Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
That old grade-school test question - Which of these does not belong? - offers a key to the aesthetics of the expressively hot, as opposed to the classically cool. The hint of crazy within the solid citizen, the blood in the water and the worm in the rose (mortal, guilty) move us in a way that visions of perfection rarely do. In honor of the flaw, a small survey of its recent, robust manifestations. Douglas Gordon Three Inches (Black) 1997 (image via) Susan Robb: Three from the last … [Read More...]
If human history were underwater, Alwyn O'Brien's ceramic vessels could serve as the bleached bones of the Ancien Regime, the decorative drained and dead on a dark sea floor. 4 Descending Notes 2010 Manganese Clay and Glaze 9" x 7" x 5 1/2" Hand-rolled coils make her lacy vessels. Born past their prime, they are in their own weird way pristine. Story of Looking, 2010 Porcelain and glaze, Two Pieces 12 1/2" x 14" x 5" Following Thelonious Monk, she knows how to use the wrong … [Read More...]
Collectors who hire experts to solve problems that don't exist till help arrives are responsible for the equivalent of bad face lifts on old masters. What the artists intended too frequently recedes under an abrasive cleaning or a deadening layer of varnish. Current practices discourage irreversible interventions. That means John Currin's work is a little safer than artists who preceded him, such as Picasso, although having the money to buy good advice doesn't guarantee it will be heeded. … [Read More...]
Nice to see David Wojnarowicz (wana-row-vitch) back in the news, making the monkeys dance. It's no surprise that the usual people want to use their deliberate misunderstanding of his work to rally their frightened base. It's also no surprise that the Smithsonian once again proves to be cowardly. Remember its Enola Gay exhibit from 1995? The examination of this country's use of the Atom Bomb started as scholarly and turned into a my-country-right-or-wrong cheering section, after suitable … [Read More...]
Humans see, humans do: After the first horse drawn on the first cave and the first pot incised with a decorative line, everything became imitation. You don't need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows, or that in the contemporary period, it blows harder. In selecting the 12 artists featured in Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture, associate Henry curator Sara Krajewski looked for those whose engagements with image recycling make them visual mix masters of note, those who … [Read More...]
Mequitta Ahuja Wriggle, oil on canvas, 41"X26" 2008. Could have been titled, Medusa takes a nap. Geoffrey Chadsey Welterweight, 2002 Watercolor pencil on rag vellum, tape 57" x 24" Another great Chadsey figure with flowing locks. (Not safe for work.) Lauren Grossman Behold 2003 Iron, wool, steel. 13"x21"x12" Rolls on casters. Mequitta Ahuja, again. Flowback, oil on canvas, 68"X51" 2008 … [Read More...]
Joseph Anthony Velazquez (Via Vermillion)
Dan Webb (Via Greg Kucera)
Jenny Zoe Casey (detail)
Previous post here. Context? Paul Krugman will do.
Edith Isaac-Rose (Last Supper, detail)
Edith Isaac-Rose (The Cronies)
Nigel Cooke (To Work Is To Play)
Joe Biel
Karen Ganz (Float)
St Helens super-volcano news here and here. Mark Morford explains it all in Your imminent apocalyptic death. It’s just around the corner. Any minute now. No really, including:
Did you hear? It’s quite possible. Right there, under Mount St. Helens up in Washington state, scientists think they can see a true, epic monster of an eruption brewing, one far more intense than the classic 1980 model, a perfect storm of gasses and pressure and molten magma, all of it the size of, well, a mountain. Times ten.
And so you think, well gosh, thank goodness I don’t live up in Washington state! I shall live far away and watch the pretty eruption, should it happen, on YouTube someday!
How cute you are.
Did you miss the noun? It’s not just a volcano. It’s a supervolcano. The eruption zone potentially spans from St. Helens over to Mount Rainier and Mount Adams … upwards of 75 miles, total. If this region blows, they say it would be the equivalent of the blast that formed Yellowstone National Park a half a million years ago. The spew would block out the sun, worldwide. It would drop the temperature of the planet. For days. Maybe longer. Does it matter? It’s the sun. The sun is sort of important.
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Bruce Conkle, Middle Kingdom
Earth is Fucked (Blubberlamp IV)
Shaun Kardinal at Vermillion to July 5. (Group photo exhibit with Katherine Dyke, Jesse Delira, Aaron Morris and Joey Velazquez.)
Anne Karsten, Sink
Bothering President Obama is not a good idea if you’re a fly. (Much-watched video encounter here.) There’s something about the president’s calm focus followed by quick action that reminded me of this:
There are always more insects.
The history of the world, my sweet,
Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.
Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim
It had to happen. The (new) Art Baloney Blog describes itself as a collection of the “most egregious and pretentious art speak or outright bullshit we manage to unearth.” (Via C-Monster)
Writing deserving such notice certainly exists. Reading it is like shoveling smoke. But too often readers lose patience with a complicated text, assuming if they don’t understand it right away, it’s bullshit.
Art lives in its complexities. Critics digging into them can lose themselves in the effort, but isn’t that effort admirable? It’s easy to be jaunty. No, that’s hard too. To be jaunty with brains takes real effort, with the final flourish of making it look effortless. But sometimes cruise-control clarity is wrong for the art under consideration, and the writer who lets the sweat show is being most faithful to the subject.
I’d defend at least a third of Art Baloney’s examples of baloney as struggling but real.
Isn’t Colby Chamberlain’s sentence, held up to ridicule on the site, really a fine sentence marred by a typo? (From his review of Frank Magnotta at Derek Eller Gallery, artforum.com)
A display of virtuoso draftsmanship and procedural rigor, the resulting drawings offer a fluid interchange between the recognizable and the repulsive.
I think Chamberlain was going for “unrecognizable.” There are no copy editors left on earth, but that’s another problem. (File it under “no net.”) If Chamberlain meant what he wrote, recognizable, he’s got a problem with parallelism, because the repulsive is contained within the recognizable. He could have written, between the reassuring and the repulsive, I suppose, or the recognizable and the unknowable.
Onward. As a decaying bohemian who is pleased by the shout out, I’m firmly behind the following sentence by Ram Moshayedi, part of his review of Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon at the Armory Center for the Arts, also from artforum.com.
Persisting as a remnant of the city’s unofficial history, the decaying bohemian icon enters into Pettibon and Okon’s project as the subcultural ideal, as the anachronistic embodiment of political nonconformity to the point of primitivism.
What’s wrong with that?
Wishing makes it so in the Museum in a Shoebox, the online-only institution that pretends to take up space in the world. (Via Bad at Sports.)
Its summer project hits me where I live. If I had ruby red slippers, I’d click them.
This July, every single billboard in the city has been taken over by the Museum. It is part of the summer advertising campaign. Usual billboard motifs have been replaced by images of clouds, the theme of the Museum’s major exhibition. Look up at the sky and see if you can find a billboard that matches the sky at this very moment!
Writing for Art Fag City, Karen Archey is persuasive on the subject of Carsten Holler‘s Vogel Pilz Mathematik at Esther Schipper in Berlin, a “high-budget, in-vogue exercise in industrial design” saved, partially, from the fatally sleek by its “off-putting, saccharinely magenta walls.”
Each of his cages had a canary in it.
Persuasive, yet I was not persuaded. Ordinarily, I am not drawn to Holler. Maybe this piece impresses me because I haven’t stood inside the gallery and instead seen only reproduced images, but a nervous blur of yellow isolated in a cluster of cages appears to animate his chilly geometries without raising their temperatures.
It’s fine to be an iceman, but an iceman voguing on art’s runway is a tough sell for those whose experience with runways is deliberately limited.
Canaries no longer exist in the wild, which isn’t enough of a reason to keep them in cages. (The same could be said of us.) In 1992 at the Henry Art Gallery, Ann Hamilton gave 200 of them the free run of the place. In the show’s early days, they kept having heart attacks. Volunteers hired to tend and feed found a couple dead on the floor each morning. After the shock of the new wore off, the death rate diminished quickly, not quickly enough to prevent animal rights activists from picketing.
I can’t remember what their signs said (Get those birds back in cages?), but the protesters at one point blocked entry to the museum with their bodies. One woman who brought her young daughter and had to step over the prone to get in reported that she was chided by them for being a bad mother.
To this day, whenever I think of canaries or see one, I think of that show, titled Accountings and curated by Chris Bruce.
Its power came from a metaphorical assumption of
geological time, with the Henry transformed into a blighted hulk.
Entering through smoked glass doors, viewers saw the elegant main gallery
thoroughly undone. Nearly 300,000 metal tags covered the
floor in woozy patterns. Blackened soot covered the walls, smoked by candles.
Canaries flew free. They perched on moldings, hopped around the floor, sailed through the air
and sang. With a long case in the back gallery filled with a jumble of wax
heads made from plaster molds sold in Brazilian churches as amulets
against sin and evil, Accountings functioned as a giant, moldy coat wrapping the audience in its living signs and wax symbols.
Hamilton risked sentimentality. Holler, superficiality. She overcame her limitations, and I have a feeling that Holler did too.
Bateke Proverb:
One crosses to the other side of the river only for an important reason.
In Seattle, the same applies to a lake. There are three important reasons to cross Lake Washington to get to the Eastside: the Bellevue Arts Museum, Open Satellite and the Kirkland Arts Center. The habits of a lifetime have worn a rut into the neural pathway saying, don’t go, but missing real exhibits so nearby demonstrates real inertia.
While nothing’s in the over-soon category at BAM, Seth Kinmont, Vehicle, closes tomorrow at Open Satellite and Cutism closes today at the Kirkland Arts Center.
About that title, Cutism. Being a bad speller myself, I hesitate to make a suggestion, but why not add the e? Cutism could be collage with a sharp instrument, instead of cute as an ism, Cuteism.
From Cutism:
Melissa Jones
an ArtsJournal blog
