Another Bouncing Ball: October 2009 Archives

Video for the weekend, from Object Index via.

A machine in the roof rotates with a speed of one revolution per hour. Every minute it let one gram of hot glue drop down on the floor. During time a sculpture takes form.

Alexander Calder never goes out of style, but he's never quite in it either. Before children are old enough to respond to Edvard Munch, they (given the chance) love Calder. By adulthood, delight fades to affection.

Like Roethke, Calder mines the transformational mysticism of play.

When I stand, I'm almost a tree.
Leaves, do you like me any?

Bougainvillier (Bougainvillea), 1947, Sheet metal, wire, rod, lead, and paint. Collection of Jon and Mary Shirley.© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Justin Gollmer

Little in Calder's recent exhibits, one at the Whitney and a smaller one at the Museum of Modern Art, helped to redefine his reputation. Charm was abundant, but so was familiarity. The extraordinary had a hard time surfacing within a context that triggered well-worn assumptions.

In contrast, Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act at the Seattle Art Museum is nothing but extraordinary. It's Calder at the top of his game, both playful and profound, and installed with deft wit in the airy light galleries of the still new museum addition. With more than 40 pieces, counting everything but documentary photographs, the exhibit isn't large, but all of it is brilliant.

An alternative title could have been Jon and Mary Shirley Collect Calder, as 95 percent of it is theirs. Their names in lights wasn't an option they favored. Despite a pivotal role in creating the Olympic Sculpture Park, they declined the opportunity to name it for themselves.

From miniature maquettes to the monumental and spanning the artist's career with a concentration on the 1940s, theirs is the finest Calder collection in private hands and one of the finest in existence.

Toile d'Araignee is a sentence diagrammed in white, phrases floating on slender connectives.

Toile d'Araignee (Spider Web), 1965, Sheet metal, rod, wire, and paint. Collection of Jon and Mary Shirley.© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Justin Gollmer

        

Compared to insects, we are lumbering creatures, but our minds can fine tune themselves to hum, blank but for the tune. 

Untitled, ca. 1948, Sheet metal, wire, wood, string, and paint. Collection of Jon and Mary Shirley.© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Justin Gollmer

Calder had a long run as a public artist, rivaled only by Henry Moore. While Moore's hill-and-dale fusion of landscape and female form holds its own in front of even the bleakest corporate building, Calder's efforts tended to grow stale. Mobiles turned to stabiles and stood there. Plop. It's an insult that's hard for them to shake. I like them (who doesn't?), but I don't care about them in any deep way.

Then there's Red Curly Tail: powerfully blunt but still insouciant.

Red Curly Tail, 1970, Painted steel and stainless steel.Collection of Jon and Mary Shirley.© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Justin Gollmer

One of Calder's great strengths is his ability to shift scale. Renowned for large work, he can be dazzling in the space of a hand's span.

Polychrome Dots and Brass on Red, 1964, Sheet metal, brass, wire and paint. Collection of Jon and Mary Shirley.© 2009 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Justin Gollmer

Roethke, The Dance

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide
Down a steep hillside one a cake of ice -
Or was that in a book? I think with pride:
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice
In the same way: O watch his body sway! -
this animal remembering to be gay.

This show is worth a trip to Seattle. Those who are already in the region can say, lucky us. Through April 11.

In 2007, Jack Daws fabricated 10 pennies, each copper-plated, 18-Karat gold, heavier than the usual and slightly smaller. His gallery offered nine for sale for $1,000 each. The 10th Daws dropped into circulation at the Los Angeles International Airport.

What are the chances he'd ever hear from that 10th penny again?

Daws' counterfeit, fresh from his gallery:

This week, a woman in NYC named Jessica Reed called him to say she'd found it, noticed its difference and tracked back to the original stories about the piece. The penny lost and found has more value for Daws than the pennies that went straight to collectors' homes, but what attracted him to pennies in the first place was their lack of value.

"The lowly penny," he said in 2007. "People don't bend over to pick it up."

The counterfeit Daws' Reed found:

Mike Leavitt

Magritte (Still crazy after all these years. Not safe for work.)

Alfred Gescheidt

Judith Supine (image via)

There's something about a... an unfinished piece of work, a... a thing like this where... do you see? Where perfection is still possible.

 William Gaddis, The Recognitions (via)

Here's one more reason to wish to be in Paris.

From Kader Attia:

I am very happy to announce that the work Untitled (Al Aqsa) will be shown in the big octagonal pond of the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris until the 27th of November. This installation is made of hundreds of cymbals, that produce music when it's raining and windy. The unexpected but very much appreciated thing that happens with this installation, is that people throw small stones on them in order to create musical sounds as well...

While Louise Bourgeois celebrates the maternal embrace of the most famous weaver in the insect world...

(image via)

other artists focus on the web.

Mona Hatoum (image via)

Rachel Maxi carved this year's pumpkins in tribute to her friend Harold Hollingsworth.

Her pumpkins:

His  painting:

As he slammed himself into a wall, Gary Hill stuttered through his discourse on being and nothingness. After finishing Wall Piece in 2000, he was covered in bruises and could barely walk. His interest in theory he roots in sensation. Central for him is the idea of rupture. His focus is the seams and dislocations between sound, image, time and motion, between the real and the surreal.

Many aspire to their fusion, but Hill succeeds in giving thought a physical form. Consciousness comes from skin, eyes, mouths, brains and hands; what sounds, motions and memories we make and why.

While the beauty of his work beguiles, its density frustrates. To frustrate is to offend. Intellectuals are offensive in America. John Goodman spoke for his country as he lumbered down a burning hallway in Barton Fink and roared, ``I'll show you the life of the mind!"

With the thumps of Hill's body scored to a strobe, Wall Piece is in Vortexhibition Polyphonica at the Henry Art Gallery. My review of the exhibit here. Erin Langner's Peripheral Vision here.

Back to Goodman.

Columbia opens at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Nov. 7, celebrating the publication of PIM & FRANCIE.

Born in Mexico City to painters Elizabeth Sandvig and Michael Spafford, Seattle photographer Spike Mafford has spent two decades documenting Dia de los Muertos in the country of his orgin.

What distinguishes these photos is not just his innate elegance but his intimacy. He knows the people in the costumes and some in the graves, has stayed up all night with them to drink, scatter marigolds and dance.

We dress up:

The church outside:

The bounty from the living earth:

So the blind might see:

The morning after:

There are no facts to transcend in the tale of Leda and the Swan. There is only a sea of sliding signifiers. They touch without landing on power, sexual hunger, fertility, violation and cunning. With such a range of meanings in play, why did artists so long lean on the soft porn angle? Beginning in the 20th century, they were less inclined to do so.

Frank V. Hoffman in Chicago envisioned a dance, both parties flaunting their power, image undated but probably from the 1930s.

Last year's holiday tree at the White House had a ringer ornament. Amid the usual patterned swirls was a call to impeach Bush. Its reverse side was a salute to Jim McDermott, the Seattle congressman who'd signed a House resolution asking for the same thing.

Deborah Lawrence didn't sneak her orb onto the tree by cover of darkness. In order to showcase the congressional districts, Laura Bush asked members of Congress to pick artists to decorate an ornament for free. Of 435 districts, 370 participated, which means 65 congresspeople couldn't or didn't bother to find artists willing to work for the thrill of it all.

Even though Rep. McDermott is the ornament's hero, he didn't seek the role. He asked 4Culture to find an artist, and 4Culture found Lawrence. As Lawrence is a straight-forward political artist, the decision to give the Bush administration a little grief on its way out was made there. (Free ornament download here.)

Michael Williams

Matthew Offenbacher. At Howard House through Saturday. (Exhibit review here.)

Keyes

Via His lover's weight in candy.

Jim Hodges

Eric Yahnker, Cream Corner, detail

Sean Johnson, Brothers

Fred Muram, Rug

Harvest Henderson

Via

Mark Mumford

Jeffry Mitchell, Angel of Mercy

Elizabeth Sandvig, Peaceable Kingdom With Clouds

Christopher Martin Hoff (detail)

The problem with Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti  isn't the core of the exhibit itself. Had the Seattle Art Museum stripped it of lard and presented it with the modesty it deserves, it would have been a fine thing to see in a small gallery on a rainy afternoon.

Instead, Michelangelo comes with the trappings of a major moment: a wall-sized time-line of the artist's life, extensive text, copious illustrations and an attempt to create titillating controversy.

Flashing on the Web site:

Michelangelo burned most of his sketches. Come see 12 drawings that escaped the fire.

They escaped the fire but not their admirers. The Casa Buonarroti Web site explains why the drawings are ghostly. The best of the 200 in the collection were on view from 1566 to 1960 with no time out for good behavior. The Uffizi undertook their restoration, returning them 15 years later.

Surely the Uffizi is not responsible for what happened to a preliminary sketch for The Last Judgment. The wall label notes that the artist created it in black chalk, reinforced later with pen and ink. In other words, it's an original traced into a forgery.

Make that 11 sketches. Still, they're Michelangelo's. Not for nothing did he regret his work when he was a pious old man, inclined to agree with the cleric Pietro Aretino that some of his nude figures would be "at home in some voluptuous bathhouse, certainly not the highest chapel of the world."  

As a colorist Michelangelo was the equal of Raphael, and his forms have no peers. Not before him or since has anyone matched the glory of his well-muscled males, and he did so within the context of a fully-articulated human drama. A handful of his notebook drawings is worth seeing, but it's almost impossible to do amid crowds puzzled by all the filler: little-known artists of his time or shortly after creating tributes and stray sculptures from the school of. 

This show screams minor museum in a provincial town. There's a dissatisfied buzz in the galleries from people wondering when they'll get to the good stuff or if they've already missed it or maybe they should take a tour? I doubt exit interviews will be encouraging to the marketing department.

Painter Fred Einaudi opted for inclusion. If you click on biography on his Web site, you'll get:

And nothing else. What else is there?

When cornered, Mary Ann Peters comes out drawing. Even when her resources are depleted and her imagination drained, she can count on the marks her hand makes. They're beautiful, no question, but they're also flaccid imitations of her work when it's focused and intense. Allusions to remembered landscapes become allusions to upscale wine bars. I can imagine sitting beside one doing double duty as wallpaper as a waiter glides up to take my order.

and the edge becomes the center, 2009, Watercolor and gouache on clayboard, 96" x 120"

Besides the above painting, her exhibit at James Harris Gallery features a series of small drawings. They lack the turgid sense of empty overkill that ruined the painting, but even though fresher, they're still Peters in a minor vein.

Her 2006 exhibit at the same gallery was superior in every way.

Through Nov. 14.

In the middle of the 19th century, painters thought of Victor Hugo as a writer, and writers called him a painter.

Now that few who are not forced read his famous novels (thick in every sense), his 1998 exhibit at the Drawing Center was decisive. Writers don't claim him, but painters need to, as his connection in the visual realm is decisive. His semi-abstractions freely range from the specific to the general, zeroing in and fading out, suggesting vast amounts of time crawling by and smoke hanging amid ruins.

The link between him and certain painters of the present moment is the use of fine lines that cut through vapor to shovel smoke.

In Seattle, there's Mary Ann Peters, now on view at the James Harris Gallery. (Images below from 2006 exhibit. Review of current one to follow.)

In San Francisco, Darren Waterston.

In New York, Christopher Lowry Johnson.

In LA, Tony De Los Reyes, at Howard House through Oct. 31.

In LA and New York, Gary Simmons:

In New York and London, Cecily Brown.

And two more from Seattle, Barbara Earl Thomas

...and Kenneth Callahan, a drawing from 1972.

In response to this post, The Meat Dance, after Amiri Baraka, Sue Danielson suggested the addition of Pinar Yolacan. Excellent choice.

From Boing Boing:

Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolacan, who is based in Brooklyn, is best known for her portraits of ladies wearing clothes fashioned from meat parts (tripe, guts, assorted offal). (more)

Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope brushes, paper scrap. It's propulsion is toward the ecstatic-- shifting and turning between tenderness, wilderness, precision, abandon: qualities which could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent.

Zverina also offered his meat poem, titled, Holy Cow.

i don.t eat meat, do you?
it.s a really bad thing to do

cattle ranchers use public land
to fatten these beings for slaughter

this cruel business is subsidized
by your and my tax dollars

life is cruel, i know, it.s true--
it.s basically eat or be eaten

but if i come back as a cow,
it.s not yr mouth i want to be meat in

Ries Niemi suggested Ann Simonton.

Wrote Niemi:

Thanks, everybody.

Like Thomas Demand,  Oliver Boberg, James Casebere and Lori Nix, Ross Sawyer Sawyers constructs models that he photographs as full-scale environments.

Demand's are meticulous and devoid of oxygen. Boberg's explore the homey banality of the ordinary. Casebere's focuses on the ornate, often after a flood, and Nix's are fantastical. Each manages to make worlds from doll-house stage sets.

Sawyers' are constructed to look as if they are still under construction, and photographed as if they are melodies orchestrated with light.

Wrote Andrew Kozlowski in Art Papers, September/October, 2009:

These spaces recall unfinished housing developments and luxury condo projects abandoned by unscrupulous investors, ready to fall down at any moment.

In the untitled photo above, the floor becomes liquid at it meets the white scrim, which extends to a rectangle that appears to be three-dimensional at the top and flat at the bottom. A full moon casts its reflection on the blue water, bringing to mind the seascapes Arthur Dove.

More toying with art history. Above, James Turrell meets Wolfgang Laib meets Rothko.

Above, light wrapped and ready with nowhere to go.

At Platform Gallery through Nov. 28.

Clemens Kraus

Mark Takamichi Miller

From Michael Buitron of Leap Into The Void:

In my mid-residency review for my master's at CalArts, I told Sam Durant that the things I was being evaluated on and expected to do for my mid-res show--make objects, install them in an aesthetically appropriate fashion, light the work, advertise it, talk about it, write about it, invite faculty, cater an opening reception--all amounted to CalArts being a finishing school to the social graces and conventions of the art world. "I would hope so," was his response, "We don't want you to leave here without those skills."

He'd prefer not to. (more)

From Susanna Bluhm of Getting To Know You Better:

I would love to go on some kind of massive research expedition to explore this very question. I want to know details about how other artists are making ends meet and making things work. I don't know if it's for commiseration or inspiration, or purely because no one ever talks about it. It was an unmentionable even in my grad school program, this "how to survive" issue. Is it because you don't? Or at least not by doing art? I've heard "There's always teaching," but really there isn't. Teaching art at the college level is extremely competitive, and in order to get a stable teaching job, MFA graduates must first be willing to (typically) move anywhere in the country to adjunct part-time at near-poverty wages. (more)

How to get covered by a daily newspaper:

Step one. Create a blog. Step two. Without taking off your pajamas, announce a contest for cities with your results. The smartest. The sexiest. The greenest. The most fat. Publish your top ten and send a link to your targets.  Newspapers fall for it. The most desperate put you on the front page. In the  rush to get your survey into print, mistakes are made.

From Fail Blog:


Good news after the fire: Less damage to Helio  Oiticia's life's work than first reported.

From Greg.org:

Note to self, the Brazilian media & world's wire services: the guy standing outside his burning house and saying he lost everything does not, in fact, know that everything is lost.
(more)

Gay kiss-in from O My God Seattle here. I love flash mob art, so evocative of earlier models.

Brancusi:

Erwin Wurm

Spike Mafford

Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947 

Janine Antoni (At Luhring Augustine through Saturday)

Alex Schweder, A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, currently in Sensate at the San Francisco Museum of Art, through Nov. 8.

Barbara Noah, Earth As Bowling Ball

David Hammons made sculptures from elephant dung in 1978.

Chris Ofili followed in 1996, getting all the ink.

For sheer invention, David Hammons is the equal of Bruce Nauman, although Nauman is the bigger name. Why? I don't think it's racism alone, although racism can't be counted out. Nauman will talk to people. He's willing to participate in the gallery and museum system. Hammons is not.

Hammons:

THE ART AUDIENCE IS THE WORST AUDIENCE IN THE WORLD. IT'S OVERLY EDUCATED, IT'S CONSERVATIVE, IT'S OUT TO CRITICIZE NOT TO UNDERSTAND, AND IT NEVER HAS ANY FUN. WHY SHOULD I SPEND MY TIME PLAYING TO THAT AUDIENCE? (more)

Like a corset leaving little room for breathing, tight budgets curtail curatorial choices. The Henry Art Gallery is dipping into its collections for answers, which in Henry's case is overdue. Aside from photography and contemporary art from Bill and Ruth True, what the Henry owns tends to be unexplored.

Part of the reason is unwieldy diversity. Only in the 1980s, under director Richard Andrews, did the Henry clarify its identity as a contemporary art venue, leaving the bulk of its collections with no reason to surface.

Besides contemporary art, these holdings range from historic photography, Horace C. Henry's 19th-century landscapes; 19th-century prints, Japanese folk pottery, prints and ceramics as well as textiles, clothing and costumes from the U.S., Japan, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Under director Sylvia Wolf, the necessity of budget cuts fused with a genuine interest in making what's best in the back bins accessible to the public. Costumes and textiles are available in depth online, with other collections to follow.

In its galleries, the Henry is making a virtue of its disconnects. The unfailingly deft associate curator Sara Krajewski opened the year-long Vortexhibition Polyphonica with a fluid presentation of  nearly 100 objects that make sense in their own company, despite disparities of time, media and place. In 2010, senior curator Elizabeth Brown will reshuffle the object deck.

Krajewski offers not just a noir Nan Goldin woman, but a corset her more modest mother might have worn in the 1950s.

Nan Goldin, Joey with her heart shaped breasts, NYC. 1999 Silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) print 25 9/16 x 38 1/8 in. (64.9 x 96.8 cm)

The exhibition's title is a hat tip to E.V. Day's Cherry Bomb Vortex from 2002. (Red sequin dress with monofilament, turnbuckles, and stainless steel base 115 x 102 x 102 in.)

The dress is exploding, but the hat needs work. Rhythm, ladies and gentlemen, rhythm. Were the title Vortex Polyphonica  instead of Vortexhibition Polyphonica, the point would have been clear and pronounceable, stylish even. As it is, it's tone deaf and, with the suppression of the ex in exhibition, too cute.

Better a bad title than a bad show. This one is a pleasure. The associations between objects are sometimes obvious but frequently subtle and intuitive. It asks viewers to create their own or simply enjoy shopping amid its multiplicity.

Morris Graves would have been pleased by the company he's keeping, a Buddhist devotional hanging from the 17th or 18th century in silk damask and satin weave with embroidery.

Graves, Sublime Buddha Gestures [study drawing]. 1935 Ink drawing and tempera on Japanese rice paper 17 7/8 x 13 7/16 in.

California funk is well represented along with Northwest fellow travelers, such as Clair Colquitt. The penis in the center is a replicia of his own. Turned on, it whirls like a drill.

Table Top Air Purifier, 1975 Hand built and slab built earthenware with low fire underglazes, clear glaze and luster 20 7/8 x 19 7/8 x 17 3/8 in
The spineless confront the rigid: Robert Longo's color print Triptych: Men in the Cities from 1981 is pretty funny in the company of Axel Lieber I Beam (Ich Strahl) from 2004.

Shoes for bound feet keep company with stilettos from contemporary high fashion.(If you think they have nothing in common, take a look at the bunions on the feet of models.) Nineteenth-century silk brocades mix and match with Pop art dresses from the 1960s. Arnulf Raine and Lucas Samaras make fiend faces beside Cindy Sherman's high gothic.   

I love Helmi Dagmar Juvonen's drawing, We Are the Seeds of Our Ancestors from 1955. Juvonen was the only woman in the Northwest School. She was hauled away into a mental for having too many cats and being in love with stalking Mark Tobey.The artists in her circle tended to take themselves and their spiritual aspirations seriously. She was at hand to smack some sense into them, rolling their fine ideas in her heavy, tender paws.

A pair of Gilles Barbier's panoramic landscape photographs feature himself as a footnote of a footnote within their terrains. He had an exhibit at the Henry in 1999. I looked up my review and found it unrelentingly wrong. If I could walk back into the PI files and erase it, I'd be tempted. 

Paint makes the world go round.

Jeffrey Simmons, Pontian,1997 Oil and alkyd on canvas 26 x 24 3/8 x 1 1/4 inches

So does Howard Kottler. Just in time for same-sex marriage, his Look-Alike Plates from 1972. More images here. He's a buried treasure.

Mainstream journalists do not break up their lines to weep, laugh or jeer. Even when the question is ridiculous, they're devoted to their version of a call-and-response pattern.

Exhibit A: (It's in the PI)

Question:

 What is the significance of the pedestrian crossing sign with the circle?

Answer:

Eric Widstrand, city traffic engineer for the Seattle Department of Transportation, says the hula hoop is a sticker (which is graffiti) that has been applied to the sign to make it look like the pedestrian is hula-hooping. "There is no significance to the hula-hoop sticker from a traffic operations point-of-view. Signs with graffiti can be reported by calling (206) 684-7587," Widstrand says. (If you Google "hula hoop pedestrian signs," you''ll see the stickers are associated with a band called the "The String Cheese Incident."

Relatively well known on the East Coast in her youth, Yvonne Twining Humber moved to the Northwest with her husband in the 1940s and promptly fell off the art map. Yet she kept on.

In 2001, she set up the award that bears her name (administered by Artist Trust) as a shout out to other women who find life getting in the way of art. It was her way of saying, "You're not alone; keep working." To win, artists have to be female, 60 years old or older, have worked as an artist for at least 25 years and live in Washington State.

Humber puts me in mind of Tillie Olsen, whose stories of women buried alive under homemaking reflected her own life and meager art output. Somehow, the award has never gone to anybody like that, and this year is no exception.

Congratulations to Anne Hirondelle, who receives $10,000. More about Hirondelle here. Her gallery here.

Sol LeWitt:

He is the tide on which all these boats rise.

 Barry McGee:

Michael Knutson:

Jim Lambie

Mark Grotjahn

Emily Pothast

Julia Haack:
Tim Bavington:

Susan Dory:

Starting in January, Chiyo Ishikawa, the Seattle Art Museum's Deputy Director for Art & Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture, is one of 12 curators selected to participate in the 2010 fellowship program at the Center for Curatorial Leadership at Columbia University.

From press release:

Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books The Museum of Modern Art, New York • Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs El Museo del Barrio, New York • Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Kristina van Dyke, Associate Curator for Collections and Research The Menil Collection, Houston • Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Visual Arts Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, New York • Alison de Lima Greene, Curator, Contemporary Art & Special Projects Museum of Fine Arts, Houston • Frederick Ilchman, Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings Museum of Fine Arts, Boston • Chiyo Ishikawa,  Seattle Art Museum • Alisa LaGamma, Curator, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas The Metropolitan Museum of Art • Lisa E. Rotondo-McCord, Assistant Director for Art & Curator of Asian Art New Orleans Museum of Art • Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art Nasher Museum at Duke University • Stephan Wolohojian, Landon and Lavinia Clay Curator and Department Head, Department of Paintings, Sculpure and Decorative Arts Harvard Art Museum/Fogg.

Even though it's a good group, they lucky to have her. What I think of her here.

The Seattle Art Museum's blog, SOAP, is off to a promising start with three entries by new director Derrick Cartright. After receiving a certain amount of (gentle) ridicule for its (what the?) name, (here and here), Cartright countered with a description of the process of choosing it and a few image associations, chief among them:

Considering the alternatives, floating is a good thing.

When Michael Knutson was 19 and doing summer farm work, a grain thresher grabbed his left hand and chewed. If he hadn't been wearing a sweat shirt, he would have bled out. The shirt twisted in the machinery to form a tourniquet just under his shoulder, leaving him dangling.

Help arrived 20 minutes later. He did not lose consciousness. The accident helped him focus, he said. "I was vague about what I wanted to do. After that, I knew I wanted to paint."

In his early 30s, Robert Hardgrave was making a slim living as an illustrator when his kidneys failed. After the transplant, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. In the interval between health and disease, he became a terrific painter. He still does commercial work, but not for clients who want him to illustrate their ideas. They come to him, they get him.

Although tainted by association with fetishistic fundamentalists, the concept of born-again applies.

Friday night, 5-9 p.m., Hardgrave hosts what he calls Drum of the Draw at Halogen Gallery, 2316 Second Avenue.

Hardgrave:

It's an invitational drawing event that brings artists and their creative process to the public for one night each month. The artists create original drawings while the public is invited to enjoy refreshments, observe the artists at work and purchase art as it is completed. None of the work is over $200.00. Participating artists are: Daniel Mitchell, Karin Yamagiwa, Ninjagrl, Robert Hardgrave, Soopajdelux, Suzanne Kaufman and Todd Lown.

Nancy Spero, 1926-2009. Holland Cotter obit here.

    The Bite - Olga Broumas

What I wear in the morning pleases
me:     green shirt, skirt of wine.          I am wrapped

in myself as the smell of night
wraps round my sleep when I sleep

outside.          By the time
I get to the corner

bar, corner store, corner construction
site, I become divine.          I turn

men into swine. Leave
them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.

Faris McReynolds

Aaron Morse

On the first day of the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference in Seattle, I walked uptown to the Sheraton hear Morris Dees talk about the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center. On route, I found myself surrounded by a sea of people in turtle suits, if not a sea, then a substantial cluster.

They were in town to represent the ocean, which didn't have a representative at the conference. By the time I left the hotel, the turtles had company: labor unions, other environmentalists, progressive religious groups, anarchists from Eugene, police, reporters, press photographers and TV camera crews.

Joe Hill, who'd advised, "Don't mourn for America - organize," would have been proud. The 1999 battle in Seattle brought together a wide spectrum of forces to protest a common if abstract foe - unregulated, free market Capitalism.

Allan Sekula 's interest in the event set him apart from journalists seeking peak moments or critical points of revealation.

I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival. Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital.

Wrote Richard Lacayo:

In this moment of triumphant capitalism, of planetary cash flows and a priapic Dow, all the second thoughts and outright furies about the global economy collected on the streets of downtown Seattle and crashed through the windows of Nike Town. After two days of uproar scented with tear gas and pepper spray, the world may never again think the same way about free trade and what it costs.

Ten photos from 30 in Sekula's series, titled, Waiting for Tear Gas, are at the Henry Gallery through Jan. 31. Because the series is a narrative, it would have been swell to see all 30, but the 10 in the hallway are riveting. The cheap charm of their carny glamor does not obscure their heart.

(Previous in rosaries ).

Dan Flavvin at Donald Young through Nov. 14.

The Dance (for Robert Duncan)
Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones

The dance (held up for me by
an older man. He told me how. Showed
me. Not steps, but the fix
of muscle. A position
for myself: to move.

David Hammons

Duncan
told of dance. His poems
full of what we called
so long for you to be. A
dance. And all his words
ran out of it. That there
was some bright elegance
the sad meat of the body
made. Some gesture, that
if we became, for one blank moment
would turn us
into creatures of rhythm.

Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987-2006

I want to be sung. I want
all my bones and meat hummed
against the thick floating
winter sky. I want myself
as dance. As what I am
given love, or time, or space
to feel myself.

Mark Prent, Thawing Out, 1972

The time of thought. The space
of actual movement. (Where they
have taken up the sea, and
keep me against my will.) I said, also,
love, being older or younger
than your world. I am given
to lying, love, call you out
now, given to feeling things
I alone create.

Zhang Huan, My New York, 2002

And let me once, create
myself. And let you, whoever
sits now breathing on my words
create a self of your own. One
that will love me.

Tania Bruguera  (via)

On Labor Day, 1993, Jason Sprinkle and a few of his friends attached a ball and chain to the foot of Jonathan Borofsky's "Hammering Man" in front of the Seattle Art Museum. To prevent damage to the sculpture, they padded the chain with foam. (Image via)

Elmgreen & Dragset at the Frieze Art Fair in London, 2009. (Image via) 

Still traveling around the U.S., the Chinese Corpses exhibit Bodies - The Exhibition returns to Seattle.

I wonder what Zhang Huan thinks.

Who's bodies are those in the exhibit? Questions raised and unanswered here.

In their extended synthetic panoramas, Scott McFarland and Paul Berger tend to shrink shadows or misdirect them. They look like raisins added to cookie dough at the last minute.

McFarland:

Berger:

Mary Temple: Her trees painted in latex on walls and stain on floors suggest a fragility they have transcended. They will not dissolve when the sun goes down or lose their form in a larger dark.

Pat De Caro - When it really is too late to have a happy childhood.

Roger Shimomura: When Japanese Americans were shadows to their fellow citizens.

Susie J. Lee - Fugue State

Tannaz Farsi- A reflection is a shadow that repeats everything it sees.

Tomiko Jones

Eden Veaudry

Ross Sawyers,at Platform Gallery Through Nov. 29.

Stephanie Syjuco - A blackout as a bird of prey.

Mark Takamichi Miller - They may be bloated apparitions, but they still dress up.

Joey Veltkamp - 1977. Their last good kiss was years ago. (Image via)

From W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 2001

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.

As what they lack - heat and light.

Mark Takamichi Miller

Frank Zadlo

Jorge Macchi - shadow as the end of the road.

Claudia Fitch: A parenthesis primed to delete its internal aside.

Glenn Rudolph: The solace of a gathering dark.

Browning: Glass, 2009

Just kidding. It's not a history of NW glass. It's a history of adolescent boys throwing empty beer bottles into a campfire, with a hat tip to these guys.

In Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi 's The Adoration of the Magi, 1440/1460, light framed in an arch on the upper left serves to echo the light of the event, central to Christians.

The Annunciation, 1898, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, deals with the strangeness of the moment - an angel visiting a girl to announce her future - by turning the Angel Gabriel into a column of light.

In Lead Pencil's Adoration Turning Yellow from 2008, Gabriel is worse for wear. Not only is he no longer the light source, he's making a mess.

Thanks, Crawl Space. Last show, Stranger Circumstances, opens Nov. 7 at 6 p.m.

If you drag your life behind you in a sack, it's your shadow. A shadow is a fact when you cast it and otherwise a metaphor for experience, except in art, where its meanings are myriad.

Cat Clifford's shadows do not depend on light. They have their own lives and creatures who move within them.

William Kentridge gives flesh to James Joyce's aside, that history is a nightmare from which he is unable to awake.


In An-My Le's war, soldiers set up shadows to take the hit. (more)

Matt Browning's Honest Labor is a droll sham even though it's real, which is why shadows carry the meaning.

Charles LaBelle's shadows accept none of taint.

Chris Buening's shadows are fractured light.

Methhead
Said Buening, via Best Of

When I first moved to Seattle methamphetamine was quickly becoming (or perhaps already was) the preferred party drug in the gay scene. I was a working DJ at the time, spinning at clubs and parties around town....Methhead is a memorial for a lifestyle that I left behind years ago and for some of my friends who were lost along the way. I think of the statue-like crystalline head as being symbolic of many different faces / heads, as well as being a kind of self-portrait of that time in my life. I also think that correction fluid (a material generally used for covering one's mistakes) is the perfect medium for the "portraits" in this series, which often have dark and embarrassing back-stories.

Via

It would have been a stronger show.

As it is, The Old, Weird America is a hell of an accomplishment. Its curator Toby Kamps proved that folk themes encased in stereotype can become fluid when reconsidered by contemporary artists.

The 18 featured come from around the country, everywhere but here. Kamps had no responsibility to include all regions. His goal was an alchemical  series of relationships, each building from each to enrich the complexity of his themes. Most of what he delivered is magnificent, but there are a few artists hitching a ride on the accomplishments of others. They're good but not great.

Exhibits are not infinitely expandable. Anyone suggesting an addition needs to propose a deletion.

I'd delete none of the following, the exhibit's A-list heart and soul: Eric Beltz's cobwebby drawings of founding fathers; Jeremy Blake's video miasmas of memory and loss; Sam Durant's revolving stage set that upends a foundational myth; Barnaby Furnas' explosive paintings; Matthew Day Jackson's Spiritual America collage; Margaret Kilgallen's Main Street; McDermott & McGough's gay history; Brad Kahlhamer's lost roots drawn as a stream of consciousness; Aaron Morse's woozy scale shifts; Allison Smith's self-portraits as Civil War corpses, better in this context than they'd be on their own; Kara Walker's ecstatic recreation of this country's original sin, and Charlie White's collage photo, revealing everything important about a pivotal American year in the mid-20th Century.
 
There's nothing awful about the remaining five, save that their work doesn't measure up. Had Kamps been aware of what's going on in the Northwest, he would have made stronger choices. In terms of this show, stronger choices litter the NW ground.

Instead of Deborah Grant's Where Good Darkies Go (after Bill Traylor), a wall of Marita Dingus' glass heads would have served the purpose. Next to them, Grant's work looks academic.

Grant:

Dingus:

Sometimes Dingus' sculptures have a burrowing mole feeling. Glass gives her focus a point of light, a contrast that functions as an intensifier. Discards are metaphors for Africans who were used as slaves until they were used up and died. Her reuse of their images delivers a powerful new life. 

There are points in any life when people burrow. I know I'm in one when I'm reading almost nothing but essays about art with murder mysteries on my I-Pod, the latter to guarantee that as I engage in humdrum tasks, the voice in my head is not my own.

I surfaced into a (slightly) larger world this weekend when I looked up an old friend online and found her writing for Dwell. I don't care about Dwell, which appears to be fetishistic about the finer points of gracious living, but I do care about leads. My friend, Deborah Baldwin, writes them as well as anybody.

Here she is on getting fired:

When someone gets fired from a French kitchen, the chef de cuisine says simply, "Take your knives." To a chef, the knife is like an extra appendage, and its dismissal cuts deeper than the standard American "It's just not working out."

And on the lost pleasure of coffee shops:

I love coffee. It's coffee shops I have a problem with. Whenever someone suggests we "grab coffee and catch up," I instinctively shudder and suggest instead a nice cocktail or root canal.

Once havens for intellectual inquiry and quiet perusal of newspapers, coffee shops are now basically retail outlets and free office space. Nursing a cappuccino the other day, I observed a frantic businessman conducting a conference call on speakerphone, a woman toting a hysterically yapping Labradoodle, and two frosty socialites loudly debating the relative appeal of the spray-on tan. Kerouac would never have got anything done.

As in art, it's not the tale but the teller.

Update: Even though the Deborah Baldwin I know writes about food and wry lifestyle, I'm quoting another Deborah Baldwin. Everything's accurate about this post, except that I don't know this Deborah Baldwin from Adam. Or Eve.

Previous post, that ends with Marclay: The visual score, after Kandinsky

Scores that are paintings, drawings and collages are everywhere in recent years. They function as art on their own but can, depending on the performer, inspire sound.

We are all ears.

A few of my favorites:

Paul Rucker, Strange Fruit, a score he plays on his cello:

Strange Fruit is part of an exhibit at Cornish College called Live in the Hyphen, with Rucker and Wynne Greenwood, through Oct. 16. Greenwood talks in the gallery noon-1 on Oct. 16.

Other scores:

...can go to sea.

Kassandra, via

Ulli Weiss photo from Pina Bausch performance

Sean M. Johnson, Family Portrait (Nothing but tape holding it to the wall)

Tom Huber

 If you start here

or here

you can stop here

with a leapfrog to Trimpin and Christian Marclay without missing much in between.

Minus the mysticism, Trimpin and Marclay are as committed as Kandinsky to the visual implications of sound. While many of Kandinsky's ideas about spiritual color and visual sound found few takers in the second half of the 20th century, they are in play today.

Trimpin- Score for PHFFFT

I remember as a child helping to build huge, wooden discs to set on fire at night and roll off a ramp to hang in the air and fall into the valley below, as part of an old German festival. I heard the whistling and crackling of the wet wood as it rolled down the ramp and thought of opera. I asked the other boys, `Do you hear that?' They said no. I like to think my work enables other people to hear what I hear.

Marclay

I composed a silent collage of found film footage partially layered with computer graphics to provide a framework in which live music can develop. Moving images and graphics give musicians visual cues suggesting emotion, energy, rhythm, pitch, volume, and duration. I believe in the power of images to evoke sound.

Image from Marclay's Screen Play



 

Tim Roda comes from a family of makers. His Italian-immigrant grandfather and father built the  family home out of the same scrap and recycled wood with which they built their chicken coop.

My father built a two-car garage whose three sides look like a patchwork quilt of various wood surfaces and textures. Although I used to question my father and grandfather's way of building and "fixing" things, I now recognize and embrace this style not simply as a legacy but as an hereditary fingerprint.

As a father himself, Roda is intent on passing on the scrap aesthetic that made his home distinctive from his neighbors. His oldest son Ethan has acted in his father's fantasies since he was a toddler. Ethan's grace makes those fantasies credible within improvised clutter of his father's stage sets.

Perfection is attainable in photography. Those who pay for equipment can achieve pristine results at the press of a button. Roda's are rough.

The rough edges, erratic fixer stains, and haphazard tonal range are suggestive of the working class way of life my grandfather experienced when he came to America as an Italian immigrant. This set of values was passed down to my father and then to me with all of its eccentricities.

From mythical beast to the Children's Crusade, weapons are crucial to the tale.

Artists find models in their families, but the idea of collaborations between partners was rare before the early 20th century, most famously between Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who had separate careers but shared ideas for each other's projects.

Although Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, began working together soon after they met, the full extent of her contribution wasn't acknowledged for several decades.

Children enter the picture with the Boyle Family. Mark Boyle created his work in sync with his wife, Joan Hills, and eventually decided to share a credit line not only with her but with their adult children, Sebastian and Georgia.

Some women married into major art careers, such as the late Coosje van Bruggen, who married Claes Oldenburg; or Nancy Reddin, married to the late Ed Kienholz. Both couples signed their joint names to work produced after they set up housekeeping, although the fundamentals of style were grounded in the husbands' aesthetic.

Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Emmet Gowin all created tableaus featuring their offspring. In Seattle, Zack Bent's staged shots grow out of what his kids feel like doing or what they do accidentally, within the context of throwing a ball, building a fort, helping with chores, wrestling and playing in the yard.

For high family theatrics, nobody beats the videos of Guy Ben-Ner or the photographs of Tim Roda. In the latter's exhibit at Greg Kucera, the high jinx of earlier work is largely gone, replaced by a darker tone.

The photo below is untitled, but if it came with text, it might be: Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. We ask this even as we kill the Lamb. In its slaugher is our redemption.

Below, the child is again ensnared by emblems of Catholicism. The legs of an ornate table become a heavy loop of rosary beads, and the planks of wood serve as the foundation for a Cross within an overbearing grid of rules.

Through Nov. 14.

Except when it isn't.

"Devastating" cuts in British Columbia literary circles here, from the Globe & Mail.

Previous on this blog, the effect of similar cuts to B.C. visual art groups, here and here.

U.S. artists exhibiting in B.C. are frequently stunned by the support offered. They are paid to participate in group shows at galleries. In the U.S., government funding doesn't carry art culture. Culture has to sell itself to the audience.

Because B.C. museums and galleries know they can count on hefty support, they are free to mount exhibits that don't have to appeal to a wide, general public. B.C. artists are famed for their brand of conceptual photography. They produced it without the necessity of selling it, because public funding offered them a funding floor.

I love that model, but what happens when the government in power at any given moment is impressed by the sink-or-swim U.S. approach and greatly curtails the cash? Devastation.

The convention of calling cards become entrepreneurial in the 20th century. Because the leisure class no longer wanted to admit it had time on its hands, its cards advertised not free time but the lack of it. Everybody acquired a title, and everybody was working.

From 1986 to 1990, Adrian Piper returned the calling card to the personal realm, although nobody mistook hers for its gilt-edged predecessors. As a light-skinned black woman, she found herself in conversations that participants had wrongly assumed were whites-only. Hence, her cards, via:

Now, from anewdesigns , comes the cad card, via This Isn't Happiness.

Ran Ortner, who won the $250,000 ArtPrize in Grand Rapids for a painting of the sea, Open Water, could have painted it in 19th-century Russia.

Back then, however, he wouldn't have been tapped for the top take-away. Even casual observers would have noted what he owes to Ivan Aivazovsky, whose massive paintings of the churning sea go on and on. Aivazovsky would get the cash while Ortner got applause for his skill. Historians would have tagged his work as "in the school of."  

Previous post on related subject: Art Grants: Foolish peaks and absurd valleys.

In Seattle, PONCHO has a great rep. Since its founding in 1963, it has raised $34 million for 200 or so arts organizations. In recent years, as part of a thank-you to artists contributing to its annual auction, PONCHO singles one out for an  "Artist of the Year Award," chosen by vote from other artist participants.

Although it's an award given more for community service than aesthetic achievement, winners from previous years have tended to be a distinguished lot, including Jacob Lawrence & Gwen Knight, Fay Jones and Juan Alonso.

This year, artists say, PONCHO found another way to select the winner, other than peer vote. And this year, the winner is Judith Kindler, who happens to be on PONCHO"s board of trustees. For me, her paintings belong in that category of visual nicety that dominates what's on view in galleries around the country, but that's not the point.

The point is, PONCHO bypassed peer opinion to select a board member. Kindler might have won anyway, had artists voted, but she shouldn't have been a candidate. She's a board member. PONCHO relies on its reputation, and this kind of thing doesn't help.

Calls to PONCHO have not yet been returned. Will update with its response, if I get one.

Update: Jeff Crandall, who works on the annual auction, defended this year's change of policy.

"We had problems with artists asking their friends to vote for them," he said. Instead, PONCHO asked a group of people who are not on the board to make the selection, which comes with a $5,000 prize. He said he couldn't say who was on the selection committee because PONCHO didn't want them to "get pressure."

This year, for the first time, there was a no-cash artists' choice award that went to Rick Araluce. Crandall also noted that Kindler is no longer on the board although she's still listed as a member on PONCHO's Web site . She left in September, after she was picked for the award, he said.

Remember when the Olympic Sculpture Park opened and visitors were shocked, shocked, that the Seattle Art Museum asked them not to touch the art?

The Onion has a fabulous satire on the subject, via Culture Monster.

Gerard Schmidt, a retired banker who lives near the Met, said he had never much cared for museums until he was given the chance to manhandle one of Monet's Water Lilies.

"At first it just looked like a picture of a bunch of lily pads, but then I started scraping at it with my pocket knife and the whole painting just sort of spoke to me," Schmidt said. "For the first time, I finally understand what Monet was trying to get across in her work."

The dropped ball never hits the floor in Drew Daly's resin sculptures, which are surely a tribute to Jeff Koons' Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank from 1985 in particular and to Lucas Samaras in general.

Now at the Greg Kucera Gallery is Daly's Visual Fiction.

Float #2, resin and basketball, 2009

Daly makes art as if the world were a bellows, breathing in and out. On the exhale, faces, furniture and (most recently) sports equipment pull apart in fragments. On the inhale, they reform, but not necessarily in their original shapes. Two chairs become one, or one becomes two. Twelve fuse as if through an electrical current. A chest of drawers bends and flares.

Spalding 1, 2 and 3: Cut photographs, glue, Plexiglas

He's his own fun house mirror.

Through Nov. 14. His Web site here.

Michael Darling's Target Practice is gone (reviews here), but like the embroidered apron worn by Arshile Gorky's mother, the exhibit continues to unfold in our lives.

Margie Livingston, Folded Painting, 2009

In Grand Rapids, a $250,000 prize depends on the will of the voting public. (Story here) Update: Brooklyn painter Ran Ortner won first prize, here, via C-Monster.

In California I think (hard to know from the Web site), Balsa Man offers Tiny Art Grants. A panel of experts God-knows-who selects the winners, who get from $1 to $20 to help them make art that is suitably diminutive.

In Seattle, Vital 5 Productions gives away money in $500 increments that are rigorously random and named for clarity's sake the Arbitrary Art Grants.

Artists and their fellow-travelers turn out for all three. The Arbitrary Art Grants are economic Dada. The Tiny Art Grants are a satire on (big, bigger biggest-best) Burning Man. In Michigan, there's an assumption that the people know best.

Who could endorse that premise? And yet, when I took issue with it in Seattle, predicting failure, the end result in the rat-infested shadow of a bridge proved to be a landmark, forcing a recant. (Time to eat troll)

Image via

From Tom Greggs:

Until he began to paint smoke, Juan Alonso concentrated on comical version of floral overkill. Smoke saved him. His blackened tendrils in ink and pencil that hover on the edge of dissolution are tributes to his family's decorative ironwork business in old Cuba. (Profile here.)

Alfredo Arreguin is a pattern painter with a cubist base and a devotion to the high-romance of Mexican art history. I ran out of gas for his work about 20 years ago, stopped by static excess and a design that's illustrative instead of visual.

An image of a new painting I saw online could be poised to break out of that box. It appears to be inspired at least in part by the kind of South American ironwork that is a fertile source for Alonso.

1. Susan Robb. Heat rises.

 

2. Joshua Allen Harris. A cuter version of heat rises. Who doesn't like plastic bag animals swaying over subway grates?



3. Franklin Cassaro. Make your own drum.

Irving Penn is the Fred Astaire of 20th-century photography. In his studio, a pile of cigarette butts became as pure as Communion wafers. BBC obit here. Many more to follow.

 

Trailing the much smaller but much more game Henry Art Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum has a new blog titled SOAP. (As in, soft soap?) While it's unlikely to top the Henry's blog, called Hank, SOAP is off to a good start thanks to a charming entry from SAM's new director, Derrick Cartwright.

I love SAM and can't imagine living in Seattle without it, but (there's always a but), it has a tight-ass, top-down approach to communication  that does not lend itself to the free flow of a blog. Its communications staff, good as it is, labors under this burden.

Cartwright acknowledges this in his own tactful way:

SAM, not unlike other institutions at which I have worked before, puts considerable thought and care into all of its public communications. The blog held appeal as a PR tool, but also posed a distinct risk, since staffing at the museum is currently very tight and no one wanted to rush forward with something that couldn't be maintained at the usual professional standards of SAM.

I'm intrigued by this sentence:

I confess that I have never written a blog before, although I have recently had the painful experience of being blogged about.

What? Name names, Derrick. Your pain will drive traffic. In the meantime, despite staff shortages, it's time to do something about SAM's Web site, which (usually) looks pretty good when clicked on but is unspeakably stingy at releasing information on exhibitions and collections.

In 2001, at age 33, Margaret Kilgallen received an MFA from Stanford, had her first child with her husband, Barry McGee, and died of breast cancer.
 What she made lives behind her. Her storefront installation, Main Street from 2001, is one of the best things in The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, now at its final stop at the Frye Art Museum.

Borrowing signs and symbols from Stuart Davis' street jazz, Kilgallen filtered them through Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson's  hopped-up, skinny-legged figures of The Hairy Who, a Chicago group that Nutt and Nilsson transplanted to Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Nutt was teaching at UC Davis.

Getting a good reception from Bay Area Funk and Dude Ranch Dada practitioners who were also on the faculty, Nutt's and Nilsson's impact rippled up the coast to Seattle and down to San Francisco and was still percolating when Kilgallen (and McGee) came of age in the 1980s.

Main Street is her monument. Full of scale-shifts, fractured street advertising and sad sacks caught in colored light as if the day loved them, it records the ordinary raised to  gut-bucket sanctity.

Kilgallen:

I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn't matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don't project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it's human. And I think it's the part that's off that's interesting, that even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.

After an atom bomb strikes its target, there's a moment before victims are blown out of their shoes or blasted onto a wall as carbon shadows. Call it a soul flash. Matthew Offenbacher paints its presence in daily life. He paints it as a cat turns its head, flowers start to die in a vase and a fish, turning in its watery gyre, sustains the universe.

In acrylic and oil on treated cotton, each in the series on view at Howard House is 52 by 45 inches. None has a title, which is a shame. Offenbacher's titles are worth collecting on their own, such as, from this painting from 2007, Recognizing the diligence with which death approaches, and trying to recognize also the desirability of her arrival, and to take advantage of such recognition.

Offenbacher is mildly mystical in an early-20th century vein, modest but aspiring to consequence, hopeful that there is a key and a mystery it will unlock.

Earlier paintings looked burrowed into existence, woven and bulging slightly along each line as if there were a roden beneath it, pushing up dirt.

Currently, lines are fractured and color smeared, bringing to mind the early paintings of Joseph Raffael, unfortunately not online. His later work is so decorative it's hard for anyone who wasn't in the Bay Area in the late 60s to believe that it ever mattered at all, and yet all my life I've remembered a painting of a man with birds in his turban, they and he living together in perfect, light-struck calm.

I doubt Offenbacher will take the same route. He's too (for lack of a better word) smart. Even if given the chance to live in a fine house for becoming a shadow of himself, he wouldn't take it. Unlike Raffael, what interests him is what art can deliver, not what are can illustrate.

Through Oct. 31.

Tony de los Reyes specializes in suppressed landscapes. When he paints women, they're  suppressed landscapes, too.

A couple of years ago he was painting in oil alkyd: creamy white grounds with blue figures. Those surfaces look shellacked but aren't. Sometimes a bird (always blue) flies by, high overhead. Sometimes there are sheep, ships or flowers, and sometimes a tree leaning into the air from an outcropping of ground, inspired by a combination of delftware china and traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Image via: The Chase, 2004

Recent paintings (and one sculpture) at Howard House could be called Fade to Black. Painted black space in ink and oil on linen overwhelms form, seeps into it and changes its character. His bright flowers are gone, replaced by the foam of a poisoned sea.

The Prophet, 2009, polyester resin, aluminum, wood.

From delicacy he has moved to a bombast that resembles Robert Morris' in the early 1980s. As Ricard Lacayo noted in 1984:

Two years ago, Robert Morris began showing a series of bas-relief works that seemed to vent nuclear anxieties in a visual language of medieval fatalism. Embedded in an infernal slurry of plaster, human faces and fractured skeletons held the poses of apocalyptic death agony. This year Morris returned to painting with a series of more ambiguous abstractions. But a skeletal frieze has been retained along the frame to specify the note of mortal dread.

Morris charted Dante's Inferno. De Los Reyes is filtering Herman Melville through a lens of contemporary environmental degradation and economic collapse. De los Reyes' paintings suggest the seeds of our ruin were there all along, in the chaos of our hearts. (William Carlos Williams: "The pure products of America go crazy.")

1851:

As with Morris, the bombast has a built-in problem. If it fails to overwhelm, it becomes its own parody. What de los Reyes has given up to get here is his subtlety, insouciance and tough-minded allure.

Also like Morris, what saves him are high craft values. His chaos is well made, which gives it focus and depth. After the white whale breeches and dives in 1851, the pool that churns in its wake under the stars in a backwards flag is a lizard's eye.

Melville's sea drove a boy stranded in it out of his mind. About rivers, however, Melville was more optimistic. From The Confidence Man:

Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.

I miss in de los Reyes what he used to have in abundance, a sense of that cosmopolitan and confident tide.

Lawrence Weschler's essay on David Hockney's cell phone paintings is another Weschler classic. Weschler is his own tour guide to what interests him, with none of the seen-it-all cynicism that can affect even the best art critics. Like Calvin Tomkins before him, his writing charts the process of absorbing a subject and clarifying it into revelation.

Hockney's return to painting includes a fresh and unsalable application:

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image.

Is not John Sandford's fictional advertising executive in Rough Country:

The agency over the years had accumulated foot draggers, time wasters, slow-witted weeds more suited for a job, say, at a newspaper than at a hot ad agency.

Plenty agree with Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, who finds  "familiar forms of patronizing 'identity art'' - art that addresses, in the most dutiful, box-ticking ways, the familiar tropes of exclusion and wrongdoing... wearingly predictable." (more)

In the United States of denial, I don't know how predictable any justice is, which is why I'm fond of Oscar Arredondo's A Mile in My Moccasins from 2001. Subtlety is not his strong suit. (Insert eye roll from Smee here.) Arredondo holds his subject matter in his heavy hands like a bear preparing to smash a food chest. And why not? I love Jane Austen but wouldn't want to live in her novels.

Arredondo wonders why one baseball logo is acceptable, at least in Cleveland....

Welcome to Cleveland, Home of the ....

And others like it wouldn't be.

Welcome to Cleveland, Home of the....

More here.

Robyn O'Neil, Occurrence, 2009  Graphite on paper  6.5 x 10 inches

John Grade, Seep of Winter, 2008

Narratives encased in convention become fluid in The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, inviting the audience to appreciate what Laura Lark called in her excellent  review the "complexity of the iconic."

Organized by Toby Kamps, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the exhibit opened there in May, 2008, and debuted at the Frye Museum on Saturday. It features 18 young to mid-career artists interested in the roots of an American experience that extends from the Pilgrims to the Space Race.

Eric Beltz, Fuck You Tree, (detail), 2007, graphite on board, 40 x 30 inches



Beltz gave the father of our country lovely feet. If he could stand, they could carry him out of this scene of morbid self-reflection. Instead, he sits on a log from his cherry tree with stars from the original 13 colonies ringing his face like mosquitoes, and his head detached from his body as if ready to be reproduced on dollar bills. The tree itself flourishes behind him as a rootless cosmopolitan, an entangling alliance.

The title of the show comes from the peerless Greil Marcus, who used it for his essay on Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, in which Dylan paid homage to American blues and country folk.

Barnaby Furnas' paintings are a giant step up from Ralph Steadman's illustrations, which could be a source. Where Steadman relies on endlessly repeated flat splatter, Furnas opens the splatter with electric Kool-Aid colors, scale shifts and the narrative detachment of video games.

When James Baldwin was asked in the late 1950s if there were a candidate he could support for President, he answered, "Yes. John Brown". The guns firing at Brown's feet are candles and also flowers reminiscent of Anslem Kiefer's.

Furnas, John Brown, 2005, Urethane/dye on linen, 72 x 60 inches.

Seattle is the last stop for The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in American Art, and Seattle is lucky to get it. As art museums hunker down with long runs for exhibits featuring objects from their collections, fewer shows travel.  If the recession is over, nobody told the art world.

The Old, Weird America would be welcome at any time. Organized by Toby Kamps, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the exhibit opened in Houston in May, 2008, and debuted at the Frye Art Museum on Saturday, just in time for Thanksgiving.

A review will follow but given the season, I'd like to consider separately Sam Durant's Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching. Its revolving-stage, dual dioramas invite the audience to contemplate who is weirder: those who insist on a fictionalized version of American history or those who dispute it.


Durant purchased the dioramas from the defunct Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts. Initially, the museum displayed the accurate version of Thanksgiving's origins: After Pequot Indian Pecksuot insulted Captain Myles Standish, Standish flew into a rage and killed him. Fearing retribution from Pecksuot's tribe, Standish organized a raiding party and wiped out the Indians camped nearby. Afterward, settlers celebrated their win by declaring a national day of thanksgiving.

Over the years, the story transformed into its opposite: Pilgrims breaking not bones but bread with the land's original occupants.

The factual diorama was removed after visitor complaints in the 1970s, leaving the story we know so well.

Reviewing the show for the Boston Globe, its art critic Sebastian Smee trotted out the usual insults for anyone questioning a master narrative from America the beautiful. Smee bemoaned the inclusion of:

familiar forms of patronizing "identity art'' - art that addresses, in the most dutiful, box-ticking ways, the familiar tropes of exclusion and wrongdoing.

(Two familiars in one sentence? Maybe the Globe no longer deserves its reputation for great editors. I also note with dismay Smee's lead, which for no good reason is in the passive voice. Had he wanted to leave a snail's trail of inertia across his copy, passive would serve him. If not, not. )

Back to Smee:

I'm thinking, for instance, of Sam Durant's two life-size dioramas that suggest alternative interpretations of the first Thanksgiving. The dioramas are set up on a circular platform, divided in half, that slowly revolves. One side shows a Native American teaching a pilgrim how to grow corn (with the help of a buried herring); the other shows Captain Myles Standish beating to death the Pequot Indian Pecksuot, which, the catalog tells us, led to a raid on the Pequots and subsequent celebration. Durant purchased both displays from the defunct Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts. But to what end? The work he has made from them is as didactic and kitsch as the originals, and it isn't saved from being so by the artist's ironic know-ingness.

American exceptionalism means Americans never have to say they're sorry.

Smee fell into the trap of reviewing the subject matter, not the art. I don't mean to imply the trap is easy to avoid. Personally, I'm relieved to see accuracy creeping into American history by way of art or any other way, if only because too many American myths are found there and fuel attitudes that impede progressive change.

In reacting to Durant, I have to consider whether I am Smee's twin, responding to what art says rather than what it is. And yet I think it is what it needs to be, an appropriation of frozen moments he sets in motion, fact and fantasy as each other's form and each other's shadow.

Flash mobs continue, via

Walking into a warehouse in Portland in 2003, I saw 10 old refrigerators lined up against a wall in an assortment of once tony shades: avocado, orange, dark brown. I opened one and saw a video of a wolf chasing what it hoped would be dinner. Each refrigerator contained a similar chase, but only in one did the wolf score. The title of the piece, Hunting Requires  Optimism, struck me as the perfect metaphor for making art.

Vanessa Renwick, creator of Hunting Requires Optimism, is good with titles. (She calls her Web site the Oregon Department of Kick Ass.)

October 7 -9, she hosts a survey of Portland short films at the Northwest Film Forum, titled, A Natural Selection. Missing it is a bad idea.

Still from Melody Owen's Kayavak

Rewick describes her survey as

...some hopping films from Portland's finest artists. Lions! Bicycles! Melting Polar opposites! Rabbits! Record Stores! Beluga Whales! Tears! Mind bending! and MORE!

They include:

That's Fine, You're Doing Perfectly by Karl Lind
Performance by Robin Moore
Lion Roars by Melody Owen
Moonbabies, part 1 of You Were a Perfect Gentleman and part 2  New World by Zak Margolis
Pain Is Fear Leaving Your Body by Alicia McDaid
Storm Studies 1 by Liz Haley
Kayavak by Melody Owen
Portrait #3: House of Sound by Vanessa Renwick
A Vertiginous One by Zach Margolis
Psychic City by Judah Switzer

Straight out of Texas,  Rainey Knudsen, founder and director of Glasstire, was the star of the first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism, held in L.A. on Friday. More on Glasstire to follow, but first, a few words about Douglas McLennan, who conceived it and produced it with Sasha Anawalt.

McLennan is best known as founder and editor of  ArtsJournal. If you're reading this, you're on an AJ site. ArtsJournal is an aggregate of arts news in English around the world, with the additional of a streaming rail of posts from AJ arts bloggers, including me.

More alliances: I live-blogged the summit, here, at Doug's request. Throw in my friendship with him and clearly I have a dog in this, which influences but does not account for my belief that the summit went well.

Given the free fall of traditional arts journalism, this summit is the first to consider options for replacing it.

Tyler Green (AJ blogger) and Paddy Johnson (nonAJ blogger) were disappointed in advance. Both objected to the idea that a nonprofit can be a business. They say opening the competition to nonprofits was changing the rules.

Although I hesitate to dispute a business question with two people whose entrepreneurial savvy overwhelms my own, I side with the summit on this one. It never said nonprofits couldn't apply or weren't businesses.

Nor did it change the rules by "adding" five project models.

After an open call for entries, jurors selected five models to present at the conference. From these, NAJP members voted to select three top entries, all of whom will get cash awards, starting at $9,000. (Winners not yet announced.)

In addition, the Summit asked representatives from five businesses working in support of arts and/or arts journalism to present. They were not part of the contest, were not chosen by jurors and are not eligible for awards. In saying the summit added five projects after the fact, Johnson and Green are factually wrong. 

Johnson also wrote that she didn't watch the summit, which was live-streamed around the world and is still available. Disclosure is good, but why didn't she watch, especially as she intended to write about it? Even though she was traveling when it took place, she could have caught it later.

On the other hand, I can't help but admire the vigorous way she attacked McLennan's baby. He was on the Warhol grants panel this year and successfully argued for her to get one. If speaking her version of truth to power means biting the hand that feeds her, she chomps down.

Back to Glasstire, which Johnson praised as a good model. (Note to Johnson: it's a nonprofit.) It covers Texas, which is a way of covering the world, as a lot of art flows through the Lone Star State. In nearly a decade of existence online, Glasstire has attracted terrific writers and given them a platform to be regional without being narrow.

I also like that it's not a design wonder. It serves those who want to think about art, not just click through razzle-dazzle. Its existence is a fundamental challenge to those who maintain that New York and L.A. are where the U.S. art action is, and artists/critics living elsewhere are delusional.

John Pfahl

Because time is a way of keeping events from happening all at once, it tends to bury the past. Anyone who wants to see it again has to dig. In Seattle, artREsource offers that opportunity. It's a regional resale gallery, providing a secondary market for collectors and a chance for the larger audience to see what is no longer current, such as Gene Gentry McMahon's untitled mural from 1983-84, oil on canvas 24 x 168.75 inches, via

Detail:


McMahon paints in a comedy-of-manners vein. Back before anyone thought William Hogarth had anywhere to go other than the slag heap of history, she was Hogarth in stilettos, painting women on the make flirting with underworld thugs.

After that, she developed the most famous case of artist block in the region, down but not out, fighting through two bouts of breast cancer (hers and her daughter's), holding down a day job as party props creator and struggling to keep her studio practice alive. Last year, she bounced back with a terrific show at the Grover/Thurston Gallery.

Her self-portrait in that exhibit, Pinkie, 20 x 22 inches, 2008, suggests a new level of self-sufficiency. This figure needs a man like fish needs a bicycle.

Anthony Discenza, the consolation of art:

Robert Zverina has nowhere to go...

and all day to get there.

A triangle wearing a cap of clouds casts its shadow on an empty street.

1970s (Knoxville, 1971) Via

An image of twin towers as an ad for builders?

Image via

The Old Weird America, organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, opens at the Frye on Saturday and includes Cynthia Norton's Dancing Squares, 2004:

Also opening Saturday is Vortexhibition Polyphonica at the Henry Art Gallery, including E. V. Day's Cherry Bomb Vortex, another little red dress.

Reviews to follow.

builds a ladder.

Hannah Greely, Assembly, 2001

Miranda July dropped out of the University of California at Santa Cruz in her sophomore year, disappointing her parents. After working her way to the top in Oregon's DIY arts scene as a performance artist, Internet experimenter and writer, she moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and in 2005 delivered the widely heralded independent movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, written by, directed by and starring herself. It opened the Seattle International Film Festival and won the Camera d'Or for best first feature at Cannes. She submitted her screenplay to the Sundance Screenwriting and Filmmaking Lab, was rejected twice before getting the Sundance nod.

In a 2005 interview in the PI, she explained Portland's allure.

Your parents must be happy now.

Yes. I grew up in Berkeley with a full Berkeley upbringing. They expected independence, but not independence from a college education. For me, school was taking away from getting to begin. I was never academic. I fight all conventions until they become useful to me.

Why did you move to Portland?

One of my best friends from high school was going to Reed and it seemed like a good place. I lived with a bunch of girls in a house and started doing plays in a punk club. I had a band called The Need. I was singing, although I can't sing at all. I made up for it in showmanship. I loved being on stage. I have a pretty strong connection to the independent music scene in Olympia. Performance is something I've been doing since high school. There's a great film and video community in Portland, with people like Harrell Fletcher and Matt McCormick. I feel lucky to know them. Portland was very nurturing for me. I found people interested in what I was interested in. In Portland, if you're doing something, there are people who will give you their time and talent. They're totally game for putting in huge amounts of time.

What did you do to earn a living?

I was a car door unlocker. I worked at Pop A Lock, but I haven't had to have that kind of job since I was 23.

What a useful skill. Can you still pop locks?

I'd need the tools.

You developed the Internet site "LearningtoLoveYouMore" with Fletcher. Who thought of inviting people to do those amazingly affecting tasks, such as, "Re-create a poster you had as a child" or "Make a paper replica of your bed"?

A lot of people. It just grew.

You're had a lot of support from the visual art community, both in the Northwest and around the country, yet you don't exactly identify with that community.

I don't feel that much a part of any of these worlds, partly because of how I entered them.

No master of fine arts degree? No film school?

Yes. I always felt I was crashing.

A New York Times critic said you'd be famous by now if you hadn't spent so much time in Portland. That's kind of funny considering your age. You're young for a movie director, actress and major writer.

I'm glad I lived in Portland when I did. I wanted not to be under the influence of a powerful city like New York or Los Angeles. I'm impressionable. I could have taken a wrong turn. In Portland, I could wait to develop, and I knew a voice would come.

In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman was the star of her own B-movies. She remains the central figure on her own stage. Recently, Miranda July changed  Sherman's conceit, becoming Polonius to Sherman's Hamlet - an easy tool, deferential but aspiring to larger things. (Via Eyeteeth)

July in Kramer vs. Kramer:


More here.

Kucera responds to this post: Is First Thursday Over?

At a recent meeting of the Seattle Art Dealer's Association, we discovered by a poll that about half of us are now on a 5 or 6 week show time turnaround, doing about 9 or 10 shows a year.
Several more are on a schedule that allows for mostly monthly shows and a few shows per year, generally around the summer or the end of year holidays, that are longer. Fewer than half of us are on a strict First Thursday to First Thursday schedule.

Personally, I feel that a show length of 5 - 6 weeks allows many more collectors and viewers to see our shows and the chance for repeat visits. If galleries stay on a FT - FT schedule, shows are up for between 18 and 23 days, Tuesday through Saturday business days. Last month yielded a short 18 day show; this month would be only 23 days. (Only a few dealers are still open on Sundays here.)

Working with nationally known artists, as we often are, it's impossible to suggest with any credibility a show length of fewer than 5 weeks. And I don't feel the artists of our region deserve any less.

Still, whether we're opening our show that night or not, all of us in the downtown area are still committed to keeping First Thursday as a predictable night for being open to the public. At nearly 30 years of age, First Thursday has become the longest standing regular monthly arts event in Seattle. It has always been privately funded by the participating galleries. No public funds make First Thursday possible. SADA, arguably an organization of the city's best dealers, produces and provides a monthly map and guide. We will continue to welcome the public from 6 - 8 on each and every First Thursday. Maps and guides are available at each gallery to help find the others.