...stares into his future, which is behind him.Mike Worrall, (via), painting under the influence. … [Read more...]

The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.Tom RobbinsRobert AdamsEd Ruscha, via … [Read more...]

Heading into the fourth episode on Wednesday night, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist has provided a few surprises. Despite a lackluster beginning, auctioneer Simon de Pury has come into his own as a coach, dispensing genuinely helpful advice. On the other hand, Jerry Saltz has yet to emerge. The editing of his remarks has to be brutal.If this were Saltz before editing: This would be him after:(Both images details from Drew Daly's altered photographs via Greg Kucera Gallery)In my previous post about this show, From Bravo: the next barely … [Read more...]

Mauro Perucchetti  Luxury Therapy 2008 Pigmented urethane resin, glass, crystals and metal (via)Tobias Wong 24 Hours of Pure Silver Leaf 1998 (Image via New York Times: NYT obit here and possible reasons for the death of the 35-year old artist who misidentified himself as a designer here.)Damien Hirst Medicine Cabinet (one of many) … [Read more...]

 Art is math. Some artists add, some subtract. The rest multiply. Among the multipliers:Tara Donovan ToothpicksJohn Grade (at Suyama Space)Jim Hodges, Silk Flowers (image via)Tony Cragg, Stack 1975Bradd SkubinnaMark MenjivarLouise BourgeoisJason RhoadesAnnette Messager at the PompidouJosh FaughtMandy GreerDale Chihuly, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001Juniper ShueyDamien Hirst Pharmacy (Image via)Mike Simi Sex Offenders From My Hometown:Throw Pillow Series (Ongoing) Printed fabric, found imagesFinally, the greatest example of simultaneous … [Read more...]

Happy DazeMauro Peruccheti  (image via)Not so happy:Do-Ho Suh … [Read more...]

Stephen Nguyen's installation at Suyama Space, Migration, is a stage set that aspires to be a play. Instead, it's a proposal for a play, an idea roughed out on a three-dimensional drawing board: Trace evidence of birds bursting through a drywall constructed for the purpose. Plot hangs heavy on Nguyen's hands, but he is unable to give flesh to its outline. Nguyen is thinking, but not with his hands.Nguyen, Migration, detail, 2010Nguyen's best installations derive from teamwork with Wade Kavanaugh, who had his own solo show at Suyama Space in … [Read more...]

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead When I met Chris Jordan, he was a Seattle lawyer representing a now-defunct pipe line company. Its product had ruptured on June 11, 1999, allowing 236,000 gallons of gasoline to pour into the Whatcom and Hannah creeks near Bellingham, turning them into fireballs. Two 10-year-old boys playing by the riverside were killed. Jordan's job was not to help anybody deny guilt. That trial was over. His more … [Read more...]

Possibly starting in the 5th Century but documented since the 19th, a tradition of women divers off the coast of the Korean peninsula.  Photos, Brenda Paik Sunoo  (Thanks, Rooney O'Neil) … [Read more...]

I deemed the weather offensive, the way the air lay on me like a giant tongue - clammy, warm and gritty as embers. Galveston Nic PizzolattoSometimes the weather that isn't there is all the weather you need.Buddy Bunting 2004 ink on paperYou can drown in it, even it you're already dead.Andres Serrano Piss Christ 1987 Sky to land: Drop Dead. In the photo that documents sky's insult to land, a  loogie hawked out of the sky lands with a muffling thud on a pine tree. The tree tops a mountain, with white air surrounding the tree as a … [Read more...]

Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist made its debut in someone else's prom dress. The format, the editing, premises and pacing were all worn first on Project Runway.Instead of Project Runway's Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, Work of Art has art dealer Bill Powers and dealer/curator Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Instead of make-it-work Tim Gunn, auctioneer Simon de Pury muttering into his manicured hands. Instead of Heidi Klum, "art enthusiast" China Chow.As with Runway, the possibilities were determined before the first episode. By then, … [Read more...]

Joe Deal didn't live in California but returned to it throughout his career to articulate its self-devouring growth, subdivision on subdivision. Deal died on Friday of cancer. He was 62.  St. Louis Beacon obit here. Teacher: What's 2 plus 2, Michael?Micheal: 4.Teacher: That's good, Michael.Michael: It's not good, it's perfect.Joe Deal's photos are perfect. They are what it is, images of an Etch-A-Sketch state that keeps erasing and repeating itself, without Bill Owens' hapless charm or Ed Ruscha's consolation of the cool. Deal, Watering, … [Read more...]

Whoever the Seattle Art Museum hires to replace Michael Darling (why Darling left here), the museum needs somebody who likes a challenge. Money is tight, the work load (with three sites) is enormous, and payoffs on the national stage are elusive.For the hiring committee, 10 suggestions:1. Don't limit yourselves to PhD's. We all know PhD's who get the job, sit down and rarely rise again.2. Good contemporary is not skin deep. How well does the candidate know the permanent galleries at the Met? The Frick? Ask who has the best American historical … [Read more...]

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. (Photo, Mike Urban, Seattle PI 2007, accompanying my profile of him, here.)A curator on the job for three years is cracking open the territory. Darling has the wit, energy and vision to connect … [Read more...]

None of William Ivey's paintings have a title. All of Howard Kottler's sculptures do. They're either jokes or explication, the latter because he was a teacher.William Ivey (1919-1992) Untitled, 1976 Oil on canvasHoward Kottler (1930-1989) Portrait Vase, 1988 Ceramic with whitewash and luster Ivey painted not what he saw but what he felt about what he saw: windows, waters, hills and dales, bridges, tables, ledges and restless passages of sky as they poured themselves out through the window in his studio. Like Joan Mitchell, he continued to … [Read more...]

Armando Mariño The Raft, 2000 Watercolor on paper 60 x 81 inches Courtesy of The Farber Collection  Harriet Saunderson Walking Wall, 2007 Christian Weihrauch Kleine Schritte (Small Steps), 2005 Colored pencil on paper 12.5 x 10 in. Jon Michael Turner, from the Combat Paper ProjectDo-Ho SuhKaren GanzJennifer Campbell   … [Read more...]

1. Activate figure/ground relationships.Jennifer Mao Figure Ground2. Subvert verisimilitude. Glenn Ligon Malcolm X (small version 1) #1, 2001; painting; paint and screen print on primed canvas, 48 in. x 36 in. (Image via)3. No line unchallenged.Sigmar Polke, Over the Rainbow, 2006 (obit here)4. No dead edges.Andrew Dadson, Plank Lean Painting #2, 2010. (detail) Oil on canvas. 60 x 60 x 10 inches 5. Color needs a crew.Robert Ryman (His white on white in white qualifies.) Ledger, 1982. (Image via)6. How carries what. Mark Mumford, Hold … [Read more...]

Screens full of their efforts, all deleted, all in search of a free advertising platform, come in several times weekly.Sample:Not that trolls (and gnomes) don't have their uses. Below, a fine one by Nicholas Nyland in the spirit of Tang Dynasty. … [Read more...]

Erwin WurmDon't tell me I've nothing to do.Back Monday. … [Read more...]

You draw, she embroiders your results. Mao: Map-making is an assertion of the finite - an attempt to physically embody knowledge of structures and boundaries...They are created with the implicit understanding that the depicted space holds a degree of permanence. In asking individuals to map familiar places from memory and embroidering the results, I am interested ... in creating a non-reproducible illustration of a subjective memory, inverting the traditional practice of mass-production associated with conventional maps. I am also interested in … [Read more...]

WarAdam Helms, image viaByron KingPolar Brokers is a series of drawings where I took the bio pics of big oil executives and morphed images of polar bears into their silhouettes. Trophy Soldiers is a web project made in 2007 that became a reaction to my own personal desensitization to the imagery from the war in Iraq.Sherry Markovitz Boots Are On The Ground gouache on vellum, 36 x 47 inches, 2001PeaceGala BentClaire CowieElizabeth Sandvig … [Read more...]

What if Flash Gordon went to art school? Bryan Schoneman Communicating with the B Horizon. 2010 Aluminum foil, dirt, Plexiglas, wood, glass, steel, rye grass, video monitor Dimensions variable (Flash Gordon meets Kim Jones but manages to stay presentable.)An exhibit is the last thing tuition buys you. Using as evidence the University of Washington's MFA survey at the Henry Gallery, the program of digital arts and experimental media is worth the dough, as is sculpture, especially ceramic sculpture. Painting is less so. Although there are artists … [Read more...]

A Biblical promise...But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore...is a threat in the age of surveillance. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch:I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train... Evidence can be gathered on any life. If the state seeks, it will find, and hope of oblivion will be a … [Read more...]

The last gasp of a dying order or the revitalized root music of American racism?From NYDailyNews.com. Full story here. Artists who painted a mural at an elementary school in Prescott depicting four students, with the most prominent being a Hispanic boy, were asked to lighten the faces amid taunts and tensions. R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the Prescott Downtown Mural Project, told a local newspaper passersby regularly shouted racially charged comments at his group while they were creating the mural at the Miller Valley Elementary … [Read more...]

Lots of comments on this post. I want to thank the artists themselves, who graciously offered the most basic metaphoric response imaginable, and everybody else.  … [Read more...]

Apocalypse Now surf scene, homemade 2010 Afghanistan update (to Gaga). Via. If we were fighting with this music video instead of weapons, wouldn't everybody be dancing in the streets?  … [Read more...]

Blake Fall-Conroy via Wasteman Wonders Blake Fall-Conroy Minimum Wage Machine (Work in Progress) 2008 Custom electronics, change sorter, wood, plexiglas, motor, misc. hardware, pennies (approx. 15 x 19 x 72 inches)The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in … [Read more...]

And (good god) sexism. That's what it sounds like when Marly Guthrie covers Nelson's Travelin' Man. (Via Molly Lambert, who titled her entry, Ricky Nelson never had immigration problems.) … [Read more...]

Andy Warhol considered himself a camera. He was more like a mirror. Into his mirror the culture gazed. Every little thing about the people in it - from the soup in their bowl to the money in their pocket - is art. In my youth when visiting friends, a photo of the host on the wall was worrying but not conclusive, especially if some other person, place or thing shared the frame and could be considered the point: a favorite haunt, horse, child, lover, dead parent. Two or more photos of the host alone? No need to ask which way that wind blew - into … [Read more...]

Billy Howard's gallery on the northern edge of Pioneer Square is open for its final First Thursday Gallery Walk tonight, 6-8 p.m. (Previous post on his closure here.)Howard's last exhibit is Patti Warashina, a pioneering figure in West Coast ceramics, one of a trio who brought Seattle ceramics to national attention in the 1970s. (The others - all from the art faculty at the University of Washington - are the late Howard Kottler and the late Robert Sperry, the latter her husband.)Kottler had no false moves. Sperry had one great one - cracked, … [Read more...]