Archives for May 2010

When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at age 69, he left a challenge to Seattle. If the city would commission an artist to create a  “fully articulated,
realistic male nude” and place it in a prominent public spot surrounded by a fountain, he’d underwrite it with $1 million.

Naturally, the city punted. (Where did Smailes think he was living, Florence?) The city passed Smailes’ proposal to the Seattle Art Museum, then in the process of creating the Olympic Sculpture Park. Lisa Corrin, then SAM’s curator of contemporary art, commissioned designs from three finalists, Anthony Gormley, Glenn Ligon and Louise Bourgeois.

Smailes was the kind of person who ate dessert before dinner. He wanted to leave behind him a lovely penis in a public place. Gormley entered in the spirit of the donor, suggesting a male figure from whose erect member water flowed.
Ligon’s idea was subtler, a male looking into a water pond and
seeing his own reflection.
Gormley’s design was possibly too explicit, even for Corrin. And
while Ligon’s was quieter, it came
with a less active water element than Smailes envisioned.

That left Bourgeois, who got the nod for Father and Son. Her design
features the family pair facing each other as water plays over the
surface of one body and then the other, forever separating one from the other. Bourgeois isn’t known for fountains or for realistic nudes, male or female.
But she’s recognized for the range and flexibility of her 
production.
She dealt with the figure in both sculptures and
drawings, leaning toward psychologically rich content with
Freudian overtones. She was interested in how family dynamics shape lives.
But most of all, she was interested in how she could use content, any
content, to create art.

Bourgeois:

The subject is only the subject. So it’s not a
mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.

Bourgeois died Monday at age 98. (New York Times obit here.)

Her achievement is towering, but not in Seattle. After looking at her fountain for several years, I think it stands as her worst work ever. Even water jets cannot animate her awkward father and son, nude for no reason beyond the patron’s stipulation. The water was supposed to cover one and reveal the other, but it tends to cover or reveal each together.

If only Smailes had harbored an interest in giant spiders.

(Image via)

If  Smailes were alive and allowed a vote, doubtless he would have gone for Gormley. I didn’t have a vote either, but I would have gone for Ligon. On the other hand, Bourgeois threw in two sets of eyeball benches in black granite, and they rock. Kids growing up in Seattle will remember sitting on eyeballs, which could be all they need to jump start their lifelong  interest in art.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, …

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
W. H. Auden

Poets matter to poets, musicians to musicians. Tributes to dancers come from other dancers. Rare are artists who inspire a legacy outside the arena of their endeavor.

Sixteen years after his death, the poet of power chords continues to matter to musicians, but the exhibition bearing his first name at the Seattle Art Museum isn’t about them. Curated by Michael Darling, it’s entirely about Cobain’s afterlife in visual art. Given the narrow theme, the breath of the work is astonishing: from robustly celebratory to tender, fierce to funereal, funereal to forensic. The exhibit opens with the artists who knew him, Seattle photographers Alice Wheeler and Charles Peterson. (Previous post here.)

Everyone else came after.

For Elizabeth Peyton, he’s a Russian icon remade in Oscar Wilde’s dandy mode: bloodless as an angel, lovely as a wilting wildflower. Cobain is her most consistent subject, and yet deliberately there is only one small portrait from her in the exhibit, a single piece given an entire wall for maximum impact. On it, painted silver, her colors glow. Derived from the thinnest of oils brushed onto heavily gessoed board and leaking in faltering streams, the painted molecules of her portrait appear ready to fall apart at the slightest touch.

If Peyton is the cooked, Scott Fife is the raw. His Cobain made of cardboard drilled with screws from a gun rests like a severed head on the ground.

Jack Pierson offers the artist’s name in mismatched metal lettering, like a ransom note. (Kurt Cobain, 1994, 40 x 56 inches)
The famous are their own tribe. They are interchangeable in their excesses and  anonymous in their particulars.

Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe 1996.

From  Heart-Shaped Box, the lyric, “Cut myself on angel hair and baby’s breath” inspired Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Marc Swanson‘s Untitled (Kurt Cobain), 2009. Wrapping the bouquet is part of a shirt from a French designer label Cobain favored after he hit it big. Turns out his flannel was not forever. Once the man had money, he wanted to look good.

Time slows around Banks Violette‘s Dead Star Memorial Structure (on their hands at last) from 2003.  Why do brights lights insist on burning out? The sculpture is a drum-set wreckage shellacked in place, as if that wreckage were the point all along, the price to be paid for creating youth’s most haunting cri de coeur.

 Jordan Kantor is having none of that. His paintings of the death scene are both exact and unknowable. They chart the aftermath of violent death. Be it murder or suicide, fatal violence draws the cops. The people who bent over his body did not love it. For them, he was a professional puzzle to solve.

Drawn from Gus Van Sant’s Last Days as well as images from Internets, Gretchen Bennett‘s colored-pencil drawings have a bleached intensity, the subject drained in the spotlight’s glare, a private figure made of public moments.

Jennifer West‘s film Come As You Are features her and her son jumping on a trampoline. Like Bennett, she’s interested in image decay as metaphor. Because for her Nirvana songs are all about expelling things from the body, she soaked her film in bleach, antacid, laxatives, mud and pennyroyal (all featured in Cobain’s lyrics) for a ruined celebration. (DVD
projection 16 mm film negative transferred to DVD. 2
minutes, 51 seconds)

Evan Holloway‘s Left-Handed Guitarist, 1998, is made of foam, paper, plaster and graphite, but mostly foam. The figure bent over a guitar looks as if it’s made of Styrofoam that washed up on a beach. Cobain suffered from largely untreated back, stomach and intestinal problems. When he bent over his guitar in this posture, the intensity of the music was not the only reason.

Rodney Graham‘s unassuming slide installation, Aberdeen from 1998, plumbs the shallows of Cobain’s home ground, its bleak nowhere. The effect, slide after slide, is hypnotic. It’s a place where nothing will happen. The night will never fall, the car will never make it to the corner, and the kids who live there will not graduate from high school.

And yet Cobain goes on. After his death, Alice Wheeler collected signifiers of his influence on the bodies of the young, including the dyed blonde guitarist kid who made his way to Seattle and pitched a tent on the outskirts of the city in 1999, wearing the flannel like a flag of his country.

Through Sept. 6.

Note from Greg Lundgren:

Dennis Hopper is dead.. At 74 years old, it’s kind of a miracle that he lived that long. For all of the crazy things he did in his life, for all the drugs he consumed with great enthusiasm, for the very address he resided at, it is amazing that something like cancer was what took him down.

Tomorrow most of us get the day off for Memorial Day. And I think Memorial Day should be broader than paying our respects to the military men who have protected our freedom for the past 234 years. There are those that defend our freedom with guns and uniforms. And there are those that defend our freedom through a life of art and action. We defend our constitution so crazy son of a bitches like Dennis Hopper can make films, take pictures, perform and generally test the limits of what freedom looks like. If our country was a jet plane, they would hire Dennis Hopper to stress test it. If our country was a piece of luggage, they would give it to Dennis Hopper to see if he could break it. What makes our country so great is that is permits people like Dennis Hopper to create and destroy and live in a way that most people don’t understand or endorse.

Come on down to the Hideout tonight and join us for a drink in honor of Dennis Hopper. I am going to play the soundtracks from Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider, and probably round it out with Gram Parsons, the Stones, the Doors and maybe even a little Jimi Hendrix. It just seems like the right thing to do.

From Flashback. He can’t get a word in vertical.

In a repeat of an event in Berlin,titled, Its Form Will Follow Your Performance, Alex Schweder is looking for five people in Seattle who want free architectural advice from a performance architect. Ideally, he says, the five will not be directly connected to the art world.

From Lawrimore Project, where the results will be exhibited:

These people need to be of limited means, and willing to have this
process documented and agree to him exhibiting or publishing this
documentation. He will then meet with these ‘clients’ for about an hour
at Lawrimore Project and hear what is wrong with their apartments. He
will then give them free advice about how to renovate their apartment.
they will go home and ‘perform’ this renovation, document it and send it
to him via email. They will then discuss the shortcomings and
successes of the renovation and try it again. This will again be
documented by the client. This correspondence will continue until they
agree their apartment is renovated.

Schweder:

I am interested in taking what we usually think of as an object and
understanding it performatively.

From Trouble:

Rather than suggest a rearrangement of walls or different paint color,
Alex wrote a short set of instructions for each “client” to behave
differently in their home. This shift in action constituted the renovation.

Its Form Will Follow Your Performance (Seattle) runs at Lawrimore from June 9 – 16. Prospective clients can email their
interest to:  scott@lawrimoreproject.com  with the subject line
“Free Architectural Advice.”

Schweder is the 2007 Genius Award winner from the Stranger. Jen Graves story here. My review of Schweder’s A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day here.

A great gallery is a rarity in any city. For thirteen years, starting in his living room and moving into Belltown before establishing himself in Pioneer Square, Billy Howard had a great gallery. As each year ends and I look back on the memorable shows, Howard is consistently at the top of the list. Howard House will close June 12, Seattle’s first major gallery to fall victim to the economy.

Nothing illustrates the depth of the gallery’s lineup than the fact that five of its most stellar artists (Dan Webb, Victoria Haven, Leo
Saul Berk, Alex
Schweder and Joseph
Park) walked out together in 2007. Those who wanted other galleries in the region found them on the
top tier. Those artists were the cream, but skim the cream at HH, and
most of what’s left is still cream.

Below is a small survey of Howard House’s greatest hits. It barely scratches the surface.

Park The Grand Odalisque, 2001 oil/linen 30 x 36 inches

Gretchen Bennett Hand-cut Walnut Wood-grain shelf paper on wall, 2005, 9′ h

Debra Baxter Crystal Brass Knuckle (I am going to realign your chakras motherf*****)
Quartz crystals, sterling silver
7 x 6 x 2.5 in
2009

Sean M Johnson Grandpa
2008
Rocking chair, Jack Daniels bottle, pack of cigarettes
60″ x 46″ 38″

Robert Yoder
Harmon
2004
lego on wood panel
20″ x 20″

Mark Takamichi Miller Thieves: Man at Party
2008
acrylic, wax, urethane, oil and glass spheres on canvas over board
48″ x 72″

Jon Haddock
Wang Weilen – Screenshot Series
2000
chromogenic print from digital file created in photoshop
22.5″ x 30″
Edition of 3

Karen Ganz
Blue Puppet
2003/04
photogravure etching on paper
13″ x 11.5″

Cameron Martin
Conflation
2006
screenprint
edition of 25
30″ x 40″ (Howard House had the first show for Martin.)

Lauren Grossman  Whithersoever
2006
iron, plastic, rubber
10″ x 13″ x 10″

Howard’s goodbye letter here. Jen Graves on the end of Howard House here.

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles

Marianne Moore
1887 – 1972

Modernism scorned the decorative. More than a century later, its patterned flourishes are a kind of ghostly garden for Claudia Fitch, now showing at Greg Kucera.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, 2010
Graphite oil pastel on Strathmore drawing paper
45.5 x 37 inches

The door leads nowhere, but the windows wake you up. So do her figures. Pried from plinths and niches, they wrap themselves in cultural influences and jump into 21st-Century space, landing lightly.

FLATSCREEN, 2009
Ceramic, steel, gator board, flocked paint
26 x 15 x 6 inches

Love the boots. Through June 26.

Loose from their strings or using them as weapons, puppets in contemporary video, collage and sculpture tend toward the coarse and the brutal. They clump through their lives with a relish that is almost obscene, hypnotized by their own desires.

Artists who stand out in this crowded field include Nathalie Djurberg, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Cat Clifford, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Dan Webb, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Chu, Thomas Schutte and Pierre Huyghe.

Add to that list Martha Colburn, whose Puppet Regime is at Ambach & Rice. Like Kentridge, she draws her tragedies from history, but she adds her own wild hair of pop culture and feminist humor. A dense collage of cutout, found and hand-colored figures collide in her videos and small Polaroid photos. Predator and prey flash by, trailing wreckage. Their score is chaos, and they never miss a beat.

Through June 27.

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (via)

Part 1: Big Kiss

Tanya Batura, Intricacies of Dreaming 1  2004 Clay, airbrushed acrylic paint

Ariana Page Russell, Heat Wave
2008, archival inkjet print, edition of 5
18 x 26 inches

Part 2 – can’t breathe

Tanya Batura Inhale, 2003, Clay, glaze, china paint

Dan Webb, SHROUD, 2008
Carved wood (Redwood)
22 x 7.5 x 11 inches
Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

If as John Russell maintained, a “painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time,” a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.

Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn’t know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.

Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware busts airbrushed with acrylic paint. They look fetal, even though drawn from adult models. Blank but wounded, they are gestating in time’s garden, perfect but born past an unattainable prime.

At James Harris Gallery through June 19.

The princess who couldn’t bear the burden of a pea was not an artist. She is an emblem of the useless sensitivity of a blue blood. In the human garden, royalty is a hot house flower on luxury’s life supports.

Ariana Page Russell is more sensitive (and hearty) than that. She has dermatographia, which means her immune system is always on red alert for blistering news from the outside world. Even the lightest scratch will cause her capillaries to dilate and welt.
While the situation doesn’t scream opportunity, Russell turned it into one.

 In 2005, she began to draw patterns and words on her skin, which she photographed.


Index
2005, C-print, 11 x 16 inches, edition of 8

Flora
2006, C-print, paper size: 20 x 24 inches, image size: 13 x 19 inches;
edition of 8

A couple of years later she turned images from her welted skin into wallpaper and temporary tattoos. Her body is her instrument, but it no longer confines itself to playing a dermatographic tune. Skin is the casing for everyone’s sack of flesh. To ward off the ills it is heir to, desperate measures are taken.

In her current exhibit at Platform Gallery, Save Face, vulnerability becomes war paint.

Gush archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Images of her belly button bloom across her face and chest.)

Seethe
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Sensitive skin becomes sci-fi armor.)
Through June 29.