When Michael Darling leaves his job in July as modern and contemporary curator at the Seattle Art Museum to become chief curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, it's good news for Chicago, bad for Seattle. He's an extraordinary gifted curator. Objects speak to him, suggesting patterns and relationships that root and waken in his exhibitions. He is not, however, only the second curator to hold the modern and contemporary slot at the Seattle Art Museum.New York Times: Mr. Darling's appointment reverses his last professional transition, … [Read more...]

In years past, my visits to the Met tended to be focused. I'd pass wide swaths of world culture in a glance and on a trot. Today everything stops me: the heads and feet, swords and shields; gossamer-thin stone draperies wrapping stone bodies fresh as flower buds; cups and chairs, scrolls and silks; tombs, animal emblems and more than a millennium of painting. Unlike the Louvre, the Met is not an airport hangar where visitors seek the great amid wide stretches of less than. The stately architecture that can handle crowds … [Read more...]

On a recent Saturday, a woman behind me in line to get into MoMA said, "I hate the young." She was assuming they were there en masse to see the museum's grotesque hagiography of Tim Burton (every scrap preserved). If true, they didn't limit themselves to the man who made a mockery of Sweeney Todd but poured out into other galleries, their numbers mitigating against anyone's engagement. Obviously, the problem is not the young but the museum, which needs to determine what is a sustainable number and what is a stagnating overflow. People were four … [Read more...]

Historically, when city fathers were moved to blight a neighborhood, they put a freeway through it. New York's Robert Moses was master of the practice. Today, the same purpose is served with a monolithic, dead-to-the-street convention center.  From Purvis Young's obituary in the New York Times:He lived most of his life in the Overtown section of Miami, a once-thriving community that was ravaged by the construction of an interstate highway through it in the 1960s, and he painted what he saw around him. Artists are the bloom that blight … [Read more...]

(Image via This Isn't Happiness)I'll be walking on the right. Will continue to post, although I'm using a laptop for the first time and might fail to figure it out.  (Into every life progress comes, however haltingly.) … [Read more...]

Leans into a black hole. (He/she who digs newspapers is an ongoing series.) OSCAR TUAZON "BLACK HOLE" 2003 Newspaper, tape, paint 250 x 900 x 600 cm Edition: 1 … [Read more...]

Curators are entitled to put whoever they can get (and the director is willing to defend) in a show. I find it inconceivable, however, that a Northwest curator would mount an animals-in-art exhibit that failed to include Seattle's Sherry Markovitz. Not in Rock Hushka's The Secret Language of Animals at the Tacoma Art Museum:Encrusted over the surface of Markovitz's fiberglass molds, gourds and papier mache are many thousands of tiny glass beads woven into streams of colored light and bordered with oil paint, leather and velvet, foil and nails, … [Read more...]

With a lifelong affection for Desolation Row, I contemplate the abandoned Fun Forest at Seattle Center with pleasure. Cracks in the asphalt and gaping holes where the rides used to be are not an amenity to be taken lightly. For that reason I'm sympathetic to those who are outraged that a Dale Chihuly glass house and green shed with garden might supplant an excellent place to shoot an end of the world movie. They say they want grass, but tearing up the concrete and seeding it with what Walt Whitman called the lovely hair of graves will cost … [Read more...]

In response to this post, Charlie Kitchings sent me the video below. Being ArtsJournal's video editor, I would have posted it on AJ's main page, but the video's credit line extends too far right. It would cut into the blogger's corner, interpreting somebody and no doubt stimulating complaint.Rathman creates his own rumble in the jungle: drawing vs photos, drawing vs film. Drawing wins.  Zaire: David Rathman Project - Muhammad Ali Rumble in the Jungle 1974 from Tom DeBiaso on Vimeo. … [Read more...]

If you were going to get a pet What kind of animal would you get? A soft-bodied dog, a hen Feathers and fur to begin it again when the sun goes down and it gets dark I saw an animal in a park Bring it home to give it to you I have seen animals break in two You were looking for something soft And loyal and clean and wondrously careful a form of otherwise vicious habit could have long ears and be called a rabbit Dead died will die want Morning midnight I asked you If you were going to get a pet What kind of animal would you get?Robert CreeleyThe … [Read more...]

Now that journalism has succeeded in removing the journalists, losses are slowing and newspapers are at long last carrying on. Staffs are smaller, but the work goes on, not, of course, at the newspapers that folded early, such as my own, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, RIP March 17, 2009.With 10 (or is it 8?) journalists replacing a staff of around 200, the PI continues online as a delusion of itself. This shallow but sprightly mirage continues to attract traffic. In doing so, it's shaping up to be a financial success and a journalistic … [Read more...]

The question of hotness is not fruitfully addressed to art galleries. It pitches the discussion below the level of substance and implies that galleries have nothing better to do than titillate the fickle. Hotness runs in the same circles as buzz, a word I heartily dislike unless bees are doing it.An exquisite example of the hotness-and-buzz genre is Tim Appelo's Charlie's Charge in City Arts Magazine, Seattle edition. I appreciate Appleo Appelo personally and enjoy his writing, but in visual art, which is not his forte, his insouciance is … [Read more...]

(Photo via)Speaking of himself in the third person, Jesse Bernstein once noted that he was "unemployed until the age of six; since then he has worked as a seeing eye dog for the spiritually impaired and as an emergency storm drain." Poet, performance artist, playwright, actor and friend of what he called the expendable people, he killed himself in 1990 in Neah Bay at age 40. Photo Alice WheelerMost of his friends remember him not for his tragedy, which included mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, but for his talent, his generosity, … [Read more...]

A Concise History of Northwest Art opens with Michael Brophy's clear cut along a logging road:  January, 1997. Oil on canvas, 78 x 95 ½ inches.How brilliant it would have been to pair it with a Kenneth Callahan clear cut from the 1930s. Brophy has the sky drifting across mud furrows, the mountains serene in the distance and the exposed face of a cut tree shining low like a setting sun, but Callahan has the forest world convulsed, with no reassuring grace notes.  The Tacoma Art Museum does not have such a Callahan in its collection or … [Read more...]

Among the many responses to this post (thanks, everybody!), is Yoko Ott's dissection of the money involved, as well as an alternative plan for a botanical garden at Seattle Center, leaving aside the fact that there is a perfectly lovely botanical garden in Volunteer Park. I'm posting her comment here, because she is indeed good at math. One point you keep reiterating repeatedly is the $500K in lease revenue Regina. The (more important) public-private debate aside, it's the math I've been interested in. Generally speaking, I see the point, … [Read more...]

The game of cranking up the color on old TV sets offers rich rewards. Instead of verisimilitude, pink people can be cast in a cyanotic blue, and brown ones turned golden, like toast under butter. Landscapes too change in the over-charge of artificial light, as the stately succumbs to the carnival.Alice Wheeler never met a natural thing that couldn't be improved upon by the addition of cheap charm.Wheeler's inkjet prints are part of Made in the U.S.A. at Greg Kucera, through May 15. … [Read more...]

Rotterdam's Ron Van Der Ende builds from salvaged wood. He paints nothing. He specializes in festishized tableaus, objects that serve as emblems of historic import.His partial block of shotgun houses from New Orleans' Ninth Ward floats on the wall, the white of the wall serving as the water that carried them away.As Ben told his younger brother Willy, the woods are burning.Detail:The only other artist who makes such an exuberant overuse of tiny nails is Tony Berlant. Berlant uses his as punctuation. They complete the already completed. Van Der … [Read more...]

Sean M. Johnson does not, himself, defy gravity. He arranges for objects to do it for him - sofas taped to walls, chairs teetering on two legs, ladders frozen on a perilous diagonal, cups poised on the edge of their saucers. Beyond the balance he manages to strike for them, nothing holds them in place beyond the seemingly insufficient trappings of tape and pins. London bridges are always falling down, but Johnson gives them a last chance to impersonate the functional. The risks he takes are associated with dance and so are his payoffs, those … [Read more...]

Paper from its cuts, envelopes stuck on open, eyeglasses from broken frames, torn photos from the shredder. (Via)  … [Read more...]

I like Tyler Green's three-part look at the Wexner Center for the Arts' Hard Targets, especially Green's take on David Hammons' Champ from 1983.David Hammons' 1989 Champ is impeccable and clever, beautiful and sad. The materials are simple: inner tube, (silver) duct tape, and boxing gloves (with laces hanging down). Hammons smartly mixes a deflated sport with deflated materials to examine the role of the prize fighter in American culture, especially black culture. Before the NBA was a dreamed-of escape-valve for urban youth, boxing offered the … [Read more...]

Thomas Mallon's excellent essay on the novelist Muriel Spark is in the April 5 edition of The New Yorker, focused on her astringent and precise eccentricities. Her short stories in that magazine have been for me a decades-long treasure. From one I remember a sentence about champagne: "Through its murk bubbles climbed." Fallon quotes from Spark's Loitering with Intent from 1981, her character Fleur Talbot, like her a writer:When people say nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an … [Read more...]

DawsUh, Dad? That's three words. On the other hand, it isn't every day that a family farmer tips his hat to Deborah Butterfield.Daws' suite of four drawings photocopies collectively titled, Life on the Farm, is part of Made in the U.S.A. at Greg Kucera Gallery, through May 15. … [Read more...]

Some people need to reintroduce themselves to reality.Reality: The 74-acre Seattle Center is home to a failed, five-acre Fun Forest. Even at its peak, it wasn't that much fun. I was there more times than I want to remember with nephews and nieces, pouring money down the drain of their frustrated desires. Now that the pseudo-fun is gone, what's left is the asphalt on which it rested.Three of those five acres are going to be open space with a children's garden, a basketball court, a maze for kids to climb through and a big tent for big band … [Read more...]