Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
Gretchen Bennett placed her memorials to weeds and rubble amid weeds and rubble at the corner of 12th Avenue and Jefferson Street in Seattle. If Joseph Cornell’s cabinets could be found inside curio shops instead of museums, the effect would be similar. (Her gallery here.)
(A project for Capitol Hill Housing with assistance from Steve Zielke.)
In Seattle, both left James Harris to sign on at Ambach & Rice. More on Ambach & Rice’s expanding empire here.
McMakin :
From email:
The NYTimes recently published an image of Ambroella trichopoda as the sole surviving member of the oldest extant family of flowering plants, “a small shrub found only on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.”
I am reminded of our good friend Wes and his
accosting Kathryn Hepburn on the stairs of the Burke Museum, giving her
a fossil flower from Republic, and in his charming but star-struck
manner, inadvertently comparing her to same.Ou sont les fleurs d’antan?
I responded:
Wes was so star-struck. Reminds me of the Leigh Bowery-Mick Jagger exchange. Late one night in
a bar in London, Bowery turned around and bumped into
Jagger. Jagger said, “Out of my way, freak.” Bowery responded, “Out of my way, fossil.” (Image via)
From C-Monster:
The graffiti artist who stole a buncha pencils from a Hirst installation at the Tate Modern is now threatening to sharpen them.
(Jonathan Jones opines. Art Observed.)
Or at least rotate it.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (via)
Standards and Double Standards is an interactive installation created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer which is comprised of fifty buckled belts that hang from motors in the ceiling and a computerized tracking system. The belts will slowly turn so that the buckles face people walking by. If only one person is in the space, all the buckles will face him or her. If several people are present and moving around, there is more movement, as the belts closest are the ones influenced by each new presence. The belts are at waist height, so the effect is of a crowd of ghosts wearing belts whose invisibility wore off. An interesting idea presented by Lozano-Hemmer is that the belts represent a fetish of paternal authority.
Debra Baxter, at Or Gallery through Oct. 17. Earlier review here.
If I get my passport in time, having foolishly allowed to lapse, I’m going to catch Death & Objects at Vancouver’s Or Gallery, featuring Debra Baxter, Dawn Cerny, Barb Choit and The Goggles (Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge). Through Oct. 17.
Cerny is well-known in Seattle for her drawings. What she’s showing north of her home town is new.
Or not near you, depending on where you, yes you, are standing on earth.
Seattle Art Museum, opening Oct. 15.
Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act
Nice, but nothing people are going to fly in to see, especially considering the recent flurry of Calder exhibits in New York. The fly-in show opens May 13: Kurt.
Vortexhibition Polyphonica, opening Oct. 3. Great idea. The Henry looks for interconnections within its collections.
Though the Henry is recognized as the region’s preeminent contemporary art museum, its holdings include 19th-century paintings, contemporary art and photography, textiles and costumes, ceramics, and many other art objects that are little known.
You bet they’re little known. If they’re not photographs from the collection, the Henry rarely shows them, and there is a lot to see.
Alan Sekula: Waiting for the Tear Gas, photo survey opening Oct. 8. Take a trip down memory lane, back to when Seattle did the World Trade Organization to the sounds of breaking glass and the screams of the wounded, accompanied by the smell of tear gas in the morning.
Polaroids: Mapplethorpe opens Oct. 24. Henry director Sylvia Wolf curated this show for the Whitney last year before she was Henry director, or she would have curated it for the Henry.
When he traveled, John Singer Sargent carried his watercolor kit, just in case.
Below, Venice, 1903
Charles LaBelle also makes art as he travels, but in his case, he makes it everywhere he travels, at least in places with structures on them.
Since September of 1997 I have maintained a database of every building that I have physically entered.
A record of each building is made upon entering the building for the first time. This information is subsequently entered into the database.
Additionally, the database is supplemented by a photographic archive of each building. Each building is photographed, if possible, before entering it. However if a building is not for any reason photographed, it is still recorded in the database.
The database includes the date and time I entered the building and the building location (street, city, state and country).
As of January 2009 there are approximately 9,200 buildings in the database with additional buildings being added almost daily.
The photographs themselves are never to be shown. They exist as raw supplementary data only. Rather, the project, whose true site is the realm of perception and consciousness, is represented by the database itself and occasional drawings of individual buildings made from the photographs. When executed, each drawing is done in brown watercolor pencil on sheets of paper ranging in size from 4 x 4″ to 9″ x 12.”
It is not important that the drawing be done at all.
Archaeologies of the future here, 268 drawings and counting. They are part of his continuing exploration of psychogeographics, the relation between place and the person in it, him. I love the rough drafts he’s posting on Facebook:
He describes them as:
a limit of space, not a space: the limit where space becomes pure time,
but where pure time annuls the event. No passage, no coming, no
departure, no birth or death, no attraction or excitation of a new
subject, and consequently no disappearance of the new, no abolition of
its novelty in its other absolute novelty that is its empty place or
its tomb. No not.
When I was a child, my father liked to say as he slipped off his wedding ring and held it out to me, “This ring has never been off my finger.”
an ArtsJournal blog
