Another Bouncing Ball

Some couples stay together by pretending the rest of the world does not exist.

Will Rogan

Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette recently asked if it's fair to give an audience something it hasn't shown any signs of wanting:

Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to new things, and that they should be convinced to give them a try. But is this true? I've observed before that classical music, particularly opera companies and orchestras, are unusual in that they repeatedly try to force things on its audience that its audience doesn't necessarily want. Someone who comes to the movie theater to see "Avatar" is not necessarily going to be thrilled if I show him "Pan's Labyrinth" instead, even if I'm convinced that he would really love it if only he would watch it. And yet this is what's going on in classical music, all the time: audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone. (more)

I thought of Midgette while looking at Isabelle Pauwels' exhibit at the Henry Gallery titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/The complete ordered field. There is so little pleasure to be had from its stuttering films, dry photographs and fragmentary collages, the idea must be that viewing them is good for the audience.

I also thought of David Pagel's review of Diana Thater in the L.A. Times:

Making a movie about movie magic is not the same as making some of that magic. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic" goes so far out of its way to extinguish the magic that you can't help but wonder why movie magic was brought up in the first place.

The answer is that Thater's brand of art is opposed to all forms of entertainment, which it sets itself apart from. (more)

I don't think the review is one of Pagel's best. Instead of being specific to Thater's work, it's a generalized complaint about art that appears to disdain anything that could be called entertainment. At Pauwels' show, however, I could see Pagel's point. Pauwels is Exhibit A in audience neglect. The onus is on the viewer to prove worthy of the artist's ragtag moments.

Should pleasing an audience be an artist's responsibility? Artists who worry about how their studio work will strike others don't get anything done. They repeat their greatest hits, if they have any. They temporize and shilly-shally. They lose their nerve and doubt their understanding of their own visual thread.

On the other hand, Pagel's problem with Thater and mine with Pauwels is the suspicion that the artist has confused the didactic with the challenging.

And yet, there is something there. I'm going to take a fresh look with none of the above on my mind. After that, review will follow.

From Efrain Almeida's world view.

The few get lucky.

The rest keep a record of their tears.

Unring the Bell at Cornish College surveys the early work of Cornish grad (1991) Dan Webb, curated by Jess Van Nostrand. Because the show is about getting started, its catalog (drawn by Kelly Martin) is a comic book, which represents Webb's reading habits when he happened upon the evidence of art in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1983.

The day I learned about art, I was just another kid skipping class in high school.

Here's what he saw, flipping through a book on modern art:

Via

His reaction?

HAHA

Webb is a great carver in all materials by anyone's measure, but there are better. What makes him an essential artist is not the level of his skill, which is high, but his ability to use his skill to be (in Kafka's phrase), an ax for the frozen sea within us, what Rauschenberg did with a stuffed goat, tire and paint, using odds and ends as a floor.

Hiding out in the library stacks in high school, himself a maker, he realized there were makers who triumphed beyond literal depictions, and that the essence of art is exactly what he craved - freedom. Webb talks about his work tomorrow at noon in the gallery, free admission.

Samples of it include a pair of desks, with gum chewed by the artist. Hanging in threads, it looks suspiciously like paint thrown on the beard of a goat.

Woody Allen's Interiors opens In a New York apartment that has been designed to death. It could be a window display of a chilly boutique, except a young couple lives in it. The only object that hints at their occupation is the chord of a table lamp, which dangles in plain sight. When the designer enters, the mother of the wife, she sees the chord and frowns. "Who moved this lamp," she asks, in accusation.

Allen foreshadowed the entire story through that chord. The chord is also the point for Justin R. Lytle, currently showing in the hallway at Cornish College of the Arts, not that the exhibit is anywhere on its Web site.

Lytle, Deviations

Trajectory

Lytle graduated from Cornish in 2009. He's off to a good start.

From Seattle's Klara Glosova

On my recent road trip I got inspired by a huge FRESH CHERRIES sign in eastern Washington. The letters in the photo are just a mock-up, but I plan to make it real.

This is what happens when you take your house for a walk.

Open House : Nepo (A HUMOROUS APPROACH TO THE SERIOUS ART OF LIVING)

Please come curious and prepared to use you investigative skills. Expect a homespun, high-end affair: a visual experience perched on the threshold of spontaneous creative experience and perfected mastery. Among our auditory attractions will be Live Poetry Juke Box and The Purple Dots, a five piece band of eight-year-olds (band name is subject to change). Not Decent Docent will be available for those needing a little interpretative help.

February 27th 2010, 6:00 pm - 11:00 pm 1723 S Lander Street Seattle WA 98144

On Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof's The Art Blog, writer Andrea Kirsch breaks out the hymnal in praise the female sex organ:

Explicit views of women's pudenda have never been in short supply in New York City but one found them on 42nd St. (before Disney arrived), not in established art galleries. Inspired by Eve Ensler's Vagina Dialogues, Francis Naumann began collecting work for an exhibition and when it grew too large, enlisted David Nolan to join him; the exhibition, The Visible Vagina, continues at both galleries through March 20.  The results include the entire range of responses one might expect from women to their own most singular parts, and respectful, appreciative study by men of the most mysterious parts of women.  This is an important exhibition.

What if this were a penis show? Would Kirsch approve only of "respectful, appreciative attention" from women artists? And would she indulge men who are in awe of their "own most singular parts"? The vagina is not the most mysterious part of a woman. That honor goes to the brain, as it does for men.

These exhibits might be swell, but surely not because their artists' treatment of the content is "respectful." Art cannot be judged on its manners, good or bad, or its attitudes.

Below, a watercolor on the theme by Seattle's Amanda Manitach from her blog, My Heroes Died of Syphilis. I like it not because I have a weakness for the genitalia of female syphilitics, but because it makes its own atmospheric world, both ruined and lovely.

Other stories:

An Aesthete's Lament noticed the floors in The King and I:

My family and I were watching Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in The King and I a few weeks ago and one aspect of the sets caught our mutual attention--the high-gloss floors. Jet black, pale blue, jade green, and shocking pink, King Rama IV's residence in Bangkok, the Grand Palace...was all about super reflective, boldly coloured floors and masses of airy chinoiserie. For one mad moment we discussed painting our wood floors similarly, then remember what hell was wrought when we coated them with shining white epoxy paint, and the feeling passed.

Just as I suspected: An exposure to luxury goods can turn you into a shit. (Via AJ) For those who are confused, art is not a luxury good. Think Rolex, not Tim Rollins.

The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study. (more)

Best art blog lead, from Art Fag City:

If the Meet the Biennial Curators press breakfast is any indication -- and it never is -- this year's Whitney Biennial will be really great. (more)

Best new online art magazine - This Is Tomorrow. For the images alone, it deserves a prize, but there are also excellent reviews with a global reach.

Cynthia Gutierrez

Brian Jungen - Wasp

Art Chantry

More here.

The great Marsha Burns, not online, no longer represented by a gallery.

Kushner:

At least I never voted Republican.

via

After she bungled a question in the Miss Teen USA pageant, contestant Caitlin Upton become her own event horizon. No light penetrates past her media coverage. Jesse Edwards' painted her pixelated to the edge of her form. His version of Pointillism is a critique on fame that lights up the Web, like fireworks in a night sky, except it trails after its subjects forever. Even if Upton becomes a Rhodes Scholar, her misadventure in front of a microphone will be there whenever anyone clicks on her name.

Detail:

Pageant (oil on linen 40 x 36 inches) was part of Edwards' show at Flatcolor Gallery last month. I saw it on the last day and didn't intend to write about it, but it stayed with me.

The rap against Edwards in Seattle is that he's all over the map. It's true. Then there's the fact of him. Below, the opening of a profile I wrote in 2006:

Jesse Edwards lives in a downtown studio that is packed with his paintings. They lean in stacks and protrude in piles. His bed is a sack on the floor, which is littered with fast food packaging, art books and objects he uses for his still lifes, including a skull, a skateboard, pop cans, bongs, porn magazines, shredded dolls, a toy cop car and the odd piece of fruit.

He has a computer covered in graffiti on a wrecked table beside half an office chair, foam spilling out, that he found on the street. Creature comforts are not his thing. "I'm an artist," he said. "I want to paint in oils like the old masters."

An aspiration to old master painting is not the first thing that comes to mind on meeting him. He looks like a thug. At 29, he's tall and lean with thick muscles running up his tattooed arms and down his torso. His smile doesn't often reach his eyes, which bore into people.

"I'm an ex-thug," he said. "In the old day, I'd stomp people who disrespected my tags."

Stomp?

"Put them down so they don't get up. I was a kid. I didn't know any better."

His landscapes look as if they're sweating - open stretches of summer fields working hard for the money.

Landscape oil on linen 60" x 40"

Some of his ceramics are tributes to his adventures as a graffiti writer. (Image via)

The art world breaks artists' hearts. First to break are those who ring wrong bells when they walk into a gallery. Edwards can't change that, anymore than Caitlin Upton can, but she could learn a lot from him. He's stout-hearted and keeps on keeping on.

White Fear, oil on linen, 38 x 28 inches

Title a variant on a theme.

About artists and serious books, Robert Storr sees a divide.

There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many.

Increasingly, however, artists treat books as objects. They empty them out or roll them like stones against the mouth of a cave.

Jill Sylvia

Stella Waitzkin

It's a self-portrait. Beres is a member of SuttonBeresCuller, but he draws alone. (image via)

In response to comments made about this post, Sylvia Mendel wrote:

Yes, I expect that if any group is invisible in certain organizations or societal settings it's worthy of question. For, you may be the one who is excluded at some point in the future. If you are a curious person you'll notice that older women artists are invisible in the art world and most other arenas of life, unless they're generous philanthropists or volunteers - which I call work without pay.

 I have actually experienced this invisibility/exclusion recently. A Chelsea gallery owner saw my work on a website. She made an appointment to see the actual work. She saw me in person when I visited her gallery to check out the space where my work might be shown. I said I was looking forward to her visiting my studio and she canceled the appointment by email the following day pleading sickness and never rescheduled.

Women are even more biased against older women than are men. That's just the most obvious incident. I recently did a series on age with one piece called Wear Masks and have been asked to write a piece against this invisibility for an art publication.

Mendel, Wear Masks and Missing Pages II

The milky light suggests cataracts on the lens. (Via)

The cartoonist Gahan Wilson will be at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Dec. Feb.13, 6-9 p.m., to celebrate the publication of GAHAN WILSON: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons with an exhibition of his originals and a book signing.

Fantagraphics gallery director Larry Reid adds:

Also on display on February 13 for one night only is a recently completed sculpted portrait of R. Crumb by Seattle artist Mike Leavitt. Commissioned for a private out-of-state collection, this is only opportunity to view the fully articulated wood carved figure - the latest addition to Leavitt's ongoing Art Army series.

The reception on the 13th coincides with the Georgetown Second Saturday Art Attack, featuring visual and performing arts throughout the neighborhood.

When I noticed that the Seattle Art Museum is running a Steve McQueen festival, I was thrilled. After winding my way through its Web site to get to film programs, I realized SAM is hosting the wrong Steve McQueen.

The wrong Steve McQueen: (image via)

The right Steve McQueen: (image via) Profile here.

Of course people want to see the wrong Steve McQueen. I like him too. But SAM is an art museum. Wouldn't it be great if visitors could go there to see at least the right McQueen's shorter films from a library of video/film artists available for screening by appointment?  I'd like to see Bear (1993), Drumroll (1998) and Deadpan (1999), the last being homage to Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. Deadpan was at Western Bridge the Henry a few years ago. Be nice to see it again.

The Northwest Film Forum screens a fair sampling of films and videos that are art straight up. Last April it featured McQueen's Hunger, about Bobby Sands. At the time, I couldn't force myself to go. Having lost my job a month earlier, I was trying to hang out on the sunny side of the street. I'd love to see it now, and where is it?

The theoretical advantage of film & video is that anyone can see it anywhere. Alas, that is far from the case. In the meantime, SAM is screening the Steve McQueen who is already ubiquitous. Something wrong here.

Rush, Fox News and its zany all recall Father Charles Coughlin, anti-Semitic radio priest of the 1930s. While today's version is certainly appalling,  none of them go as far as Coughlin, who sided with Hitler right up until FDR managed to talk the American Catholic Church into ordering him off the air.

Here's the big difference. Coughlin appealed to those who had nothing and wanted someone to blame. Fox appeals to the well-fed.

Maynard Dixon's Forgotten Man from 1934 (image via) is not a portrait of a Glenn Beck supporter.

Tebaggers aren't worried about scabs.

Dixon, Scabs (image via)

Nor are they likely to break factory windows. Their goal is to prevent a just and multicultural America from emerging. Since the last election, they have managed to convince a growing number of the disenfranchised to join them. The phenomenon makes the violent strikers of the 1930s look like sages. They at least knew who was on their side and who wasn't.

Vachel Lindsay

FACTORY windows are always broken. 
Somebody's always throwing bricks, 
Somebody's always heaving cinders, 
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Other windows are let alone. 
No one throws through the chapel-window 
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Something or other is going wrong. 
Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark. 
End of factory-window song.

From Emily Pothast of Translinguistic Other:

I'm writing to enlist some help drawing attention to a silent auction to help a Seattle business owner from Haiti (David Pierre-Louis of Lucid Jazz Lounge in the University District) provide direct assistance to the survivors of the earthquake in his old community. The deadline for dropping off work with coordinator Leilani Lehman (lani.lehman@gmail.com) is this Sunday, February 7. Participating artists include Allison Manch, Gala Bent, Celeste Cooning and myself.

Pothast, L'Origine du Monde, college/drawing, 6 x 6 inches

You can relegate it to TV.

Donna Stack

Princess and the Pea (the pea), Down feather brocade Asian floor pillows, monitor and video. The video is looped to display a single pea as it slowly dries out and becomes plump again.

Or wrap it in a rug.

Fred Muram, Rug

You can banish it to the back pasture in your mind.

Grant Barnhart, Way of the Warrior

You can set it on fire...

Lauren Grossman, The Pentecost

Or turn it into a joke.

Grossman again. Drunkard

You can wipe your personal slate clean.

Ingrid Lahti

If all else fails, you can praise it.