Archives for October 2009

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.