Regina Hackett

Recycled Visions: The Films of Salise Hughes will be screened at the Northwest Film Forum Oct. 12, 8 p.m., courtesy of Third Eye Cinema, with live music from original scores.

Still from There Were Houses Here, 2007.

A primitive version of Tidal Wave here, which is stilted compared to the real thing but still good.

Info from Web site:

Visual artist Salise Hughes began experimenting with found film footage four years ago, creating her own unique process of digitally erasing and layering areas of the film image. Recycling is a major theme of her work, tearing apart existing 16 mm educational, and Hollywood genre films and rebuilding them, subverting the original material and giving the footage new meaning. Her films have screened in festivals around the globe including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Athens Greece International Film Festival, L’Alternativa-Independent de Barcelona, Seattle International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival were she won an award for Technical Innovation in 2006. For this event composer Jason Staczek, and vocalists Alicia Dara and Mia Katerine Boyle will perform their scores live.

KUNSTFEHLER-FEHLERKUNST (Failed Art – The Art of Failure) ran at the ACC Galerie in Weimar till August 9th and is now at Halle 14 in Leipzig through Oct. 25.


Peter Santino’s contribution is a field of sand hemispheres that spell an apology in Braille. If the blind read it, they’ll ruin it.

Ambivalent regrets are nothing new for the (former Seattle) Northern California artist. In various forms, his apology text has been in motion since 1995, when, presumably, he first realized the error of his ways.

Translation:

Whomever,

On January 25th, 1968, when I first began my creative work, I felt certain I
had something to offer, a vision, something to put into the world. Now, some 41
years later, it has become clear that what I must offer is my sincere apology.
Nineteen years ago, I recognized and embraced my failure; my failure to
achieve a measurable level of artistic communication. Despite numerous exhibitions
and more than sufficient opportunities to explain my vision, no thing has been
achieved.
I must apologize:
I am Sorry for allowing my ego to convince me of my cleverness.
I am Sorry for allowing that cleverness to permeate my work.
I am Sorry, Very Sorry for assuming my vision had merit enough
to conquer,
to change,
to dominate.

Peter Santino
Eureka, May 2009

Update: Dave Hickey discusses the reasons for art failure in a lecture taped by James Kalm, which the lecture hosts want to take down so watch them soon, part one here. Charlie Finch calls him a bulbous phony here. I don’t agree with a lot Hickey has to say this time out, but whatever he’s saying, he can’t be written off as a phony. Finch and Hickey have more in common than either is likely to own. Both are good writers with a tendency to swing wide at the lip.

Monty Python:

First sad sack: We were raised in a corridor. We longed for a room.
Second sad sack: We longed for a corridor. We were raised on
a road.

Not since 17th-century Chinese painters focused on the fluid connectives between forms has empty space been as riveting a subject as it is now.

Rachel Whiteread is crucial in this context, but by the time she began to explore the space between legs of a chair, for instance, Bruce Nauman had already been there and gone. (The peerless Peter Schjeldahl described their relationship as Nauman’s Chuck Berry to Whiteread’s Beatles.)

In Seattle, Leo Saul Berk has his own version of the theme: empty space as landscape narrative. In his exhibit at Lawrimore Project, Deep, Dark, he maps the volumes of famous undergrounds, including the hole in which Saddam Hussein unsuccessfully sought refuge after the U.S. invasion of his country on trumped-up charges.

Spider Hole, 2009  Fiberglass, foam, resin and glass.  6 x 4 x 10 feet.

Berk gives volume to the photos, schematics and renderings of the box-cave trailing a partial tunnel that the U.S. military released to the media. Hanging from the ceiling and painted yellow to mirror U.S. ridicule of the sole occupant, Spider Hole is a positive projection asserting itself with a phallus, snake, tongue and weapon.

Who’s weapon? Not the butcher of Baghdad’s. Glass beads ordinarily used for roadway strips give the piece its disco glitter.

Quecreek Mine, 2009  Acrylic and walnut.  30 x 2.5 x 22 feet.

If this piece came with a soundtrack, it should be the wacked-out beauty of the Beatles’ Come Together.

The
Quecreek Mine collapse came after 9/11 and during the build up to the
Iraq War. Nine men trapped 240-feet underground managed to run to the
highest point of their three-to-five feet high coffin and find a bubble
of air as water roofed the structure.

Thanks to the miners
themselves and the rescue crew of engineers who did everything right,
everybody got out alive. There was only one side to be on during the
78-hour ordeal. When that side won, it was a rare piece of good news
for a rattled country. For a moment or two, everybody ignored the
inherently flawed nature of an industry tearing up the earth and using
humans as disposal parts.

Orange acrylic dips and rises as it tracks a layout through an echoing grid of purple shadows. Cracked in spots and porous throughout, the piece is tapped out, with empty squares where earth used to be. As Chinese landscapes move from earth to sky to water, Quecreek Mine also metaphor for the river that ran through it.

[Read more…] about Leo Saul Berk: caves, mines and hideouts

After running on a regular basis earlier in the summer, Stokley Towles’ Waterlines surfaces again for two performances at Noodle Works Studios, Oct. 18 and 25. (Info here)

Allen Ruppersberg

Dan Webb
Webb’s Fortress (above) is currently in From Whence that Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice.

Laura Owens

Claire Cowie

The trees you know are Roxy Paine‘s. They’re all over the place, including at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. (Image via SAM)

The tree you’re less likely to know:

Chris Sicat, Redwood Tree Top (Tag a Log) 2009, Graphite on redwood, 14 feet tall (Image via)

Sicat hand-colored a 14-foot Redwood log with pencil, which he intends as a dialogue between two natural elements: (from Otis)

I begin with looking at the wood form and the flow of the grain. I smoothen the wood to prep the drawing surface, which is a paradox in that it is a sculpture that is being imagined. At this point, I start to see a non-linear narrative script written out…. and this is where the moments of undefined deuce begins… a buzzing of the electric pencil sharpener… the scratching of the needle point of a soft graphite pencil onto a hard redwood log. The music plays…. miles and miles and miles of Miles Davis, lines after lines after lines til there is an infinite of graphite fibers making a collective mass… the grains finds their moment to rise and descend… the sounds of contemporary chamber music, Erik Satie, Hank Williams, Chemical Brothers, Scott Joplin and Snoop Dog… the crescendo brings the form of the woods and I find quiet moments in the knots and grooves… the hand plots to contemplate… concentrate… and converse back to nature… All this happens in between the engagement of the tag and the log.

2009 P-K Awards here, average award, $16,000. Seattle artists on the list are:

Rick Araluce, Etsuko Ichikawa, Ken Kelly and Alex Schweder. Congrats all.

If Culture Grrl’s list of stories missed by the New York Times is accurate, the NYT culture desk would be wise to give it some thought. Her complaints would have more weight if she had gone on to say what she appreciates about NYT’s arts coverage. In visual art, at least, it’s stellar. I don’t understand why so many art bloggers have a hard time coughing up a compliment for the Times.

Constant nitpicking against it gets old. Reminds me of Olive Oyl’s dad saying over and over in Popeye, “You owe me an apology!” Let me get my form letter of apology and sign a dozen in advance.

Spiders made this: (story here)

Bill Viola was temporarily Jeff Weinstein’s hero when he declined to participate in Pope Benedict XVI’s conference on spirituality and art. Good piece by Weinstein, as per usual, although it ran under the mysterious subhead, Who Would Expect a Video Artist To Be a Hero? Why not expect a video artist to be a hero? Viola no longer is, as least as defined by Weinstein, because Viola changed his mind and will attend.

Instead of his original statement, issued by his dealer and quoted by Weinstein, “Bill Viola doesn’t agree with many of the policies put forth by the
Vatican and the Catholic Church and this is his reason for declining to
participate,” Viola now says the issue is so important he’ll show up, story here.

Like Weinstein, I cheered Viola’s first impulse, but the best comment came from Jen Graves:

But seriously: Church, if you want to get the attention of artists, do like you used to do–throw money at ’em. (more)

I’ll believe the Pope is serious about engaging contemporary art when he commissions Eric Yahnker. (Yahnker was recently at Ambach & Rice. My review here.)

Eva Diaz on Lisa Oppenheim’s Dead Letter Office, an altered-photo series that sounds like a terrific 9/11 memorial:

Dead letter office. The phrase nags at me; it seems too direct, perhaps insensitive to use, given the context. The dead letter office is what happens to public artworks that have outlived their civic life and, due to the vicissitudes of time, taste, and politics, find themselves with no public. Their large scale makes it unlikely they’ll find another home, so they may end up stored in the basement of the World Trade Center until 2001. Then, well, we know the rest. 
…Now these forever absent works exist only in photographs: the death of the dead letter office. Oppenheim’s series is, however, the birth of a gracious memorial to all that was lost. (more)

Diaz wrote no more than a long paragraph but covered everything. An image would have been nice, however.

Did Jackson Pollock sign his name all over the all-over abstraction of Mural from 1943? I’d say yes. Fascinating to see what was there all along. (Story here.)

From dogs to the deep space of an eyeball: Douglas Britt interviews Keith Carter, here. Speaking of deep space, stars eat each other, story here.

In the interests of ending on a positive note, here’s Andrew Junge with something you gotta have.

Referring to this post, no-last-name-offered Eric wrote:

Regina. I read with interest your claim that Seattle has 10 top
galleries. In what way top? Try as I might, I can come up with only
four that even marginally live up to that description: Greg Kucera,
James Harris, Howard House and Lawrimore Project.

There are more than 10 I’d call top.

The first meaning of top is that I see every show, even the rare ones I’m not looking forward to, because I respect the dealer’s record and know the opportunity exists to be surprised. These galleries are Ambach & Rice, Greg Kucera, Howard House, James Harris, Lawrimore Project, Francine Seders, Platform and Punch.

That’s eight. Top also includes galleries that are good to great within their specialties, such as Roq La Rue for Pop Surrealism, Traver for glass, G. Gibson for photography and Martin Zambito for Northwest historical.

That’s twelve. If art cooperatives can be included as galleries, then both Crawl Space and Soil make the the list. That’s fourteen.

On a different list are Seattle’s B galleries. I don’t see every show, but I check their Web sites each month. The strongest of them is Davidson Galleries. In this group, galleries offer something I find engaging once, twice or even three times a year. (Davidson is more like six times a year.) They include Foster/White, Grover/Thurston, Catherine Person, Fetherson,  Friesen, Lisa Harris, Linda Hodges, Winston Wachter and Woodside/Braseth.

There are two galleries that are also bars that show signs of turning out to be better than B-list. They are Grey and Vermillion. Joe Bar is not as good but still better than most on the B list.

There are galleries that are too new to judge but show great promise, chiefly, Ohge Ltd, adjacent to Lawrimore Project, and Cario Cairo.

If I absolutely had to come up with a top ten list, I’d add Crawl Space and Ohge Ltd to the first category and call it a day.