Regina Hackett

Critics in the Northwest appear to be vying for the punchline position from an old anti-feminist joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That’s not funny.

We fall all over ourselves in our haste to tell Portland’s Jim Riswold that he’s not funny. I’ve done it. Jen Graves has done it. Chas Bowie is doing it now, in response to Riswold’s show at Augen Gallery.

Me:

He doesn’t have the depth to compete with Mexican graveyard humor, even under the utterly false guise of a Hirst tribute.

(Not just false but utterly false. more)

Graves:

Riswold makes big, glossy, colorful photographs that reach for satire but amount to little more than low-calorie artistic cannibalism. (more)

Bowie:

It doesn’t take a degree in art history to get Riswold’s one-liners. One of the show’s better photographs, for instance, a small still life titled “Damien Hirst Gets a Fish for His Seventh Birthday,” alludes to Hirst’s infamous sculpture of a dead shark by imaging the artist’s boyhood fish tank, occupied by a singular fish skeleton. Seeing as Hirst first exhibited his 14-foot tiger shark in 1992, Riswold’s commentary is as culturally relevant as a Monica Lewinsky joke. (more)

Mike Leavitt cannot claim to be any more nuanced, but his home town (Seattle) hearts him. I post examples of his art toys on a semi-regular basis. In New York, William Powhida is as subtle as a sledge hammer. Reaction? Pant, pant.

What’s wrong with Riswold? Why do critics rain shock and awe down on his head? He moved to art after a big career as an ad man. Could it be (at least partly) the oldest of NW critical tropes, that commercial success, especially in a commercial field, is suspect?

Riswold’s Retired Jesus is pretty funny and, dare I say, well done.

Q: How many art critics does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That’s not funny.

Jonathan Horowitz:

Dan Webb

Joseph Park, picasso and bull, 2009, oil/panel, 36 x 24 inches

Ree Brown

Before he became director of Western Bridge, Eric Fredericksen was an art critic.

To wit, his review of Whiting Tennis in 2000:

WHITING TENNIS’ new work is dumb. Dumb as in dumb luck, dumb as in mute, dumb as in the best solution to a problem is the simplest one. In these forms, dumb is good. And in art, this kind of dumb is rare.

Art is rarely free of gamesplaying, of a strategically marked-out position that the artist can work from, of some role that defines readings and defends the value of the work. Tennis’ position for this show is dumbness. In his cogent, helpful artist’s statement (these two adjectives apply to almost no other artist’s statement) he writes that he’s “the kind of person who’s struck dumb by a child’s painting or a little canvas-board winter landscape with birds, and thought it odd that after 15 years or more of ‘painting’ I’d never sat down and tried to make a ‘picture.’ So I did, literally sit down and try.”(more)

Before he was an art critic, he was a singer, as in, he sang in the shower. Years of singing in the suds led logically to karaoke, and karaoke left him with theories he plans to share Wednesday night at 7:30 at On The Boards. Interview with Eric about his performance here.

Via

It’s possible to be famous long past your lifetime on the strength of one piece. No one exemplifies that possibility as well as Meret Oppenheim, whose Object from 1936 is at the Museum of Modern Art.  

Its origins, from MoMA:

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim’s fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, “Even this cup and saucer.” Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism’s leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. (more)

Its influence continues.

Jennifer McNeely:

Sandra Doore:

Taro Hattori

In the anything-goes, free-form era of contemporary criticism, only those whose tenure is guaranteed can dare to be dull. They write to keep a well-fed hand in. Others tap dance. They’re as good as their clicks. Dull used to be the critical norm. Few long for a return to those days, but back then, attention came to critics who articulated a rigorous set of ideas, not necessarily a snappy approach to the sentence.

Personally, I’m all about snappy. And instead of possessing concepts which I bring to bear on the art, I respond to the ideas in the art. Paul Valery called it the equivalent of playing a card game whose rules change with every hand. 

Undoubtedly, that approach is generational. I started at the tail end of the anti-Clement Greenberg era and never left. (Marat/Sade: We’re all normal and we want our freedom.) But there are limits. No, there aren’t, but there should be. Critics who free associate in front of an artwork aren’t critics. They’re flying kites in their heads. They’re taking a test for a psychology course.

Few artists attract as much snap, crackle and pop nonsense as Luc Tuymans. His paintings are slippery blanks, unpleasantly representational without being dark. His moments are worth missing yet there they are, the thin-lipped equivalents of gray days.

The Secretary of State 2005
oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4 inches David Zwirner Gallery

The image above is perfectly transportable. Seeing it reproduced online is not significantly different from seeing it in person, which is, of course, remarkable for an oil painting. Note the tooth and the Buddha ear. The tooth on the left is like one slightly-longer table leg tipping the balance out of true. The long earlobe? Not in this case an old-soul signifier.

Pigeons
2001, oil on canvas
128 x 156cm (Image via)

Exhibit A, part of an essay on Tuymans from the online Saatchi Gallery:

Luc Tuymans’s pigeons bop in dumb disarray. Dirty and disease-ridden, they’re a strangely curious mob, a metaphoric stand-in for ourselves. Painted in the muted tones of history, Luc Tuymans offers a chilling ultimate truth about humankind. He makes a cold comedy of a terrifying thought.

Dumb disrray? Who you calling dumb? Real life street pigeons can, when motivated by food, easily learn to tell the difference between Van Gogh and Chagall. (Abstract here.)

Dirty and disease-ridden? Not these pigeons. They’re color inflections on canvas. In their price range, believe me they’re cared for.

Muted tones of history? What? Stand-ins for ourselves? Says who? Chilling ultimate truth? Cold comedy? Come on.

Even the great Peter Schjeldahl flails around for meaning in his (as always) richly entertaining essay on Tuymans in The New Yorker. Schjeldahl claims Tuyman’s work dramatizes the fallen state of painting since the 1960s. If anything, it dramatizes the reverse, that you don’t have to be an angel to dance upon the head of a pin as the audience swells around you.

Via

David Barnes (Image via)

Randy Hayes

In 1978, Allan McCollum began a series of paintings (Surrogates) that were no more than extensions of the frame.

Evan Blackwell‘s paintings are the frames.

In his solo exhibit at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery, Lost in Space, Blackwell proves (among his many other material explorations) that Tara Donovan isn’t the only artist coming up with new uses for drinking straws. Hers billow, like clouds. His are salvaged camouflage with a direct hit in the center. The center is your center, wherever you happen to be looking. It’s the illusion of a ripple effect.

Blackwell graduated last year from the University of Washington with an MFA in sculpture.

I am in the process of constructing forms, compositions, structures, and spaces that serve as lens to see both the materials from which they were constructed and world we live in with fresh perspective.

Through Nov. 27.

can sit on them. (Via)