Another Bouncing Ball

The phrase emerging artist means what people want it to mean, but only for them. Like a couple  who enter a revolving door together but wind up on different streets, we each summon to mind different images.

Does it mean an artist who scores her first gallery show? (Tell it to Carmen Herrera.) How about someone who after years of toiling in a regional setting breaks onto a global stage? Maybe it’s someone who finally connects meaning to matter after a prelude of dilly-dallying. Is it someone  whose sales tip over into something close to a living wage or someone who can pass as a discovery for critics?

Artists who find a style and stick with it for decades can still be called emerging when they manage to attract an audience. In other minds, however, those same artists might never rise to the level of emerging. They’ve broken through nothing.

Brett Walker takes his lead from the brown burrowing mole. If he emerges into your yard, you’ll know it. Walker is part of Rattle My Cage at Vermillion Gallery, through Jan. 3.

The Emerging Artist, 2009

In addition to the usual financial problems facing art museums around the country, the Seattle Art Museum had its own special burden. To fund its 2007 downtown expansion, SAM made a deal with a bank, renting out 240,000 square feet of office space in its new wing.

(Image of the ground floor of the museum’s expansion via. Suspended from the ceiling, Cai Guo-Qiang‘s Inopportune: Stage One, 2004)

What could go wrong? A bank is where the money is. But SAM got clobbered anyway, because the bank in question was Washington Mutual. At Washington Mutual, deals were backed by hot air instead of cold cash. When WaMu was seized by federal regulators on September 26, 2008, SAM was left holding an empty bag that used to contain
$4.6 million annually in rental income (closer to $5.8 million, when operating costs are included).

Into that gap rides Nordstrom. The retail giant has signed a letter of intent to lease 182,000 square feet from the museum, which leaves vacant 58,000 square feet, or two floors. SAM might end up making money on the deal, as JPMorgan Chase agreed to give SAM $10 million spread out over five years after Chase took over WaMu.

Nah. SAM will be lucky if the money turns out to be wash.

SAM and WaMu shared the block bounded by First and Second avenues and
Union and University streets downtown. Each occupied and owned a
separate building designed by different architects (NBBJ for the
defunct WaMu; Brad Cloepfil for SAM, an expansion on Robert Venturi’s
original building).
WaMu owned the top four floors and rented eight floors in Cloepfil’s
16-floor-high museum expansion, which is next door to WaMu’s own tower.
SAM occupies four floors in its new building. Eventually, it will
occupy 12 floors, which, including Venturi’s original 150,00 square
feet, will add up to 450,000 square feet.

That expansion is in the distant future. For more than a year, 240,000 square feet have been vacant. Filling 75 percent of that space in today’s real estate market is nothing short of amazing. No word yet on the specifics of the deal. What was a fair market rent in 2007 might not be one in 2010.

Art can’t fix what’s broken, but hats off to artists who try. They turn the wheel or at least remind us that there is a wheel to be turned.

HIGH FIVE TO FIVE:

1. Shepard Fairey. This single image inspired a tipping point.

Andy Warhol wasn’t above a similar ploy in 1968 1972. His bests Fairey’s, although not in voting booth results.

Other Warhol contributions: He gave interviews.

When that didn’t work, he personalized shock and shame, as if all the blood had drained from our faces (White Flag).
4. Sam Durant. Tell the truth.  When it comes to history, an attempt to essay the thing that actually occurred is better than a make-nice Thanksgiving fable.

5. Grant Barnhart. Seeing ourselves as others see us, with rhythm. If this painting had a backup band, it would be Queen.

Via

1. Michael Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-79 at the Seattle Art Museum. From my review in Modern Painters:

“Target Practice” focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40 talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.

2. The Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, curated by Toby Kamps for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, had its last stop at the Frye Art Museum and continues through Jan. 3. From my reviews on this blog:

Also
terrific in this show are Jeremy Blake’s cloudy mixtures of memory,
guilt and loss; Matthew Day Jackson’s post-Rauschenberg book of
photographic imagery trailing across a wall like a diagrammed sentence,
and Brad Kahlhamer’s rush of signs and symbols hurtling across the
paper like a river intent on a flood.

3. Roger Shimomura at the Wing Luke Museum. From my review:

Dapper white boys and comely white girls enjoyed themselves in the
comic-strip version of college life until the late ’60s generation
popped the bubble. In Frat Rats, Roger Shimomura painted the
prelapsarian experience but added another icon dear to the hearts of
the greatest generation: Racism.

4. Dan Webb, Jeffry Mitchell, Claude Zervas and Joseph Park in From Whence the Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice. From my review, Seattle’s gang of four:

What is constructed, found and constructed again is the theme of From Whence The Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice, featuring four of the Northwest’s top artists: Claude Zervas, Joseph Park, Dan Webb and Jeffry Mitchell. It’s the best group show in a Seattle gallery in years, proposed and shaped by the artists themselves.

5. Heide Hinrichs and Debra Baxter at Howard House  (also, Hinrichs at the Seattle Art Museum)

[Read more…] about Top 11 exhibits in Seattle & one in Tacoma

Nothing like confidence. For his exhibition announcement photo, Grant Barnhart coded the theme onto a mug in his Rat Pack impersonation of a cool guy: Beg For It.

In spite of its self-mocking arrogance, his
pose is a comic acknowledgment of reality: He is a young painter
in Seattle at the edge of even the Seattle experience, overlooked as a
matter of course. With this image, he tells not only his nearly nonexistent audience but the wider world that it
will have to work to keep up with him.

Which is true. Those who know him expect attitude, and yet his paintings are all heart.

The old horse whose ragged breath congests in a clotted stream is wrapped in the consolations of color, fall trees behind her
and flowers at her feet. Blooms surge as she recedes. For all her
weight, she’s drifting like a hair or a feather on a cloudy mixture of
memory.

Killing Time With Sleeping Pills, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sympathy for the devil: A killing machine leans its hammer head on a pier to die as gulls scream overhead.

Private Thoughts Are Lost, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 18 x 24

Foam and froth and dirty wings are all that’s left of the deep, but the light that shimmers on the beast’s bloated flank is as dainty as a Fragonard slipper.

Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Thanks to scale shifts, now and then are together again in Goya garb and contemporary: The crowd marinating in its own stupidity gazes at a scene beyond its
understanding.

Mastiff On Trial, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sweeney Todd:

 
There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
      and the vermin of the world inhabit it
And its morals aren’t worth what a pig could spit…

On a lighter note: The image of women stepping into their underwear is an erotic staple, especially in Barnhart’s vein of catching the subject unawares.

Precious Broken Elastic, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 11 x 14 inches

But pearly pink and baby blue shades set up a dainty scene that isn’t there. If the model knows how to put on underwear, it’s not evident from the image. She’s forcing herself into her clothes like a plow furrowing a field.

Sunset, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 40 x 30

Isle of Man, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 60 x 48

Although there are narratives here in an Eric Fischl vein, Barnhart isn’t interested in creating a common thread.  Fischl would never put such a range of paintings together in one show. He hits a theme and explores it. Barnhart’s disregard for connectives approaches Martin Kippenberger’s. Barnhart believes in the vibrational field of a painting, and the idea that vibrations on the same frequency tend to fuse. His do. Beg For It at Ambach & Rice is a force field. (My review of his previous show here.)

Through Jan. 24.

Daniel Carrillo is time-traveling Seattle artists into the past. Through a wet plate collodion process, he presents them as their own long-gone great-grandparents.

Carrillo:

These are positives on glass plates also called Ambrotypes and they are 7 x 9 inches. Collodion is poured onto a glass plate then sensitized in silver nitrate then exposed while the plate is still wet- hence the name. When developed they have an antiquated, quirky, unpredictable, handmade quality to them that has made them irresistible and has, for me, brought the magic back of photography.

Carrillo’s portrait of the otherwise animate Steven Miller:

From an anonymous source going by the name of Not Buying It in response to the post titled, Mary Henry – artists hidden in plain sight:

Neglected abstract geometric artists are plentiful? Are you talking about painters who deserve to be well known? Name five. Not just anybody, but somebody who has created work that could stand up to international attention. The artists at the top aren’t there by luck. They are better than the obscure. I’ve never heard of Mary Henry. Her work looks pretty good online, but online is nowhere as you must know. There must be a reason why it doesn’t fly when seen in person. If not, it would have.

Ordinarily, I don’t single out comments from someone who chooses to be anonymous, but I like this issue, if only because the idea that there are only three or four artists who matter in a generation is gaining ground. (The Onion‘s disquisition on the theme here.)

Jerry Saltz, lamenting it:

… instead of the love spreading and everyone becoming “famous for 15 minutes,” by decade’s end art-worlders fixated on a tiny clique of mostly male, mostly high-priced artists: Murakami, Hirst, Eliasson. Warhol’s dictum was infernally inverted to “In the future, only 15 people will be famous.”

You don’t need a weatherman to know that some people don’t like to go outside. Anybody who believes a handful of artists represents the world doesn’t care about art. If a focus is narrow enough, the only thing visible through its aperture is hierarchy. Art is about invention, possibility, rigor and surprise. Artists who rise to the top have all that and something else besides: the luck of the draw. For their representations of their place and time, they manage to become visible, frequently due to circumstances beyond their arranging.

My favorite fall-into-fame story is Charles LeDray‘s, which I’ve told before, here.  To recap: He was born in Seattle in 1960 and raised here. His mother taught him to sew at age 4. By the time he was 10, he could sew, knit and macrame with a skill that staggered his elders. He took at the craft classes he could at the Queen Anne Community Center and endured the sexual taunting frequently hurled at boys who’d rather sew than play hoops or hang out at arcades.

LeDray, Grey Area, 2009

After high school, he took a couple of painting classes at Cornish College of the Arts but didn’t complete them. He worked as a guard at the Seattle Art Museum in the mid-to late ’80s and had a single exhibit of paintings at the Broadway Espresso in 1983. That’s it, aside from the time he tried to show tiny figurative collages on the sidewalk during Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Gallery Walk. The police, seeing gay porn, told him to pack up and leave. If anyone else noticed, there is no record of it.

The silence surrounding him in Seattle was resounding.
In 1989, planning to try his luck in New York, he asked SAM’s director of exhibition design, Michael McCafferty, to write a recommendation. Bear in mind that LeDray was a guard, not even a part-time member of McCafferty’s design crew. Nevertheless, McCafferty whipped out a piece of museum stationery on which he scribbled a note to the effect that LeDray was a valuable member of his team and recommended him unreservedly.

After dropping his duffels at a friend’s apartment, LeDray headed over to the Museum of Modern Art, where he presented McCafferty’s introduction. That afternoon, he was handling MOMA’s Van Gogh’s.

When, years later, I asked McCafferty about this incident, I wondered if he sensed LeDray’s latent potential. Did he think LeDray had the makings of a major artist, in other words?
No, said McCafferty. Back then, I thought of him mainly as a collector of Space Needle memorabilia.
McCafferty believes in recommending people. They ask, he says yes.

Back to LeDray. The freelance job at MOMA led to a job as art handler at the Jack Tilton Gallery. One day he noticed the objects in an upcoming exhibit had a link with what he made on his own at home to relax. Gallery director Janine Cirincione told him to show her. He brought in a bear in a jacket. She told him she couldn’t use the bear but the jacket would do nicely.
Hours before the show opened, she added LeDray, whose career took off.

Obviously, he had to be remarkable to turn McCafferty’s blind recommendation into a career, and LeDray is. He’s now a leader in what could be called the “Revenge of the Maker” movement, a corrective to the equally valid Call-It-In School. Without a series of fortunate accidents, however, would he have had the opportunity to be heard or would he have been the fabled tree whose fall in a forest attracted no witnesses and therefore made no sound?

Not Buying It asked for five artists who have worked in the abstract geometric vein and deserve a wider audience.

[Read more…] about Art fame and the reasons for it

Engineering seniors at the University of Maine are using Buster Simpson‘s shovels to keep the walkways clear on their plaza.

Simpson:

This collective effort provides a passage for undergraduates, serve as a civic effort to save maintenance costs, protects the campus environment from salt and abrasive sand and suggests a mental and physical college credit. Stay off the machines, keep shoveling, peace on earth.

Cuban-born New York painter Carmen Herrera, 94, is heading toward limelight. A Deborah Sontag feature story about her reports that she sold her first painting five years ago, at age 89. Since then, her career trajectory is straight up.

The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

It’s easy. Artists who would shine if those in charge of a significant stage managed to notice them exist all over the world. The interesting question is not why she was overlooked but why she’s being noticed now. Turns out, the factors that held her back – being female, an immigrant and a practitioner of a style that was not in style – are the same ones working in her favor at this late date, when there’s a serious focus on both Latin American female artists and Herrera’s particular niche, geometric abstraction.

When it comes to geometric abstraction rooted in the early 20th century, neglected artists are thick on the ground. An obvious candidate for more attention is Seattle’s Mary Henry, who died in May at age 96.

From my obit:

For her, abstraction was a clarifying order of interlocking rectangles, horizontal stripes, lumbering squares and powerful wedges. Her color choices leaned toward the bracing. Yellows tunnel through whites and hang over orange. Her blacks shine, and her blues are
deep as the sea.

Field of Silence, 1990 Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.

Baden Baden, 2002, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Seattle writers who, like myself, were unable to interest the wider world in her work include Matthew Kangas, Jen Graves, Gary Faigin and Elizabeth Bryant, the latter not linkable online.

Graves:

Henry’s paintings are alluring and unyielding, and I figure she’s the only way into them.

Fortunately, that’s not true. Henry’s gone but her paintings are still here, available for viewing at Howard House, which has a goofy Web site. You have to follow the links to get to her. The paintings, not the artist who made them, offer the best route into themselves.