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Wrong is right – the shock of the flaw
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...]
Recently in Seattle
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...]
Picasso’s flesh world
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...]
Welcome back, David Wojnarowicz
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...]
Image Transfer – Remix Culture at the Henry
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...]
Give me a head with hair
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...]
Ron Arad – illiterate Seattle
Some people do not believe that Seattle reads. Portland’s bookcase is also bare. If we’re going down, it’s good to take Portland with us. (Ron Arad, image via Look Into My Owl)
Advice from artists – scratch banality, find gold
Into every life advice falls. Few things are as unwelcome, except if it comes from an artist who wraps it in spin. Such messages can be comically explicit, fearsomely obscure or rooted so deeply in banality as to turn on the light inside a cliche. (Previous post expanding on the theme here.)
What follows is a small survey of artists whose visual exhortations and aphorisms deserve to be cited.
Dave McKenzie, Self-Help Hyperventilation Bag, 2002 (Image via)
Shawn Wolfe, Panic Now
Zack Bent, 2007
Charles LaBelle Exterior Song, (detail) Hollywood, (Cracked Actor), Alley W Fairfaix N Beverly 2003
Jason Hirata, Untitled, from video, 2008
Marc Dombrosky Get Signatures/Drop Tub 2009, Embroidery on found paper, 5 x 3 inches
Squeak Carnwath, Good Ideas, 2006, Intaglio print, ed. 24, 12 x 12 inches
Mark Mumford, Break it Down, 2004 Color Lamda print, 40 x 29 inches
Allison Manch, Wink
Grant Barnhart, Beg For It, exhibit announcement card, Ambach & Rice
Man Bartlett: the maze of the midtown minotaur
Hoping to best whatever the present day offers by way of minotaurs, Man Bartlett, son of Seattle painter Bo Bartlett, approached midtown Manhattan this morning as if it were a maze and set out to walk it in less than 24 hours, from 59th and Lexington to Times Square and back. Follow him on Twitter, here. He expects his own personal minotaur to be waiting for him on the red stairs.
His map:
Another view of the confrontation, Michael Spafford‘s Minotaur & Maiden I, 1987, oil/paper, 28 x 18 inches. (Note the red stairs.)
The bride (artist) toys with the bachelor (dealer)
Assume since 1915, the bride has grown weary of being stripped bare by her bachelors. There are the conventional methods of fighting back, including broken promises, failure to deliver, failure to appear and failure to care.
The more daring brides turn their bachelors into spectacle.
In 1999, Maurizio Cattelan taped Massimo De Carlo to a wall. The following year, Cattelan talked Emmanuel Perrotin into spending a month dressed as a pink phallus.
Making a spectacle of one’s dealer has taken a more intimate turn in Seattle.
Susan Robb‘s DIGESTER (2008) is six 55-gallon drums designed to extract methane from human waste to make energy. The waste in question came from her dealer, Scott Lawrimore of Lawrimore Project. (Waste not, want not.)
Opening February 20 at the James Harris Gallery are the line drawings of Jason Hirata, made by mixing sweat with raw Prussian blue pigment.
James Harris:
To create the works on view in this exhibition, the artist and gallerist worked up a sweat doing jumping jacks, sit-ups and push-ups, jumping rope, and running down the hallways of a storage facility that Hirata rented for just such purpose. As he has done in the past, Hirata collected perspiration in two containers to use as a painting medium. The artist and gallerist collected their own sweat by scraping it from their foreheads, necks, and backs.
(Hirata left, dealer right)
Euan MacDonald – the banality of art
Bob Dylan’s text prompts in Don’t Look Back (1967) are the most famous part of the documentary. (That’s Allen Ginsberg on the left, a celebrity non sequitur.)
Euan MacDonald‘s headless tribute (the video, Where Flamingos Fly, 2005) has no similar loose ends. MacDonald eliminates what he can, including, on occasion, the point.
At the opening of MacDonald’s exhibit at Western Bridge, A Little Ramble, bewilderment prevailed. The question in the air could be succinctly summarized as, What?
MacDonald’s work is full of narrative, but its connections with
hundreds at a party are hard to discern. He makes sense one on
one. In a crowd, his work is mute, even when it’s taking up almost all
the room.
One
on one, however, a mood emerges. The birds have eaten the bread crumbs
leading out of the forest. No, they’ve eaten the forest. It’s there and
not there. What swells around the consciousness of the solitary viewer
is anti-climatic. The artist who isn’t there is a tour guide to a
mystery. In his absence, he left notes for a reassuring brochure. These
notes might be helpful. They look as if they are intended to be
helpful, but they’re in code.
The banana downfall – a visual survey
Few objects signify as quick a trip to the bottom. Besides the slippery peel, there’s the flesh, which is on its own personal bullet train from ripe to rotten.
Aaron Morris – Detour
Whenever you are, you’ve gone the wrong way. (Via)
The endless art auction on eBay
Caleb Larsen’s Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is on view at Lawrimore Project, but it sold on e-Bay earlier today for $6,350. Auction over? No. This auction will never be over.
Review here. Frquently asked questions below.
- Q: Doesn’t the first sale doctrine prevent you from collecting further payment past the initial sale of the item?
A: In order to be recognized as a work of art the contract must be
adhered to, and regards of who owns it and who buys it the contract
remains between the artist and the purchaser, not between buyer and
seller.
Tim Rollins & K.O.S. – courage, vision and durability
The art world is always saying next, please. I’m bored with your dead tiger shark and live nudes, your singing museum guard and your fallen Pope. The shark that is never dead is the art world itself, which, as Woody Allen explained in Annie Hall, has to keep moving to stay alive.
Those who work in that world shovel the present into the past as a kind of necessary clean-up. For market reasons disguised as aesthetics, key power players determine who among the previously celebrated remains a live wire. The rest will be regulated to the heap of has-beens, to be humiliated and disappeared. Only live wires make the market hum.
Even as they rose like surface to air missiles to art world’s stratospheres, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. lived with an undertow of detractors, those who thought somebody was being exploited here and it could well be them for taking this project seriously.
How could it be taken seriously? The odds against it are impossible.
In 1981, when collectors were drinking pink champagne out of glass slippers at the Mary Boone Gallery, a serious student of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey and Joseph Kosuth stepped off the subway in the South Bronx to the smell of the burning garbage.
[Read more…] about Tim Rollins & K.O.S. – courage, vision and durability