial barriers to its appreciation.
I hope you will keep this in mind as you fulfill your roles as stewards of the public trust.

Zverina takes issue with a call for proposals from Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs:

In collaboration with Seattle Parks and Recreation and the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs seeks an artist to create a new media artwork for the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop.
The Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop is a pedestrian trail that surrounds Lake Union in Seattle. The selected artist will create a new media project drawing on the history and/or context of the site. Possible media include podcast- or cell-phone based audio work, audio and/or video tours using mobile media and GPS, and walking tours or interactive events using the Web.

Eligibility: Open to professional artists living in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia and California.
Budget: $18,000 all-inclusive
Deadline: 11 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010 (Pacific Time)
Details here. 

A quick way to kill interest in a contemporary painting is to call it Abstract Expressionist, even neo-AbEx or in the tradition. As a tradition, it played itself out more than half a century ago. From dominant it fell to irretrievably historical, rooted in post-World War II New York with variants in other places (Paris, San Francisco, Seattle), all of which are also signed, sealed and delivered into the past.

Before AbEx, abstraction was reductive. ApbEx gave flesh to those bones. Exuberant, intuitive and of-the-moment, it allowed the hand and arm to speak for mind and represent matter. Pop pushed the movement aside by making the passions of the second generation look hysterical, ego-driven and (worst of all) contrived. Pop was cool and fun-loving. AbEx was neither. Its pioneers held their own, but artists interested in carrying it forward risk being accused of playing “torch songs on dead batteries,” as David Thomson unfairly wrote about Chet Baker.

The dead-battery-torch-song theory has only one flaw: It isn’t true. AbEx’s powerful progeny are everywhere, doing their bit for overall fields and the pleasures of push/pull, but the ones who rise to prominence refer to their family tree at their peril.

Here are a few:

Joan Snyder

Susan Rothenberg (Image via)

Robert C. Jones

Lauri Chambers

Alden Mason

Denzil Hurley

Jacqueline Barnett

Mark Takamichi Miller (At Howard House)

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An art dealer expounding on the difference between hacks and has-beens said that in the right market, the work of a hack can be sold, but a has-been has no market. For art critics, the situation is the reverse. A has-been may be only a brilliant defense short of reemergence, but about a hack there is nothing to say.

In spite of the categories into which others try to tidy them away, artists continue. Why? Virginia Woolf attempted an answer in the person of Lily Briscoe, a painter of little or no prominence in To The Lighthouse. 

Lily stepped back to get her canvas – so – into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea.
…

Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint, saying she couldn’t create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer of who originally spoke them.

Can’t paint, can’t write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went slow, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and blues.

…

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

Chester Arnold, Inventory, 2005, 22 x 26, oil/linen

From Tyler Green:

Effective immediately, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is extending free admission (and parking) to all active-duty United States and Canadian military members and their families, including Guard and Reserves. Good for them. (more)

Excellent idea. The small cost to the bottom line would reap a big harvest in good will. In the Northwest, only the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum offer a military discount, and it’s just for the the person serving, not families. With the military engaged in two wars, their families are serving too. In the new year, art museums need to honor this effort with a free ticket for all concerned. (The Frye can’t rise to this occasion because it has already surpassed it, being free admission for everybody all of the time.)

Related: Sympathy for soldiers photo essay here. Jon Stewart on the government’s  shameful efforts to avoid paying for war-related health care injuries, here. Finally, bringing the war home: Owen Mundy through projections and Remi Gaillard through an invasion of a vacation beach:

U.S. News & World Report claims that the jobs for museum curators are poised to go boom, making it one of the top 50 career choices in 2010, here via Henry curator Sara Krajewski. She noted that she’d like to see their back-up research. Given the starved state of the profession in the past decade, this promise of prominence is hard to believe.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste on new-age platitudes. This one is 40 years old, proving once again that belief needs no evidence to stay afloat.

Who’s missing from the art audience? Real Clear Arts has the answer, or at least, an exploration of the question.

From the department of still good: Allan McCollum’s 2005 interview with Harrell Fletcher.

From John Lopez in the L.A. Times: What it means to be an artist now. The subtitle could be, Stop the world, I (might) want to get off.

From Christopher Knight:

In an October lecture at the Smithsonian, critic Dave Hickey noted that, in the Internet’s vast territory, niches are the equivalent of villages. And art does poorly in the homogenized, provincial ether of a village.
To thrive art needs cities, where cosmopolitan diversity, conflict and sheer accident are the norm. (more)

Uh, no. Tell that to Cezanne, who preferred Provence to Paris. Some artists want to be alone. (From William Carlos Williams, who liked New Jersey better than New York, “I am lonely, lonely./ I was born to be lonely./ I am best so!”).  Where doesn’t count next to what, and not all whats need an urban setting to flourish.

Also from Christopher Knight:

One of the funniest essays at the tail end of 2009 was Knight’s response to Jerry Saltz. In his homage to Jeff Koons, here, Saltz could have been clearer about the time-line of the many appearances of Koons’ flower-filled Puppy. Fair enough. But here’s the thing about Knight, one of the best critics in the world. He tends to be all or nothing. In the powerful sweep of his argument, the thing that actually occurred can get lost.

[Read more…] about Links – let soldiers in free

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