Another Bouncing Ball

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, with powder on my nose and makeup to hide my 4 o'clock shadow...

Joe Johnson, from Mega Churches, via

Tract homes in America are cookie cut, but slums in the Third World are hand made.

Kader Attia's installation Kasbah is in Los de Arriba y Los de Abajo at Sala de Arte Publico Siqeiros in Mexico City, through Jan. 10.

Attia's piece reminds me of what David Hammons called negritude architecture.

I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT EVERYTHING WORKS. THE DOOR CLOSES, IT KEEPS THINGS FROM COMING THROUGH. BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE THAT NEATNESS ABOUT IT, THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE PUT THINGS TOGETHER; EVERYTHING IS A THIRTY-SECOND OF AN INCH OFF. (more)

Best of 3 has the best take on the news that Shaquille O'Neale will co-curate a show titled, Size Does Matter:

It would be so easy to just poke fun, or dismiss this as a publicity stunt. But you know what? The sun's shining, I'm feeling generous, and I'm going to say that maybe Shaquille O'Neale has a genuine interest in art and his co-curation of a show for the Flag Art Foundation is a mutually enjoyable and beneficial enterprise.

Titled 'Size Does Matter', the show has a line up of artists who I wouldn't kick out of the gallery for eating crackers, including Maurizio Cattelan, Chuck Close, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons and - of course - a big naked guy from Ron Mueck (on loan from the Hirshhorn). In an icing-on-the-PR-cake move, the catalogue features an essay by (in)famous author James Frey.

It is a stretch to think O'Neale would find anything to admire in a man who cowers in a corner. (Image via Hirshhorn) Museum publicity stunt? These are desperate times, Mrs. Lovett.


Carol Diehl has a roundup of critics going sexist-berserk on her blog, which is suitably titled Art Vent. I've been reading on other blogs various snippets from Blake Gopnik's Washington Post review of Anne Truit, all making him sound goofy. But when Diehl called his piece "the most scathing and sexist writing I've ever encountered about an artist," I finally clicked over to the Post to read it.

Sexist? Not even a little bit. It's jaunty, and jaunty doesn't work if a few pushing-the-edge sentences are plucked from the whole. I found it insightful, especially this part:

When Jasper Johns and others had found the abstract in the ordinary, Truitt seems to find the everyday in the abstract -- a much stranger thing to do.

Knocking Blake Gopnik is the art bloggers' national sport. He has written a few things that made my eyes pop (Exhibit A here), but he startles not because he's a fool but because he's trying to enliven what his editors might well feel is the stale form of the art review.

Editors at newspapers rarely appreciate reviews. Gopnik is working to interest them in his, them and presumably other people who do not think of themselves as part of the art world. Anyone pushing a boundary is going to fail on occasion, but he does not fail Truitt.

As for Charlie Finch, whom Diehl also hangs in her gallery-of-shame for his sexist post on Triutt, also no. He's Truitt's son-in-law. (We know this because he titled his piece, "Mother-in-Law.") His point of view is personal and affectionate, ending with:

The Hirshhorn retrospective should vault her into a special pantheon of her own, one which she occupied in privacy during her own life and in public now that her work belongs to the world.

What a canine. Did Gloria Steinem march in vain? Women artists can't get a break. His fellow dog, Blake Gopnik, called Truitt a genius. It's a wonder women don't riot in the streets.

No humor allowed: Jen Graves posted this dazzling piece of (at least brief) nonsense yesterday:

Remember: American men don't do art unless it involves naked ladies, unless the men have thin shoulders. I hate you, Garrison Keillor.

Jen. He's kidding. Kidding. The whole thing is a spoof on sex stereotypes, not an indulgence of them. Hate Garrison Keillor? Save it for Dick Cheney.

A one-night only, anti-Thomas Kinkade show in San Francisco took up a fair amount of space on blogs this week, in reaction to a story in the S.F. Chronicle. What got me were comments from Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner, who has, as he notes, published a Kinkade book.

"I'm not anti-Kinkade," Turner said. "I think he gets under everyone's skin because he glorifies the fairy tale. Kinkade is a master marketer, and I think the idealizing of the images is Kinkade's own inside joke."

No, Ron. It's not because he glorifies fairy tales. What Hunter S. Thompson said about Richard Nixon is also true of Kinkade's work, that it's a "monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream."

Jos Sances added just the right touch of realism to Kinkade's creepy delusions years ago.

Sean Flood, 3 Deka, oil/canvas. With relatives living on all three floors and holy water in the parlor. I was born in Boston. Were it not for the restless mobility (and dread) of my parents, I might be there still, as I tend to bloom where I'm planted.

has her own light. (Via)

Kenny and rives travel to ask a single question: What do you want to do before you die? They ask participants to write the answers on a Polaroid portrait, which they post on their Web site. (via)

 Heather Cook, 2008, via
The brothers Eli Hansen & Oscar Tuazon, Tent, 2008

In the art world, there's a remarkable outpouring of support for U.S. soldiers fighting on two fronts. Their government under Bush & Cheney lied its way into Iraq. Afghanistan was an afterthought. However justified a military response might have been for the latter, the result is a mess. Increasingly, the idea that there are better ways to win hearts and minds is gaining ground.

In the late 1960s, soldiers coming home from Vietnam  rarely found anything but contempt from artists addressing the war. (He's the universal solider and he really is to blame.) Forty years later, anti-war sentiment among artists is as strong as it was then, but denunciations of soldiers are rare.

Below, a sample of what's out there, from the U.S. and beyond.

An-my Le, from 29 Palms, 2003-present. (Image via)

Eli Wright, from the Combat Paper Project, 2009

Jon Michael Turner, from the Combat Paper Project, 2008

Emily Prince, from her series, American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Included by Robert Storr in his 2007 Venice Biennial.

Prince:

The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. It was no longer enough to know how many. I needed to see pictures of them, to familiarize myself just a tiny bit more with what was happening far from my warm home. And it really isn't much. It too is a mere summary, just one more step beyond bare numbers.

Yet for me it is something. It means spending time with each one. It is looking into their eyes to see who is now gone. It is following the line of their brow and trying to perceive the expression there. It is a visual and visceral exploration of these individuals by way of their faces. It is my own eyes and my hand tracing out some very slight acquaintance with what's occurring.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Veterans' Project, 2009, ICA Boston

Wodiczko to Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee:

"The work I have made so far about veterans has been kind of 'out there.' I want this one to be more about 'in here,' '' he says, tapping his head.(more)

Eros Hoagland, from Soldiers Fighting Our War In Iraq, ongoing. Eros is the son of famed war photographer John Hoagland, who died in El Salvador in 1984. He was 36.The bullet that killed him was U.S. Army issued.

The two best art critics still employed by a U.S. newspaper who don't work for the New York Times are both in California: Christopher Knight at the LA Times and Kenneth Baker at the SF Chronicle.

There are no art critics on staff at daily newspapers in Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and Houston, among others. The admirable Douglas Britt works for the Houston Chronicle on contract. Even though he has the output of two staffers and has brought the paper back into the national discussion, the Chronicle has not said it will restore the position.

A newspaper art critic differs from colleagues at art magazines in one essential, and it's not that the former is less savvy than the latter, although that is frequently the case. A critic at the newspaper aspires to a general audience. The chance to hook somebody with a review who's flipping pages to get somewhere else is tantalizing.

Without newspapers, those accidents appear to be less likely to happen, but there is more depth and range in each separate field, with Web sites available to run on a constant scroll across the face of cell phones.

In that context, art coverage in Golden State newspapers remains golden.

Here's Knight on MoCA. As ever he's making the case for Los Angeles:

But this is not just a promotional treasure-house show. Installed chronologically by chief curator Paul Schimmel, it also tells a story -- although one that's rarely heard. The postwar rise of American art is paired with the simultaneous rise of Los Angeles, from shallow backwater to cultural powerhouse. (more)

Kenneth Baker is more detached. He makes his case artist by artist and doesn't care about regional positioning:

By giving to and buying from Suyama Space's garage sale. Donated objects include fancy chairs, tables, china, fiesta ware, silver, architectural accessories, toys, tiles, textiles, art objects and antiques.

Drop off contributions at 2324 Second Ave. till Dec. 1. Need pick up? Call 206-256-0809. Sale Dec. 5, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Sample wares:

Critics in the Northwest appear to be vying for the punchline position from an old anti-feminist joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny.

We fall all over ourselves in our haste to tell Portland's Jim Riswold that he's not funny. I've done it. Jen Graves has done it. Chas Bowie is doing it now, in response to Riswold's show at Augen Gallery.

Me:

He doesn't have the depth to compete with Mexican graveyard humor, even under the utterly false guise of a Hirst tribute.

(Not just false but utterly false. more)

Graves:

Riswold makes big, glossy, colorful photographs that reach for satire but amount to little more than low-calorie artistic cannibalism. (more)

Bowie:

It doesn't take a degree in art history to get Riswold's one-liners. One of the show's better photographs, for instance, a small still life titled "Damien Hirst Gets a Fish for His Seventh Birthday," alludes to Hirst's infamous sculpture of a dead shark by imaging the artist's boyhood fish tank, occupied by a singular fish skeleton. Seeing as Hirst first exhibited his 14-foot tiger shark in 1992, Riswold's commentary is as culturally relevant as a Monica Lewinsky joke. (more)

Mike Leavitt cannot claim to be any more nuanced, but his home town (Seattle) hearts him. I post examples of his art toys on a semi-regular basis. In New York, William Powhida is as subtle as a sledge hammer. Reaction? Pant, pant.

What's wrong with Riswold? Why do critics rain shock and awe down on his head? He moved to art after a big career as an illustrator. Could it be (at least partly) the oldest of NW critical tropes, that commercial success, especially in a commercial field, is suspect?

Riswold's Retired Jesus is pretty funny and, dare I say, well done.

Q: How many art critics does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.

Jonathan Horowitz:

Dan Webb


Joseph Park, picasso and bull, 2009, oil/panel, 36 x 24 inches




Ree Brown

Before he became director of Western Bridge, Eric Fredericksen was an art critic.

To wit, his review of Whiting Tennis in 2000:

WHITING TENNIS' new work is dumb. Dumb as in dumb luck, dumb as in mute, dumb as in the best solution to a problem is the simplest one. In these forms, dumb is good. And in art, this kind of dumb is rare.

Art is rarely free of gamesplaying, of a strategically marked-out position that the artist can work from, of some role that defines readings and defends the value of the work. Tennis' position for this show is dumbness. In his cogent, helpful artist's statement (these two adjectives apply to almost no other artist's statement) he writes that he's "the kind of person who's struck dumb by a child's painting or a little canvas-board winter landscape with birds, and thought it odd that after 15 years or more of 'painting' I'd never sat down and tried to make a 'picture.' So I did, literally sit down and try."(more)

Before he was an art critic, he was a singer, as in, he sang in the shower. Years of singing in the suds led logically to karaoke, and karaoke left him with theories he plans to share Wednesday night at 7:30 at On The Boards. Interview with Eric about his performance here.

Via

It's possible to be famous long past your lifetime on the strength of one piece. No one exemplifies that possibility as well as Meret Oppenheim, whose Object from 1936 is at the Museum of Modern Art.  

Its origins, from MoMA:

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim's fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, "Even this cup and saucer." Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism's leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. (more)

Its influence continues.

Jennifer McNeely:

Sandra Doore:

Taro Hattori

In the anything-goes, free-form era of contemporary criticism, only those whose tenure is guaranteed can dare to be dull. They write to keep a well-fed hand in. Others tap dance. They're as good as their clicks. Dull used to be the critical norm. Few long for a return to those days, but back then, attention came to critics who articulated a rigorous set of ideas, not necessarily a snappy approach to the sentence.

Personally, I'm all about snappy. And instead of possessing concepts which I bring to bear on the art, I respond to the ideas in the art. Paul Valery called it the equivalent of playing a card game whose rules change with every hand. 

Undoubtedly, that approach is generational. I started at the tail end of the anti-Clement Greenberg era and never left. (Marat/Sade: We're all normal and we want our freedom.) But there are limits. No, there aren't, but there should be. Critics who free associate in front of an artwork aren't critics. They're flying kites in their heads. They're taking a test for a psychology course.

Few artists attract as much snap, crackle and pop nonsense as Luc Tuymans. His paintings are slippery blanks, unpleasantly representational without being dark. His moments are worth missing yet there they are, the thin-lipped equivalents of gray days.

The Secretary of State 2005 oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4 inches David Zwirner Gallery

The image above is perfectly transportable. Seeing it reproduced online is not significantly different from seeing it in person, which is, of course, remarkable for an oil painting. Note the tooth and the Buddha ear. The tooth on the left is like one slightly-longer table leg tipping the balance out of true. The long earlobe? Not in this case an old-soul signifier.

Pigeons 2001, oil on canvas 128 x 156cm (Image via)

Exhibit A, part of an essay on Tuymans from the online Saatchi Gallery:

Luc Tuymans's pigeons bop in dumb disarray. Dirty and disease-ridden, they're a strangely curious mob, a metaphoric stand-in for ourselves. Painted in the muted tones of history, Luc Tuymans offers a chilling ultimate truth about humankind. He makes a cold comedy of a terrifying thought.

Dumb disrray? Who you calling dumb? Real life street pigeons can, when motivated by food, easily learn to tell the difference between Van Gogh and Chagall. (Abstract here.)

Dirty and disease-ridden? Not these pigeons. They're color inflections on canvas. In their price range, believe me they're cared for.

Muted tones of history? What? Stand-ins for ourselves? Says who? Chilling ultimate truth? Cold comedy? Come on.

Even the great Peter Schjeldahl flails around for meaning in his (as always) richly entertaining essay on Tuymans in The New Yorker. Schjeldahl claims Tuyman's work dramatizes the fallen state of painting since the 1960s. If anything, it dramatizes the reverse, that you don't have to be an angel to dance upon the head of a pin as the audience swells around you.

Via

David Barnes (Image via)

Randy Hayes

In 1978, Allan McCollum began a series of paintings (Surrogates) that were no more than extensions of the frame.

Evan Blackwell's paintings are the frames.

In his solo exhibit at Seattle's 4Culture Gallery, Lost in Space, Blackwell proves (among his many other material explorations) that Tara Donovan isn't the only artist coming up with new uses for drinking straws. Hers billow, like clouds. His are salvaged camouflage with a direct hit in the center. The center is your center, wherever you happen to be looking. It's the illusion of a ripple effect.

Blackwell graduated last year from the University of Washington with an MFA in sculpture.

I am in the process of constructing forms, compositions, structures, and spaces that serve as lens to see both the materials from which they were constructed and world we live in with fresh perspective.

Through Nov. 27.

can sit on them. (Via)

From Seattle's Wynne Greenwood:

Hello! FEMINIST FORM, a new screening series, is starting next Saturday. Please come, it would be great to see you there! And tell your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, lovers, teachers, partners...

FEMINIST FORM presents video work by: Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy Saturday, November 21 Doors open at 7:30pm Screening begins at 8pm Hiawatha Artist Lofts Community Room 843 Hiawatha Pl. S Seattle $5 - $10 Sliding Scale Suggested Donation.

Chair seating is limited, please come early if you want to sit in a chair. Plenty of floor seating. FEMINIST FORM is a screening series of feminist and queer media from the Pacific Northwest. Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy have been collaborating since 2002. Included in the screening will be TV Lip Sync, 2002, and two videos from their ongoing project New Report, New Report, 2005, and the documentation of the live performance New Report: Morning Edition, in which the reporters hold an intimate deliberation on the objectification of the biological female body. This is the Seattle debut of this project. (This does contain graphic imagery.) Please forward this announcement widely! Looking forward to seeing you there. All my best, Wynne

In the west plaza of Seattle's Safeco Field is a 5-ton granite boulder that sculptor Peter Shelton found in the Cascade range. It's an object with the power to bring wilderness into the city. Shelton honored it with a shadow, a black bronze replica that offers mass without weight. Woven on its surface are horizontal waves that respond to the surface nuances of the rock and answer its chaos with order. Titled "rockshadow," the piece plays with the nature of inside and out, form and shadow, the real and fake, the found and created.

Despite the challenge of his subtlety, Shelton enjoys considerable success in the realm of public art. Controversies such as the current one over his sixbeaststwomonkeys, an ensemble of eight sculptures installed in front of the LAPD's new headquarters, are rare.

(Photos LA Times)


One of two bookends:

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez kicked  off the commentary with one of his I-wander-the-city essays. In a similar vein, his columns on homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers became a book and later a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx. (In case somehow you missed it, NPR story on their friendship here. Good movie.)

Here's Lopez on Shelton:

As luck would have it, the nearly completed LAPD headquarters is right outside my office window, so I've been bird-dogging the project from Day One to make sure taxpayers don't get ripped off. Which brings me to the $500,000 worth of public art that's just been installed on the west side of the building.

The cast-bronze sculptures consist of six large black blobs, with two tall, skinny structures on either side.

I wasn't sure what to make of them, so I went straight to the top: It looks like "some kind of cow splat," said Police Chief William J. Bratton, who sounded as if he were personally insulted by the installation. Bratton said he first drove past the work and later walked back to see whether "it's as ugly up close as it is when you're driving by."

The answer was yes, and he sounded mad enough to have the artist arrested.

Lopez's aw-shucks style appears to preclude research. If he did any, it's not obvious. LA Times art critic Christopher Knight had to respond, but such responses are tricky. Knight cannot shoot inside his own building. While he can be tough as he wants on targets outside the Times, inside he treads lightly.

In art, meth lab imagery tends to engage the DIY spirit of the outlaws. In an art context, before they are outlaws, they are makers. Claiming them is radical, but possibly no more radical than artists' interest (now fading) in Project Runway. From high fashion to low crimes, enterprises that require the skill of the hand attract artists, even those whose practice calls for them to delegate fabrication to others.

As installations, meth labs fascinate, which can't be said of PR. The problem with the current season is not the move to LA, although it didn't help. It's not the sporadic appearance of the New York judges, who are disinclined to make the trip. That didn't help either. And it's not the goofy challenges. There have always been goofy challenges.

It's the poor quality of the contestants. Where did PR get these people? Of the final three, only Carol Hannah Whitfield has possibilities, and they dim compared to finalists in previous years. As for Irina Shabayeva, she projects shallow luxury, while Althea Harper projects not much of anything.

Meth labs, however, always have possibilities, being made and wrecked at the same time.

Meth kills, but so does moralism. Think of where we might be if the U.S. government had paid Afghan farmers for their poppy crops instead of burning their fields. Once in control of the product, we could have used it for medical pain relief in the Third World, where surgeries without anesthetics are too common. For a fraction of the cost of killing them, we could have helped the poorest of the poor raise their standard of living.

And if, in the U.S., drug abuse were a medical and not a criminal problem, those who construct the labs would be reduced to making something else. Art, for instance.

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh
Hello Meth Lab in the Sun #1, 2008
custom pigment print


Eli Hansen, I'm not paranoid because I'm high, 2009

Davis Langlois Meth Lab, 2003, oil/canvas

Vija Celmins is known for her small output interrupted by long silences. To admire her work is to lose one's taste for charm. Her early still lifes are full of an understated yet powerful dread. Her later seascapes, desert floors and night skies look like the world seen through the eyes of the dead.

From 1977 to 1982, she paired rocks she had picked up and saved with painted bronze replicas. Eleven pairs are at the Museum of Modern Art.

I got the idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I'd bring them home and I kept the good ones. I noticed that I kept a lot that had galaxies on them. I carried them around in the trunk of my car. I put them on window sills. I lined them up. And, finally, they formed a set, a kind of constellation. I developed this desire to try and put them into an art context. Sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making: the act of looking and making as a primal act of art. (more)

Fourteen years later, Andrew Witkin crafted his own pile of stones. Like Celmins', his assortment is full of ringers. Unlike Clemins, he created his bleached bone pile for beauty's sake. While hers is a challenge to the eye, his is a reassurance. All of it, from table tennis balls and bits of cork to stones and ceramic orbs, vibrates on the same visual frequency in order to fuse.