Another Bouncing Ball

Carol Milne, opening July 2 at Gallery IMA:

Drawings from the hospital. Baker – comedian, performance artist and good cook – here via the Guardian.

Tutankhamun’s come-back is coming up empty. Following a nationwide consensus, he’s now racking up bad reviews in the Bay Area, including a key one from Kenneth Baker:

Among people with a professional interest in the arts, “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” which opens today at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, will merely deepen the tarnish on the reputation of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

More here. The first Tut wave in the U.S. in the 1970s reverberated in the art of the time. This time, the only response worthy of the high status of the subject comes from Brooklyn artist Ariana Page Russell, via Shaun Kardinal. Titled Pharaoh, it’s a self-portrait as boy king.

Just as Tut’s body is an essential part of the touring package, Russell’s patterns come not from paint but from welts. She explains:

I have dermatographia, a condition in which one’s
immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases
excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts
to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is
lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words
on my skin, which I then photograph. Even though I can direct this
ephemeral response by drawing on it, the reaction is involuntary, much
like the uncontrollable nature of a blush.

From Lila Ghobady, Iranian artist-in-exile – why she didn’t vote in the latest elections and why Mousavi is not a real alternative to Ahmadinejad. No matter who is the president of
Iran, the state, she writes, would would stone her.

As a journalist and filmmaker, I am called upon by the Islamic Republic of Iran to respect the red lines. These “red lines” include belief and respect for the Supreme Leader and the savagely unjust rules of traditional Islamic law in my country. I am expected not to write or demand equal rights. I am not allowed to make any film without the permission and without censorship by Iran’s Minister of Culture. If I did openly do all these things in Iran, I would be disappeared, tortured and raped. I would be killed as have so many women journalists, filmmakers and activists in Iran. Among those killed include Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photo journalist who was tortured and murdered for attempting to photograph and publicize brutalities committed by the Iranian regime.

This
is Iran. This is what it means to live under Ayotollah Khameini and his
goons. No change is possible while Iran is controlled by autocratic,
fundamentalist religious despots who determine the laws of the land.
There has been no real election. Candidates are all hand-picked and
cleared by a central religious committee. It is a farcical imitation of
the free nomination/ election process that we have pictured in the free
world. There is no possibility that a secular, pluralistic,
freedom-loving democratic person who loves his or her country can
become a candidate to run for president (or any other office) in Iran.

More here. Meanwhile, inside Iran, artist/filmmaker Mania Akbari writes about the arrest of her 17-year-old son, grabbed for wearing a green armband. Badly beaten, he was released because she has serious pull.

Via

Video via George Chacona. Go here. 

Shirin Aliabdai and Farhad Moshiri, We Are All American from Operation Supermarket Series, via New York Times.

To Aliabdai and Moshiri, add Sonny Assu.

Sonny Assu again, via.

Jack Daws, TWO TOWERS, Chromogenic print of artist-made construction from McDonald’s French fries and Heinz ketchup.

Ross Palmer Beecher, 7-Up Quilt

Roger Shimomura, The Asian Mind

Shimomura again, EBay Citizen No. 1

François van Reenen, memories of a white childhood in South Africa, Crying Cowboy #1

Rashid Johnson, Shea Butter Mountain

John Feodorov, New Age Native American mysticism

Nikki S. Lee – inserting herself into iconic America

This could be the endless thread. It’s the essence of what artists do – Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. One more packaging-worlds essential, although suggestions from others welcome.

Tracey Moffatt:

With Michael Jackson dead at 50 and Elvis at 42, the unlinkable Bay Area painter Rooney O’Neil wondered what John Lennon, who didn’t make it to 40, might have looked like had he more time and (fork in hand), had he chosen to emulate the eating habits of one of his root sources. Via

Any museum director (and plenty of curators) who leave the job to
applause gets presents for the institution. Mimi Gates has earned her
share.

In her 14-year tenure as director of the Seattle Art Museum,
Mimi Gates, 66, guided guided SAM through a major expansion as
well as the opening of a waterfront sculpture park, what John Walsh,
former director of the Getty Museum, called her “benign, beautiful land
grab.” 
She came to Seattle after 19 years at the Yale University Art Gallery,
seven-plus of those years as its director.

With
a doctorate in Chinese art history, her background is art rather than
business. Under her tenure, however, the museum has been successful on
both fronts. When she announced her retirement last year, Walsh said:

It
helps if you’re a fundamentalist, and she is. She believes in the
basics of building the collections and mounting serious exhibitions.
Expansions are great and nobody has done it better than she has, but
she proceeds from sound museum ideas.

Future plans include starting a Center for Asian Art and Ideas at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

(Photo of Gates with Richard Serra by Joshua Trujillo/P-I. All other images from SAM.)

Today SAM announced a list of 20 gifts donated in her honor.

Highlights:

Pine and Rock and Lotus and Ducks,
1690s
Bada Shanren (Zhu Da)
Chinese, 1626-1705 Set of two hanging scrolls; ink on satin; 172 x 43cm
each.
(The Gates Foundation Art Acquisition Fund, backed by Gates’ step-son
and step-daughter-in-law, Bill and Melinda Gates, contributed to this
gift.)

[Read more…] about Booty time: gifts to SAM in honor of Mimi Gates

Below, illuminations on a point made today in the LA Times by Ann Powers, logging in with the best (only good) obit:

…as a man whose physical presence was first androgynous and
then seemingly cyborgian, forcing his astounded public to puzzle over
their assumptions about race, gender and age.

Jeff Koons: Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1998

Christian Marclay: from Body Mixes

Samantha Scherer: Just his eyes

As he saw himself: Robot Head (1 & 2)  from Moonwalker:

Another way to see Jackson as he saw himself: Turn him into a toy, a la Michael Matthew Porter:

Mark Flood goes for the benign freaky:

RIP to the dazzling genius of rhythm and pop soul. There is, however, and elephant in the room, and that rough beast has nothing to do with the moonwalk. As Chris Rock said, “We loved him so much we let the first kid slide.”

 Banksy here, putting a face on the (in fairness, unproven) problem. More Jackson-in-art here.