Regina Hackett

Consider your stinking carcass. What if, in addition to the options of burial and burning, you could condense yourself into colored air, hover for a moment to amaze the multitude and disappear?

The subject of Joseph Park’s Absinthe is, most obviously, a homage to Degas’ Absinthe Drinker  and to Picasso’s Arlequin, but the subject of references is not his root subject. Park deals with the world that paintings make: how they can be constructed like crystallized
growth clumps or shards to accumulate over an image.

With his immaculate surfaces, tightly controlled tonal range, fluid brushwork and ability to animate empty space, Park brings an
embalmer’s gifts to his cultural critiques. The first impression he makes is of  vitality. The second is vitality strangled.
It’s that sinister backbeat coupled with an undertow of bleak beauty that moves us in the end.

Park’s facility can be off-putting to those committed to more rugged representations. About Park’s current exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, Chas Bowie wrote:

The critical hazard of making dazzling artworks, of course, is that you
fall so in love with your refined flourishes that you fail to notice
that you’ve drifted into the unseemly realm of razzle-dazzle. (more)

Why is facility an unseemly realm? Fragonard put up with this sort of thing towards the end of his career. But who today looks at The Swing and sees only a razzle-dazzle version of an upper-class, covet dalliance? No, it’s the slipper crafted on earth that floats in the air, pink rising above the larger pink of a desirable women to claim a place amid the artist’s lights and shades.

Art requires the facility it requires, different in every case.

Waiting for Claude: (The Claude to whom the title refers is worth the wait.)

[Read more…] about Joseph Park: The subject is not the subject

Eva Lake on becoming an artist:

An artist was all I wanted to be; it was the obsession. A Working Woman
in New York City, I instead maintained a wannabe status, if only in my
mind. Help and time was the ultimate Nirvana. My boyfriend told me that
any help came with strings attached and the whole thing was impossible
anyway. He said he had given up the game and didn’t even want to go to
openings, which was sort of odd because that was where we met. My
response at the time was that my job at Bergdorf Goodman had all kinds
of strings attached anyway – I can dream, can’t I? (more)

About the much-commented rantings of Glenn Beck as art critic: Christopher Knight offered the best reality check rebuttal (here), but Lee Rosenbaum (Culture Grrl) was tops on a bigger issue, one on which Beck is right. We don’t want the NEA to become the National Endowment for Good Works. Culture Grrl below:

The Beck clip that deserves notice (below, via) addresses the Obama administration’s attempt to rally the art brigades
around its social-service agenda. Particularly noteworthy is the audio
recording played about six minutes into the clip—the voice of Yosi Sergant,
director communications for the National Endowment for the Arts, saying
the following to the members of the arts community who participated in
the White House’s United We Serve conference call on Aug. 10:

Bear
with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other
safely. And we can really work together to move the needle to get stuff
done. (more)

Rosenbaum’s update here.

Richard Dorment Charles LeDray in London:

The enormous prestige accorded to American artist Charles LeDray over the years is closely correlated to the strangeness of his working methods and the rarity of his work. LeDray did not train as a fine artist. A former museum security guard, he’s a self-taught craftsman whose work looks like no one else’s I can think of. Mens Suits, sponsored by Artangel and shown in a disused Edwardian fire station in the depths of Marylebone, west London, is his first show in this country. When you see it, you will instantly understand why it took him three years of full-time work to make it. (more)

Richard B. Woodward makes a good case against Jean Luc Mylayne, an artist I continue to admire:

For an artist whose work is devoted to enlarging our sense of ourselves within nature, he seems rigidly focused on his own experience. Even his attention to unshowy species seems confined to showcasing them against rural backdrops. If nature in all of its humbling variety is his subject, where are his photographs investigating our urban relationship to gulls and pigeons?
…

Just because an artist gets high on his own inflated oratory is no reason a curator has to participate in a folie à deux. The museum here neither serves a public skeptical about the opacity of contemporary art nor does Mr. Mylayne any favors by framing his modest, if persistent, achievement under crushing layers of grandiloquent ­hokum. ( more. In contrast, my review of an an exhibit last year here.)

Brent Burket on the Met’s inability to exhibit Damien Hirst, titled, The Aesthetic Possibility of Killing Something When It’s Already Dead:

What is it about Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living that makes the staff at the Met–a seemingly
intelligent group of people–so blindingly stupid? Is the formaldehyde
leaking? Are all the thoughts about the physical impossibility of death
snapping their synapses like gift shop cinnamon sticks?(more)

Jen Graves on a Paul McCarthy and Richard Jackson interview at the Seattle Art Museum. She’s killer good on setting up background and atmosphere, but what did they say? Did they rise above the shallow wisecracks listed here?

McCarthy is an art hero; he sort of took the soul out of Conceptualism
and put it in a deeply messy and yet Hollywooded body, and he’s been
written about and emulated for years. In person he comes across as a
regal dwarf. It’s not that he’s that short; he’s just shaped
dwarfishly. And it is impossible not to notice that his hands are so
thick that they are obscene. (“They’re penises on palms,” someone said
to me. “How were they when you shook them? Succulent?” They were. They
were succulent. Yes, it is all magnificently disturbing. This is the
guy who, wearing women’s clothes, humped raw hamburger and ketchup in a
1975 performance.)
(more)

Mark Hudson on Zhang Huan: (Below, Zhang Huan’s My America at the Seattle Art Museum in 1999, a performance that featured a wide array of Seattle writers, artists, collectors, curators, an art book editor (Joseph Newland) no critics and one art dealer, the late Linda Farris, who was the ultimate game girl.) To judge from Hudson’s piece, Zhang might be better known in the States than in London.

You may not have heard of Zhang Huan, but he appears poised to be the first
non-Western artist to become a truly global name — on a par with Damien
Hirst, Jeff Koons or even Andy Warhol. And the central element in an oeuvre
encompassing painting, performance, installation and sculpture is his own
extraordinary physical presence: the shaven head and stoic, monk-like
features that have appeared in everything from wince-makingly uncomfortable
performances to vast sculptures, such as Three Legged Buddha which filled
the Royal Academy‘s forecourt in 2007.
(more)

Kenneth Baker on Jenny Bloomfield and Jennie Ottinger:  The S.F. Chronicle’s art critic doesn’t write a lot and can be disengaged and/or cranky, but when he’s on, he’s one of the best in the newspaper realm:

Even a generation ago, abstract painters might still view their
discipline as an arena of struggle. Struggle with the inertia of
materials, struggle for authentic expression within the tainted matrix
of pop culture, struggle for originality with so many possibilities
exhausted.

Today, on the downslope of postmodernism, such ambitions seem more self-dramatizing than responsive to the realities.

British-born Bay Area painter Jenny Bloomfield stands out against
this dispiriting background, making abstraction look alive again
without nostalgia, triviality or bombast. Those who think this sounds
easy ought to give it a try. (more)

Finally, offered as a small, charming note, Maira Kalman explains through drawings the history of life on Earth: Evolution to Irving Berlin.

In honor of National Latino Heritage Month, Northwest Latino artists get space in city hall, including Hugo Ludena, whose photo, Che Carlitos, philosopher king, is below. Exhibit details here.

James H. Maroney, Jr., art dealer and former head of American Paintings at Christie’s, took issue with my review of Nathan DiPietro, specifically, my comment that Wood was an “America First, bread-basket regionalist.” who might have been a “narrow man.”

Instead, wrote Maroney, Wood was only pretending to be narrow because he was gay and hiding it. Maroney’s essay here.

From his email:

Your views on his art and his politics are essentially shared by virtually everyone in the art world including his biographers and unfortunately they are entirely wrong. Wood was not an “America first Bread basket regionalist” whatever that is. He was a swinging, Herbert Hoover, prohibition hating lefty. The man you think he was was his public persona, which he put up for his survival and which was so successful, the real Grant Wood remains hidden to this day.

To repeat, my views of Wood’s work are entirely appreciative. The only reason anyone might care if Wood were wide in his personal views or narrow is the quality of his work, which, after reading Maroney’s essay, I’m not as certain as he contain so many clues to secrets of a personal nature.

Also, even if Maroney’s premise is sound, few would agree with his apparent contention that being a closet case implies the (hidden) existence of empathy for others.

Jennifer Bolande, detail, via

Daniel Arsham

Girvin:

I found an old piece of driftwood, lay it down and painted some ravens on it. Standing, straddling the roughened board, 2×12″, I stood it up — balanced in the dried grasses, of a hillock overlooking the south reaches of Lopez Island. Watching them, a gathering, a murder — as they are called, they study what’s happening, all day…

Girvin paints ravens not just because they’re there but because he lives in Seattle, where a 17th century, six-panel, ink-and-gold-on-paper Japanese crow screen is a highlight at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti kissed off his job at the paper and the city of its origin, where he lived for what sounds like six hard years. (Story here, link via Douglas Britt.)

I’m impressed that the Dispatch posted his remarkable essay and left it up on its site. I don’t think the newspaper where I toiled till it ceased production would have done the same. Hell, I’m sure of it.

Bonetti:

As some of you might have heard, I am leaving the Post-Dispatch. Today is my last day and this will be my last Culture Club post. Although some of the Cherokee Street clique would like to think that I was fired by an enlightened management that wants reviews of inept artists showing their woeful attempts at self-expression in vanity galleries, that is not the case. I took advantage of advanced age and a benefits package and decided to retire…

I would be the first to admit that St. Louis and I were not a match made in heaven. Indeed, my editor Christy Bertelson for the past unhappy year and a half accused me of hating St. Louis. I do hate things about St. Louis: the willed ignorance, the racism, the smugness of the self-appointed social and cultural elite, the stupidity of the political class, etc. But it is hard to hate a city where you’ve lived for more than six years. Affection grows in spite of yourself.

He goes on to list 5 things he’ll miss. Lots of drinking is one. There’s not a single artist on his list, a single gallery, nonprofit space or art museum. He won’t miss the Beckmanns at the St. Louis Art Museum? That can’t be true. Obviously, he wrote this piece in a scorched-earth mood. Bonetti plans to move to Boston. I hope he keeps writing, because he’s good.

First post here on slashed funding for B.C. arts nonprofits.

Jonathan Middleton, director of the Or Gallery, said today that government funding cuts are “devastating” the Vancouver arts scene.

The liberal party has had a reasonably good history of supporting art in the past. During the last election, it promised to keep the deficit to $400 million. It’s currently $3 billion. The government is cutting wherever it can. Arts funding came for a gaming tax, which is not out of the general fund. There was the idea that the social cost of gambling might be offset with charitable contributions, including to the arts.

Nonprofits have relied on this money for years and had no prior notice of cancellation. Instead, we were told we could continue to count on it. It wasn’t a cut could could have contemplated.

Or Gallery lost $30,000, which is 15.6 percent of its annual budget. (The gallery canceled its November/December exhibit, which was to be on the theme of humor in art.) Helen Pitt Gallery lost 40 percent of its funding. Helen Pitt is going to lose its space. I don’t know if it can continue to pay a director or continue programming. The irony is, the government has talked for years about the benefits of arts to the economy, that arts bring in $1.39 for every dollar spent.

BC Arts Council defends the cuts, which it says it regrets. The opposition is organizing, including here.

With the old delivery systems for arts journalism in rocky shape, the National Arts Journalism Program sent out a Web-wide request for new models. A whooping 108 came in. Five were selected to present at a conference in LA Oct. 2 (identities released then), and five more ideas to enlarge the discussion. (NAJP Release here.) The enlarging five are:

Sophie: A new authoring tool for multimedia developed by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy that suggests new possibilities for presenting critical response.

Indianapolis Museum of Art: With its Art Babble and Dashboard, the IMA is an example of a cultural institution extending its reach into areas that have traditionally been the province of journalism.

 InstantEncore.com: An example of an aggregator attempting to gather up everything about an art form (in this case classical music) and making it accessible in one place.

NPR Music: An example of a traditional big media company that is reinventing itself across platforms. NPR Music blurs the lines between journalism, curation, presenting and producing. 

Gazette Communications, Cedar Rapids Iowa: An example of a local media company trying to reinvent the idea of what it considers news and how it might be gathered and presented to a local community.

Taken together, I found the proposals heartening, even though few are financially robust. At best, they point the way towards a future that might achieve real jobs but are far from doing so now.

The Brookyn Rail does not pay its contributors. Living on air gets thin. Other favorites from the visual art category include:

Art Fag City, Triple Canopy, Departures, Big, RED & Shiny, Bad At Sports, Dinosaurs & Robots, Idaho Arts Quarterly, Glasstire, Of Note, Kung Fu Art Critic and a site under construction, East of Borneo, which will be edited by Thomas Lawson.

There are flashier sites on the list, most prominently, FLYP Media, which is gorgeous and technically inventive. Good luck to FLYP, which seems to be aiming for an undifferentiated audience, one that will be impressed by the site’s click power and not put off by soft, feature-style arts writing.

People already in the game, on the other hand, aren’t likely to want to read what they already know, even though production values are stellar. As a bridge builder between the art audience and everybody else, FLYP serves the purpose. Its texts are elementary, but its mainstream taste is reliable. If you’ve never heard of John Baldessari, this site’s for you.