Regina Hackett

Seattle’s James W. Washington Jr. was a stone carver who sought to reveal spiritual forces in the physical realm. His roughly hewn and symbol-studded stone altars, hatching
birds, sacrificial lambs and marble reliefs are guides to higher
ground. He was drawn to life that is on the point of coming into being or making
a breakthrough, not only the birds for which he’s best known,
but also snakes ready to squirm out of their coils, sperm swimming
across a marble relief to a radiant egg, and human figures caught in
the moment of enlightenment. Each chiseled stroke echos the New Testament promise, that every hair of the head is counted.

A survey of smaller sculptures is at Woodside/Braseth Gallery through Dec. 31..

Washington was 91 when he died in 2000, having proved to be a fiercer artist in his old age than in his youth. In his 80s, his work became bigger and more brilliantly festooned. In places he painted his stones with colored encaustic and set his symbols of ancient life flowing across the surface, as if the stone were supple and easily yielding to his chisel.

Washington:

I visualize the subject within and feel it out as I go. I
am the medium, just like copper wire is the medium for the current of
electricity turning on a light bulb.

I was speaking with some ministers a few years back. There were preachers of all things. I asked, how many of you
can tell me how many times you’ve drunk your own bath water? Life goes
in cycles. The last breath of a minister may turn out to be the first
breath of a pig. Life exists and continues. It uses everything.

For 60 years, painting has been stomped, stabbed, stepped on; set on fire, bound in ropes and hung on a clothesline like wet laundry. When it comes to doing violence to the medium, the thrill is gone. (See my Modern Painters review of the Seattle Art Museum’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78.) Damaging paintings is now just one more way to make them. Like the iconography of the Catholic Church in Africa and South America, painting expands to include its opponents.

Case in point, Margie Livingston. Ordinarily, she paints in oils from models she constructs to explore the relationship between three-dimensions and their translation onto canvas. Her end results tend to look like forests fractured by colored light.

Her exhibit at the Greg Kucera Gallery include forms that reverse that process. She’s now using paint to construct objects. They’re paint as objects, either on the wall or rolled and folded onto shelves or draped in shreds from the ceiling.

Lynda Benglis preceded her, and so did Charles Ray. Livingston’s Paint Line brings to mind Ray’s Ink Line from 1987. She is in their debt but not their shadow. Her interactions with paint map her thinking about her endlessly flexible medium. She uses it to dissect her representations, to pool her resources and to chart a lyrical course through light, space, form and time.

At Greg Kucera through Dec. 24.

Laura Castellanos’ buttons, available at the Seattle Art Museum‘s gift shop and online.

Literature has a bad sex award. Despite stiff competition, this year Philip Roth walked away with it. If art offered something similar, Jeff Koons would be a shoe-in for lifetime achievement: From Made in Heaven from 1991.

Lifetime achievement for best sex in an art context?

Wayne Miller, 
from The Way of Life of the Northern Negro, Chicago (embrace), 1946-48. Sixty-plus years later, nobody has topped it.

Thanksgiving is an excellent time to remember the real story, buried under fiction. Miles Standish and his anger management problem cannot taint the efforts of individual Americans to do better. (See Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)

Via

Discovered by happy accident in a lab at Oregon State:

Online, it looks a lot like Yves Klein blue, but it’s safe and (when generics appear) cheap.

Glasstire’s Top Ten art activists.
The boom in Doomsday.

Former PI editor Gil Aegerter on the play, It’s Not In The PI, a response to my review:

Finally got a chance to see the play on the final day, and I must say I liked it — with reservations. I agree with Regina that if you weren’t on the inside, you might find it confusing and disjointed. But I thought it captured the quirky character of the P-I quite well (kind of like the Adcock review that’s quoted). And it works as metafiction — the play as newspaper story, reported and written well or poorly, depending on your viewpoint, whether you were skewered. I would like to see the play refined and leaned-out, because there are some fantastic moments. The reporter-politician exchanges were just perfect. The Green River segment was poignant. The comment by the victim’s mom who is grateful to the reporter for not describing her daughter by job or crime — it’s the same care that this play shows to the P-I.

The same care this play shows to the PI? Aegerter is fluent in quadratic equations, reads classical philosophy for fun and could front a band good enough to hit the road. As a theater critic, however, he comes up empty.

Note to Gil: You worked there for years. Did you inhabit your own experience?

If the PI resembled the paper dissected on stage, Aegerter wouldn’t have worked there for a day. Former PI reporter Tom Paulson, who advised the playwright team, told them not to turn reporters into heroes. There’s a lot of ground between hero and nonentity, and this play didn’t find it. Nothing on stage mattered. Yes, Gil, the reporter-politician exchanges were good, but they concerned some harried public official having an affair. Since this is the only moment that explores a reporter doing the real job, why was the theme chosen so trivial?

I’ll agree that the play (more or less) attempted to capture the paper’s quirky character but cut that quality free from its roots, the business of providing the public with news and opinion of consequence. Trivial stories appeared in the PI. Of course they did. Breath and depth gave way to quick and dirty. But every day there was something and usually several somethings I was proud of, something enterprising, hard won and well played.

The PI was unusual in one respect: Despite cutbacks, the addition of good
management at the top coupled with a tipping-point infusion of fine reporters woke the place up in its final years. I know they woke
me up. Thanks to them, we did not fade away but went down strong.

It’s Not In the The PI wasn’t written as an elegy for the PI. What its fact-based fiction tried and failed to be is an elegy for a newsroom. Not a single character interested me, save for the brief (and entirely accurate) appearance of theater critic Joe Adcock. If these characters were a newsroom, it would be one that deserved its demise. Its occupants are self-indulgent, dim-witted whiners. What could they write (draw, photograph, design or edit) that could possibly interest anyone?

The best elegy for newsroom culture arrived this year in the form of a thriller: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow. The paper is the LA Times, which is diminished but not yet dead, despite the efforts of its owner to kill it. Connelly doesn’t get into that, wisely. He has a monster killer to deal with and doesn’t need Sam Zell, the monster Capitalist, cluttering up his copy.

The Scarecrow does not address why we’re losing breath and depth, just that we are, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “wandering between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” In the meantime, there’s a great newsroom fallen on hard times. We meet the narrator, reporter Jack McEvoy, just after he’d been laid off.

Every eye in the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten the word.

From a newsroom friend:

Holy fucking shit, you got pinked!…Man, this ain’t right.

The world ain’t right, Larry.

Like the paper itself, my time was over. It was all about the Internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates…The morning paper might as well be called the Daily Afterthought. Everything in it was posted on the web the night before.

Editor and McEvoy exchange:

[Read more…] about It’s Not In The PI, but it is in “The Scarecrow”

Sloth’s best. Lolling on a sofa
In a Chinese dressing gown

With the windows open in the heat,
The breeze rousing the leaves.
The flies dozing on the ceiling.

Makoto Saito (Image via)

Robert Yoder