Archives for October 2009

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. 

[Read more…] about If the Northwest had been in Old, Weird America

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:

[Read more…] about The visual score, after Christian Marclay

…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.