Regina Hackett

Seattle critic Elizabeth Bryant tends to write about art at the margins of the Seattle experience. If she were in New York or LA, she’d find the less likely there too. Ditto North Dakota. Whatever is central in North Dakota would be unlikely to move her, but a North Dakota follower of Italian Futurism who paints in a sagging house off a rutted road and fails to notice that Futurism is a century past its pull date might well become the subject of her illuminated scrutiny.

Here she is on painter David Kane:

“Farewell to Mars and Other Paintings” is Kane’s first show “since all that happened,” (meaning his diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from lung and thyroid cancer…) Some of the canvases in the show were begun ten years ago, set aside and picked up again; others are entirely new. Allusions to the battle with cancer can be read throughout the show in saucers, moons and suns that look like cells, in the scorched earth and the struggle of flesh and technology.

In “Farewell to Mars”, a priapic alien herma gives a three-fingered wave to a trio of flying saucers soaring like so many platelets in the purple skies of a red planet. It’s a hopeful sign.

Kane’s painting, as always, is intellectually and pictorially brilliant, going far beyond the personal. He plays with spatial recession, atmospheric effects, and deceptively tight compositions, pulling from 18th-century Venetian vedute painters (think Canaletto), depression-era regionalism (think Benton and Hopper), ’50s pulp sci-fi illustration, and apocalyptic fundamentalist religious tracts (rapture merges with alien abduction) to reference classical myth and rationalism, post-war atomic-age conformity, environmental disaster, and the war-ravaged sands of the Middle East. (more)

Canaletto? Not even a little bit. I can see Benton without the rhythm and Hopper without the light, however. Kane’s paintings look as if he made them with caked powders on sandpaper. In their choked aridities, in their coarse forms and muddy colors, there is something genuine, a real toad in his imaginary garden. Bryant is thunderously wrong in what she sees in him, but I enjoyed reading every word. She’s that rare critic who lives not because of her judgments but in spite of them.

The great Elliott Bay Book Company got the obit it deserved not from any Seattle source, but from Kim Murphy in the LA Times, here. Murphy’s story suffers under a stupid headline – The plot thickens for a legendary bookstore – which, of course, Murphy didn’t write. The plot’s not thickening. It’s losing its narrative runway.

The usual Seattle sources covered it, but not well.

Paul
Constant at the Stranger was more interested in griping that he didn’t
get full credit from the Seattle Times for being first as the news
breaker. (Constant was much better on the demise of Bailey/Coy Books, which like the Stranger is on Capitol Hill. Bailey/Coy is a lovely little store, but compared to Elliott Bay, its significance is tiny.)

The
online Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a ghost of its former self, has no
interest in culture. Is the Seattle Times being written from Seattle? Its story
on Elliott Bay’s economic impact to Pioneer Square’s arts presence missed the
Square’s essential cultural identity. Besides being a haven for readers
thanks to Elliott Bay, that’s where nearly all of the city’s major art
galleries are located.

On Crosscut, Knute Berger was better than the ST on the economic impact, but again, does he live here?

Berger:

If
the blend of street life in Pioneer Square is largely the homeless, bar
patrons, and seasonal tourists, add to that mix sports fans, not
necessarily a book-buying crowd.

Galleries, big guy, galleries. The visual art crowd hits those streets, Tuesdays through Saturdays.

What
difference does it make? Anyone who’s interested has heard the news:
Elliott Bay is either going down or moving to Capitol Hill . That’s
where the LA Times’ story comes in. What is the character of this
particular store? Breath and depth, ladies and gentlemen. Breath and
depth.

OTHER NEWS….

Put on a happy face: The best graphic for Art/Basel/Miami Beach, opening Wednesday, comes from C-Monster, here.
(“Miami, Where Art Sweats. From the Department of Public Relations and
Extra Marital Affairs.”) Enough with the sobbing. Make it work.

Shudder: The Art World Edition of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People here. I remember when everyone at the Seattle Times was required to read 7 Habits,
and I (once again) gave thanks that I worked at the PI. The PI’s unruly
newsroom would have dropped kicked that order into a dumpster.

Richard Lacayo is pulling the plug on his excellent blog, Looking Around.
Why? Maintaining a one-person blog of that quality is a lot of work.
Missing from Lacayo’s sign-off is any acknowledgment that his blog made
him. He had worked for Time for decades and was largely ignored, except
in architectural criticism circles, laboring as he was under the large
shadow of Robert Hughes. With Looking Around, he became a
national figure. Here’s hoping his reasonable and intelligent voice
continues to be prominent once dropped back into the Time pool. (Who
reads Time? Ever? Anybody?)

From Kenneth Baker, why what art critics see at major exhibitions is different than anyone else, here.

Congratulations! Seattle’s Jen Graves wins a Warhol grant, here. (Other winners here.)

Stuart Sherman is back, here.
When an artist such as Sherman dies neglected and remains neglected, it
is a sign that the art world being driven by the market. His
reemergence means the opposite. Maybe the recession is not all bad.

Houston’s Douglas Britt loves Dario Robleto, here.
Britt goes the extra mile for his home town hero, traveling on his own
dime to see Robleto shows beyond Texas, including one in Seattle.

Private property is (art) theft, here.
Buying the land on which a key Richard Serra rests shouldn’t mean you
get to wreck it through neglect and deny access to the public. Tyler Green reports that at least the owners won’t be able to demolish it, here.

Kyle MacMillan does a fine job of saying goodbye to the retiring director of the Denver Art Museum, here.

Alexandra Silverthorne has a fresh approach to litter left in a park, here. (Love the white plastic spoon in the bushes.)

Akio Takamori’s figures are nearly always lost in thought, caught in that moment when the body pauses and the mind drifts freely across its mental sky. Born and raised in Japan, he pays his country of origin the honor of taking it lightly. Bold and loose, his figures include Japanese spirit babies with oversize heads, priests, warriors, peasants and royalty with the folds of their gowns flapping and more recently, figures drawn from the larger world.

While still in Japan he apprenticed with a master folk potter producing utilitarian ware. After coming to the U.S. in the mid-1970s, he fell under the influence of Montana ceramist Rudy Autio, whose vessels made from intertwined figures of women and horses repeat themselves.

Takamori’s do not. Bluntly made with deft, loose color washes, his version floats. Even the stoutest forms are light on their feet. Working through Autio, Picasso’s ceramics, pre-Columbian pottery and late Ming dishes fired in the shape of horses, birds, squirrels and fish, he creates his own theater populated by characters who need no text to tell stories. It’s in the sag of an old woman’s shoulders, the self-possession of a young intellectual, the fierce command of a dowager. Her chin may be weak, but her eyes glitter and her hair, painted in whirls of black ink, rises over her head like a planet.

His current exhibit James Harris Gallery includes 12 small porcelain figures paired with their photographic portraits, the latter inspired by Danish photographer Rigmor Mydtskov, plus five large figures in stoneware.

The photos reveal different aspects of the character: the modest concrete and the marquee. 

Through Dec. 19.

The Seattle Art Museum moved into the international limelight for its exhibit earlier this year, Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78. Reversing Garder Eide Einarsson‘s intent, All My Friends Are Dead brings to mind another kind of target practice taking place in the Seattle area – the gunshot murders of police officers, one in Seattle and four in Tacoma. They were singled out not because of anything they as individuals did but because of who they are as a class. Is this a new way for wars to come home?

Einarsson:

The power of horizontal lines that beat on the body’s clock, like heartstrings pulled out endlessly.

Agnes Martin, 1979

Joanne Mattera, 2008

Left: Velazquez, from Las Meninas (1656-57) Right: Picasso,1957

Akio Takamori, 2009

Lewis Hyde opened The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by describing a rift in understanding between Pilgrims and
Indians. Because the latter expected that gifts would
stay in motion, the English called them “Indian givers,” meaning, those
who take gifts back.

From
the Indian point of view, wrote Hyde, the Pilgrims might have been
called “white man keepers (or maybe capitalists, that is, people
whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a
warehouse or museum or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it
aside to be used for production).”

Northwest Coast Indians turned
this principle of gifts in motion into a banking system, known as the
potlatch. What was given away bestowed prestige and power, not what was hoarded.

Hyde:

The
Indian giver…understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we
have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it
is kept, something of similar value would move on in its stead, the way
a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the
felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present,
but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given
something else away. As it is passed along, the gift may be given back
to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better
if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third
party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are
other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or
resist momentum, but the gift keeps going.

After the gift shop at the Henry Gallery failed and the space went dark, Seattle painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed turning it into an artist space. (Story here.) Different teams of artists run it on themes of their devising. Through Dec. 13 is The Gift Exchange by Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata,
based on a come-one, come-all version of a  potlach. Anyone can bring a
gift and take one, or bring several and take several. Cowie, Hashemi
and Hirata set a high standard for the exchange by seeding the original
stock with their work.

Since it opened Nov. 14, the audience
has risen to the occasion. Although some people tear open corners of
wrapped gifts and keep going until they find treasure, many, many
others bring treasures and take what they’re given in a blind exchange.
Not all gifts are blind. Some lack wrapping, in the interests of making
sure a gift goes to someone who will value it.

As a profile of the community, The Gift Exchange
proves that people raised in an individualistic, me-first, capitalistic
system can transcend their training and rise to higher ground. Since
the 1980s and accelerating ever since is the assumption that art equals
money, that its value can be translated into cash on the secondary
market. The Gift Exchange argues for an older, truer version of art, that it is in essence a form of grace. To all concerned, well done.

Note: Remember the hours. Thanks to budget cutbacks, the Henry is open only Thursdays to Sundays.

Baxter – brass knuckles with crystals, 2009

On Facebook, Cable Griffith wrote, “You could gut a unicorn with that.” Eric Fredericksen added, “I’m going to realign your chakras, motherf*****!”

Now

Then

Why do people assume artists love nature? Because they’re sensitive? As Woody Allen liked to say, “Nature and I are two.” Kelly Mark hails from the Woody Allen School of Environmental Art. Asked to participate in a nature-friendly exhibit at The Tree Museum, Mark told curator David Liss she wouldn’t and later, agreeing to take part, that she had no intention of visiting the site.

According to Liss, she told him she “despised the outdoors, rural environments and any thing and any activity associated with nature such as insects, dirt, inclement weather, swimming in lakes, etc, and any situation that lacks a full complement of domestic amenities, utilities, appliances and facilities.” (more)

Her contribution, A Little Piece of Heaven, was a set of instructions. She told the curator to plant and maintain the equivalent of a residential lawn in the middle of the site’s wilds.

I’m not sure if the piece passed the Woody Allen test. Allen hates lawns too. Nevertheless, Kelly continues to define her position. From 2009, No Tofu, No Yoga Matt.