Another Bouncing Ball

Hands dipped in Purell, face in pom-poms.

(image via)

Via

The light dissolves intention, starting at the legs and paralyzing upward.

No Standing At Any Time, via

The crazy bone in the country's body is the right to bear arms. From The New York Times:

The rampage recalled other mass shootings in the United States, including 13 killed at a center for immigrants in upstate New York last April, the deaths of 10 during a gunman's rampage in Alabama in March, and 32 people killed at Virginia Tech, the deadliest shooting in modern American history.

The shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is a psychiatrist. Where did he get the guns and why did he have them?

Again, The NYT:

"He could have just brought (them) onto the installation," Colonel Rossi said.

We know what will happen next. Any Muslim who knows Hasan, especially one who sympathized with his doubts about U.S. policy in the Middle East, will be in for a harrowing experience. All it takes is an email saying, "I hear you, brother." Who doesn't have doubts? We're in the wrong. Of course the government needs to investigate. What they won't investigate is the thing that makes carnage easy:

Chris Crites

Justin Colt Beckman, digital collage of the artist's face on found photograph

Steven Brekelmans' paper set, Kit Bashing (via)

Arjan van Helmond's Drums (ink, gouache, acrylic on paper)

Update: Expanding the theme to useless drums in other media, Scott Wayne Indiana suggests Claes Oldenburg's drums in canvas. (Image via)

Karen Sargsyan would rather sing than be a visual artist, thrilling opera houses with his baritone, or maybe dance, leaping across stages as if his body were spring loaded. Were he given the chance, he'd have checked actor before artist, imagining himself staggering across simulated moors in Lear's mad scene.

Alas. His theatrical heart can find expression only through the work of his hand. In that hand is a scissors.

The queen flings her arms out in a slow-motion, dying fall, ignored by her rotund consort in the corner who prefers the company of his jester.

Now at Ambach & Rice, Sargsyan's Abroad Understanding was created at the Hat Factory in upstate New York and exhibited earlier this year at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.


Sargsyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1973 and lives in Amsterdam. At a time in which young artists are increasingly disinclined to commit to a single medium, Sargsyan has thrown his all behind heavy-stock paper, which he cuts into frenzied form and hangs on metal armatures, just as his Netherlands colleague, Folkert de Jong, focuses on painted Styrofoam.

What Boccioni achieved in 1913 with bronze, Sargsyan updates and transforms with flimsier materials. Motionless, each of his figures is in motion, layered into a series of messy tableaus. As his figures are nothing more than large paper dolls, they should be trivial, but the elusive themes they sound are profound.

Through November 28. Ambach & Rice is expanding the idea of what a gallery can be in Seattle, not just a commercial space but an art center with a global reach.

Nina Simon specializes in advising museums on how to deal with Internets and their audience spawn. (Her blog, Museum 2.0, here, via Betsey Brock.)

Simon's post about why museums should allow their audiences to take photographs is so obviously right it's remarkable that she wrote it down, except, most museums don't. Whip out a camera at the Seattle Art Museum only if you long to be chastised by a guard or two. Ditto the Henry.

Here's the first point of her 5-point argument.

As long as it does not promote unsafe conditions for artifacts or people or illegal behavior, museums should prioritize providing opportunities for visitors to engage in ways that are familiar and comfortable to them. Yes, some people (especially vocal museum staff!) hate the sight of people taking photos in museums. But what about visitors? If your argument is based on visitor comfort and distraction, it should be backed up by visitor research, not personal impressions.

Would staff members who hate photography be comparably disturbed by visitors sketching in the galleries? Sketching takes up more space and is more distracting than photo-taking (and pencils could be used to damage objects!), and yet many museum professionals look benevolently upon that activity as a positive meaning-making visitor experience. This is prejudicial treatment. I know that many people are uncomfortable with the growing culture of self-documentation, but no one should let their own aesthetic preferences dictate others' behavior without good reason.

I'm happy to report that SAM doesn't engage in the prejudicial treatment Simon describes, allowing people to draw but not take photos. SAM won't let people draw either, except with pencil.

Simon wants museums to give visitors more freedom. Half a century ago, Frank O'Hara had something similar to say to mothers:


AVE MARIA  
  

   Mothers of America
                                   let your kids go to the movies!
   get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
   it's true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                                 but what about the soul
   that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
   and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                   they won't hate you
   they won't criticize you they won't know
                                                                they'll be in some glamorous country
   they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

   they may even be grateful to you
                                                     for their first sexual experience
   which only cost you a quarter
                                                 and didn't upset the peaceful home
   they will know where candy bars come from
                                                                       and gratuitous bags of popcorn
   as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
   with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
   near the Williamsburg Bridge
                                                oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
   so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
   they won't know the difference
                                                  and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
   and they'll have been truly entertained either way
   instead of hanging around the yard
                                                        or up in their room
                                                                                      hating you
   prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet
   except keeping them from the darker joys
                                                                   it's unforgivable the latter
   so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
                                                                          and the family breaks up
   and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
                                                                                         seeing
   movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young

Jean Shin, Sound Wave, 2007

Brent Sommerhauser, Curl, 2009

All I need is a room somewhere...

Some people don't aspire to spacious. Even if they had the funds to expand, they'd still  wrap themselves in a home as if they were pulling on a sweater or wriggling into a shell. The inanimate becomes a layer of self with no room for another. Below, where solitaries go, both stationary and on wheels.

Scott Peterman

Amir Zaki

Andrea Zittel

Buddy Bunting

John Divola

Justin Colt Beckman

SuttonBeresCuller

Drew Daly, who is exhibiting at the Greg Kucera Gallery through Nov. 14, received an MFA from the University of Washington in 2004. Timothy Brown graduated with the same degree from the UW two years later.

About the impression Daly made in the MFA exhibit at the Henry, I wrote:

Just inside the galleries are two chairs by Drew Daley that aren't chairs at all. Keep looking at them, and they turn into rarified paintings, all scraped down and burnished to a soft green glow. They impersonate the useful as tribute to the uselessly beautiful.

Later I learned that the two chairs started as one chair. By carving it, Daly doubled its presence. That piece:

About Brown I wrote:

Timothy Brown's massive chunk of yellowing resin has four (schoolroom) chairs painted inside it. I love their spindly legs. With their platter tops and the ghostly contrivance of the resin layering, they are memories frozen in time.

That piece:

And more recently:

These artists were familiar with each other's work, at least peripherally, as their studios in the time their schooling overlapped after graduating were in the same building. Only Brown was working with resin.

As part of Daly's current exhibit, he too has turned to resin.

Circulating around town are rumors that Daly plagiarized Brown. About Daly's current show, I wrote:

The dropped ball never hits the floor in Drew Daly's resin sculptures, which are surely a tribute to Jeff Koons' Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank from 1985 in particular and to Lucas Samaras in general...Daly makes art as if the world were a bellows, breathing in and out. On the exhale, faces, furniture and (most recently) sports equipment pull apart in fragments. On the inhale, they reform, but not necessarily in their original shapes. Two chairs become one, or one becomes two. Twelve fuse as if through an electrical current. A chest of drawers bends and flares. (more)

Brown's work didn't come to mind when writing that review. If it had, I would have been unlikely to mention it. There's a material similarity, but the focus is entirely different, Daly honing in on fracture and Brown on floating sense world memories.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Daly might well have borrowed the idea of resin casts from Brown, but he might also have been thinking of Rachel Whiteread. Art comes from art. What matters is not the what of materials but the how of their use.

In regard to who did what when and thinking strictly of subject matter, don't both artists owe Jack Daws?

Daws' Hollow Reed from 2001:

No.

Does Daly need to acknolwedge Daws' Basketball Watermelon from 2002?

No. Brown deserves a far larger career than he has had to date. Daly did not, however, steal his play or render it invalid.

Previous here and here.

Today in the New York Times: Brooklyn Woman Finds Counterfeit Penny Made of Gold, here. Also, Jen Graves logs in here. The story has legs. Now that Jack Daws is going to be known as Midas of Small Things, he's going to see his work reflected back at him from halls of crazy media mirrors.

One distortion is already in play: Daws shelled out $1,000 for the gold in 10 counterfeit pennies. My math has never risen to the status of elementary, but that means $100 per penny. It doesn't mean that each penny is worth $100. Each of his penny-shaped sculptures is currently worth $1,000. To say it's worth $100 is like saying a Brice Marden is worth the cost of its oil paint and canvas.

In an essay in Art and Culture published in 1961, Clement Greenberg observed that gold is art's umbilical chord.

Daws' pennies are the disinherited kin of Damien Hirst's For the Love of God. Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull cost $14 million to produce but is worth whatever the market roller coaster says it is, at least $50 million.

Artists from Gary Hill to Chris Burden have been working gold into their installations. Only Daws uses what is valuable to impersonate the valueless. If gold is the umbilical chord of art, Daws suggests it is wrapped around the throat of the baby. On that most basic level of their meanings, both Daws and Hirst are on the same page.

"What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism....[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman."

-Walker Evans, lecture, Yale University, 1964

Via

Walker Evans, from Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, 1941

Roger Ballen, Encroachment, 2001

More than a year into a recession that still has its slenderizing grip on art galleries, November offers a strong showing all around.

Thursday night, 6-8 p.m.

Rabbits dress better than you do: Fay Jones at Grover/Thurston Gallery.

Now hear this: Ken Kelly at Howard House.

You think it's over. It's not over. (via)

(Previous)

Kelly Mark

At 12.5 square feet, The Telephone Room in Tacoma is not the smallest gallery in the world but must be in the tiny top ten.

From its Web site:

It is located in a Dutch Colonial home in Tacoma and since 1930, its sole purpose has been to house a black rotary dial telephone. Until now...The Telephone Room is small, but its mission is big: to house artist-driven exhibits and programming. Big ideas in an intimate space.

Opening tomorrow night are Blake Haygood's new drawings under the collective title of Is You Is, in gouache and graphite on ragboard.

Haygood began as a printmaker and still paints in a modified printmaking style, incising form into wood panels and painting in layers through a process of erasure, laying on and partially wiping out. When he began painting earlier in the decade, acrylics in a mineral varnish woke up his weightless world.

Born in Athens, Ga., in 1966, he grew up in a smaller, more rural town nearby, spending a lot of time at his grandfather's farm bordered by woods. Untended, the farm had slid into disrepair. Beyond a barn with a caved-in roof and machinery rotting in the field was the woods, also strewn with broken machines.

A walk in the countryside meant a scramble over dumped refrigerators, cars and parts of cars, washing machines, buzz saws, bikes and bed posts. Wild grasses, mosses and tree saplings used the machinery as nurse logs, shooting up inside it and growing large enough to shoulder it aside or bury it.

Haygood's new work has moved beyond the semi-pastoral decay of the old South to explore more remote cosmologies. Inside them, densities of cut stone or wood linger on their blunt bases before pushing off into the air. His forms may be eroded, but his soft hues are always brand new. He is a master of the potent blank. He takes his cues from traditional Chinese landscape artists who created air, water and mountains largely by leaving them empty. Haygood's forms are lovely, but it's the colored air around them makes them matter.

Is You Is is half a line. Musically, it ends in a love song. Although Haygood uses the reference to mark a career turning point, no longer part-time painter and part-time art dealer but painter full-time, his paintings make the song their own. What is lost, ruined or left behind is desirable again in the redeeming space he makes for it.

Update: Better image via

Joshua Pieper

Biel opens at Nettie Horn on Nov. 20.

Portland writer K. B. Dixon's new novel, A Painter's Life, is unwieldy but precise. It reads as if it's a journal kept by the (fictional) painter Christopher Freeze, but unlike a journal, this sack of asides, hopes, press clippings, musings on friendships, work, other artists, critics, dealers, paint and the point of paint adds up to a life.

What's more, it's a life in Portland.  We in Seattle imagine Portland artists constantly having dinner. Even a resolute outsider such as Freeze would have plenty of friends in Portland, more than his narrative can keep track of. His friendships are the cushion he leans on to keep his solitary occupation in motion.

When Seattle artists look up from their work and realize they haven't talked to anybody in a month, Portland's collective comfort zone looks good.

Below, a few quotes from the book for its flavor, with images of paintings from a few of Portland's nonfictional finest.

David Andres was saying if he could just get the right people to object to something of his, to insist that it be removed from wherever it had been placed, it would be the making of him. It would mean a reputation, which is money in the bank. It would mean a better bottle of wine with dinner, a car with more horsepower, a house with more square feet, a girlfriend with fewer cats.

James Lavadour, Blue Back

I like my pictures to look crowded - sort of stuffed into the fame. The canvas should be full like your plate when you sit down to dinner - suggestive of emotional and/or metaphysical abundance.

Judy Cooke, Ice Melt

I don't want to be part of the perpetual revolution, the chasing after novelty. The freedom to go where you want is one thing, but the obligation to move on, move on - that is the demand made by a policeman. You are never saying anything; you are trying to say it. You never get to finish or to amplify a thought.

Anna Fidler, Correspondences

I hate watching people look at my pictures. I never like anything about the way they do it.

Adam Sorensen, Squall

My father claimed he could smell electricity, and my mother was always telling us how many hours it had been (plus or minus a quarter) since this or that person had bathed or showered. I myself am similarly sensitive. The stench of the studio is one of the things I like best about being  a painter.

Storm Tharp, Approaching Thunderhead

I don't think of my pictures as small - I think of them as efficient. 

Previous post here.

From the National Summit on Arts Journalism:

First Prize of $7,500 goes to Glasstire  (www.glasstire.com) of Texas. Second Prize of $5,000 goes to FLYP Media (http://www.flypmedia.com/) of New York City. Third Prize of $2,500 goes to San Francisco Classical Voice (www.sfcv.org) . Additionally, all three projects, along with finalists Departures (a project of KCET in Los Angeles http://kcet.org/explore-ca/departures/) and Flavorpill (www.flavorpill.com ), previously were awarded $2,000 each for being chosen finalists for the National Arts Journalism Summit.

The purpose of the summit was not a search for content. Content is not what's broken. It was a nationwide call for new delivery systems for arts content, be it through criticism, photo essays, videos, forums and/or arts-driven social networking sites. Interesting, then, that NAJP voters chose to award first place to the site with the best content.

Makes sense. NAJP members are mostly critics. Critics want a place to write and the opportunity to be paid for their work. With wit and energy, Glasstire provides both, although writers are largely freelance: few living wage jobs available.

Coming in second, FLYP Media is a design marvel, but so far tends to be weak on content. If the editors undertake to improve the writing (and that means also the thinking) of its offerings, it will be able to offer genuine employment to writers, who so far play a secondary role. A brainy FLYP would be huge. 

If the Seattle Art Museum is waiting for a thumbs-up on its Michelangelo debacle, it's going to have to write one for itself. Walt Whitman did so under a pseudonym for Leaves of Grass, and his reputation remains unsullied.

The closest thing to favorable are Victoria Ellison's three paragraphs tacked on to the end of her Calder review. The decision to turn Michelangelo into a Calder postscript pushes in the opposite direction of her generous comments. (Whose work got the illustration? Calder's.)

(My Michelangelo review here. My Calder here.)

In his fine Calder review, Stephen Cummings reduced his reaction to Michelangelo to the following:

It may go without saying that SAM has a bit of a (deserved) reputation for mounting second rate shows. (Michelangelo certainly qualifies.)

If SAM has this reputation, it is unearned. At the region's flagship museum I've never seen an exhibit as overblown and underfed. It's the kind of thing John Buchanan used to surround with superlatives when he was fund-raiser-in-chief director of the Portland Art Museum. He has since taken his brass-band personal style to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, causing Kenneth Baker great dismay.

Back to Walt Whitman:

The 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass was heralded by anonymous reviews printed in New York papers, which were clearly written by Whitman himself. They accurately described the break-through nature of his "transcendent and new" work. "An American bard at last!" trumpeted one self-review. (more)

Anyone caught doing that today would surely share the fate of James Frey. He took a beating for his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, discovered after publication to be partly fictionalized.  In response to his critics, Frey commissioned a painting by Ed Ruscha. (Story here):

No story ever happens the way we tell it, but the moral is always correct.

Donald Barthelme, from The Dead Father

Jessica Reed, the person who found Jack Daws' counterfeit penny, is an artist. Here's a cake she made in February in honor of Abe Lincoln's birthday, starring his portrait on (what else?) a penny.

(Previous post here.)

The chances of anyone noticing the penny Daws cast in gold and slipped into circulation at LAX more than two years ago are slim. On the side of discovery, it's slightly smaller than the ordinary one, because gold is heavier. If Daws' penny were the usual size, its weight would have given it away. As it is, it's three grams to a penny's two.

This weekend, Reed send Daws an email explaining how she found it.

"This is a story about finding a penny, but it begins with a dime. As for how it all ends, of that I have no idea...

On Monday of last week (the 26th), I was counting out the 44 cents I needed to complete a purchase when I spotted an unfamiliar coin in the lot. Looking closer, I realized that it was a U.S. dime, minted in 1924, but unlike any dime I'd ever seen. Once home, I did a Google search and identified the dime as a 1924 Mercury Head; not very valuable, but beautiful none-the-less.

Researching it reminded me that I had another unusual coin in my possession--a golden penny. I'd had it for a few months ( at least) having noticed it when I was paying for groceries at the neighborhood C-Town.

Here's a review by Jen Graves that makes a fetish out of burying the lead:

My mother and father didn't work out; my mother remarried during a blizzard at the Old First Church in Bennington, Vermont, where Robert Frost is buried. This place, which around this time of year will smack you silly with beauty, is less than an hour from our house in small-town upstate New York, and on the way is a museum we'd often stop at, the Bennington Museum. That museum has just one claim to fame: its unparalleled collection of paintings by Grandma Moses. The headline of her obituary in 1961 in the New York Times read, "Grandma Moses Is Dead at 101; Primitive Artist 'Just Wore Out,'" and the obituary contained the remarkable line "Grandma Moses did all of her painting from remembrance of things past."

The above paragraph is not a wandering path to a Grandma Moses review. The alleged subject has nothing to do with her. And yet, there's more:

Grandma Moses may be the first recognized painter whose paintings I ever saw. Her story is like my mother's. She lived on a farm. She started painting at the age of 76 because she couldn't stand the thought, as the Times put it, of being idle. My mother does not paint, but now in her 60s, she is on her second career, which is more strenuous than her first.

Still more:

Despite all those visits to the museum, I do not recall any single painting by Grandma Moses, but that's not really how Grandma Moses paintings work. You remember them in aggregate--their belief in warmth despite snow, their belief in the delight of brightly colored sweaters, their belief in the togetherness of tiny amiable sticklike people (she squeezed them in last, working her compositions downward from the sky) who, as again the Times pointed out (it really is quite an elegy for being so offhandedly journalistic), "cast no shadows." You remember them for their belief, period. "You have no idea how much you can handle until it happens," my mother always says, promising the strength of the American character whatever might come. Conviction is the core of folklore, not style. Folk art is not just a matter of untrained marks, but of untrained marks imbued with an unwavering but not entirely plausible sense of their own worth against the odds.

Once the review clears the hurtle of its preamble, it's terrific. There are slender metaphoric threads connecting the body of the text to the heavy weight of its opening, but why must the text carry this burden? Lucy Lippard used to do this in the 1970s.  It went out of style, but it's back. Graves, who appears to be still upset by the breakup of her parents' marriage, has saddled herself with its practice.

Reviewing the same show for Glasstire, Laura Lark also took time to tell us about herself. Lark's lead works (unlike Graves') because her confidences serve as welcome mat to the subject she will in time get around to: The Old Weird America, now at the Frye Museum, its last stop.

A few years back a heavy package arrived at my door, addressed to my then-husband. Inside was a bronze statue of a realistically rendered cowboy riding a bucking bronco. Perfectly hideous. Think George H. W. Bush statue at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Who would send us such a thing?

I used it as a centerpiece for dinner parties. It got a lot of laughs. After the joke wore thin, I used it as a doorstop.

We later discovered that the statue had been intended for a wealthy and powerful member of the UT Longhorns alumni association who had the same name as my ex-husband. The man sent a special courier to pick it up and was none too pleased when I refused to re-package it.

Months later, my husband came home with an issue of Time magazine, opened to a picture of George W. in the Oval Office. In it, Bush grinned and shook hands with folks in his good ol' boy fashion. Behind him, on a shelf, was either the statue -- our statue -- or a replica by the same artist.

No doubt Bush viewed the statue as a symbol of American ruggedness and independence -- something he desperately wants to be identified with. I viewed that little slice of Americana as pure kitsch.

The Old, Weird America, currently on view in the main gallery at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and organized by CAMH senior curator Toby Kamps, tells a more nuanced story.

Even though Lark sold me this time out, critics who think the audience needs to be chatted up before it will tolerate the rigors of a review are mistaken. Better to aim for the rarities of rigor and momentum, and let the review carry itself.

Graves doesn't agree, and why should she? She's pitching in a different game. While my sort of critic wants to disappear into the art, she wants the art to disappear into her. A less biased way to say the same thing might be, she wants art to be metaphorically illuminated by her personal story. Her risks are grandiosity and self-absorption, but the nearly-impossible-to-achieve payoffs are essays that transcend their genre, in which a critic becomes an artist. I think she's good enough to get there. Surely it's brave to try. I'd rather lose a digit.

The only cackles I heard last night were from adult throats.

Steven Miller, self-portrait from the night in question: