Archives for November 2009

Before he became director of Western Bridge, Eric Fredericksen was an art critic.

To wit, his review of Whiting Tennis in 2000:

WHITING TENNIS’ new work is dumb. Dumb as in dumb luck, dumb as in mute, dumb as in the best solution to a problem is the simplest one. In these forms, dumb is good. And in art, this kind of dumb is rare.

Art is rarely free of gamesplaying, of a strategically marked-out position that the artist can work from, of some role that defines readings and defends the value of the work. Tennis’ position for this show is dumbness. In his cogent, helpful artist’s statement (these two adjectives apply to almost no other artist’s statement) he writes that he’s “the kind of person who’s struck dumb by a child’s painting or a little canvas-board winter landscape with birds, and thought it odd that after 15 years or more of ‘painting’ I’d never sat down and tried to make a ‘picture.’ So I did, literally sit down and try.”(more)

Before he was an art critic, he was a singer, as in, he sang in the shower. Years of singing in the suds led logically to karaoke, and karaoke left him with theories he plans to share Wednesday night at 7:30 at On The Boards. Interview with Eric about his performance here.

Via

It’s possible to be famous long past your lifetime on the strength of one piece. No one exemplifies that possibility as well as Meret Oppenheim, whose Object from 1936 is at the Museum of Modern Art.  

Its origins, from MoMA:

This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim’s fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, “Even this cup and saucer.” Soon after, when asked by André Breton, Surrealism’s leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. (more)

Its influence continues.

Jennifer McNeely:

Sandra Doore:

Taro Hattori

In the anything-goes, free-form era of contemporary criticism, only those whose tenure is guaranteed can dare to be dull. They write to keep a well-fed hand in. Others tap dance. They’re as good as their clicks. Dull used to be the critical norm. Few long for a return to those days, but back then, attention came to critics who articulated a rigorous set of ideas, not necessarily a snappy approach to the sentence.

Personally, I’m all about snappy. And instead of possessing concepts which I bring to bear on the art, I respond to the ideas in the art. Paul Valery called it the equivalent of playing a card game whose rules change with every hand. 

Undoubtedly, that approach is generational. I started at the tail end of the anti-Clement Greenberg era and never left. (Marat/Sade: We’re all normal and we want our freedom.) But there are limits. No, there aren’t, but there should be. Critics who free associate in front of an artwork aren’t critics. They’re flying kites in their heads. They’re taking a test for a psychology course.

Few artists attract as much snap, crackle and pop nonsense as Luc Tuymans. His paintings are slippery blanks, unpleasantly representational without being dark. His moments are worth missing yet there they are, the thin-lipped equivalents of gray days.

The Secretary of State 2005
oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4 inches David Zwirner Gallery

The image above is perfectly transportable. Seeing it reproduced online is not significantly different from seeing it in person, which is, of course, remarkable for an oil painting. Note the tooth and the Buddha ear. The tooth on the left is like one slightly-longer table leg tipping the balance out of true. The long earlobe? Not in this case an old-soul signifier.

Pigeons
2001, oil on canvas
128 x 156cm (Image via)

Exhibit A, part of an essay on Tuymans from the online Saatchi Gallery:

Luc Tuymans’s pigeons bop in dumb disarray. Dirty and disease-ridden, they’re a strangely curious mob, a metaphoric stand-in for ourselves. Painted in the muted tones of history, Luc Tuymans offers a chilling ultimate truth about humankind. He makes a cold comedy of a terrifying thought.

Dumb disrray? Who you calling dumb? Real life street pigeons can, when motivated by food, easily learn to tell the difference between Van Gogh and Chagall. (Abstract here.)

Dirty and disease-ridden? Not these pigeons. They’re color inflections on canvas. In their price range, believe me they’re cared for.

Muted tones of history? What? Stand-ins for ourselves? Says who? Chilling ultimate truth? Cold comedy? Come on.

Even the great Peter Schjeldahl flails around for meaning in his (as always) richly entertaining essay on Tuymans in The New Yorker. Schjeldahl claims Tuyman’s work dramatizes the fallen state of painting since the 1960s. If anything, it dramatizes the reverse, that you don’t have to be an angel to dance upon the head of a pin as the audience swells around you.

Via

David Barnes (Image via)

Randy Hayes

In 1978, Allan McCollum began a series of paintings (Surrogates) that were no more than extensions of the frame.

Evan Blackwell‘s paintings are the frames.

In his solo exhibit at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery, Lost in Space, Blackwell proves (among his many other material explorations) that Tara Donovan isn’t the only artist coming up with new uses for drinking straws. Hers billow, like clouds. His are salvaged camouflage with a direct hit in the center. The center is your center, wherever you happen to be looking. It’s the illusion of a ripple effect.

Blackwell graduated last year from the University of Washington with an MFA in sculpture.

I am in the process of constructing forms, compositions, structures, and spaces that serve as lens to see both the materials from which they were constructed and world we live in with fresh perspective.

Through Nov. 27.

can sit on them. (Via)

From Seattle’s Wynne Greenwood:

Hello! FEMINIST FORM, a new screening series, is starting next Saturday. Please come, it would be great to see you there! And tell your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, lovers, teachers, partners…

FEMINIST FORM
presents video work by:
Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy
Saturday, November 21
Doors open at 7:30pm
Screening begins at 8pm
Hiawatha Artist Lofts Community Room
843 Hiawatha Pl. S
Seattle
$5 – $10 Sliding Scale
Suggested Donation.

Chair seating is limited, please come early if you want to sit in a chair. Plenty of floor seating.
FEMINIST FORM is a screening series of feminist and queer media from the Pacific Northwest.
Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy have been collaborating since 2002. Included in the screening will be TV Lip Sync, 2002, and two videos from their ongoing project New Report, New Report, 2005, and the documentation of the live performance New Report: Morning Edition, in which the reporters hold an intimate deliberation on the objectification of the biological female body. This is the Seattle debut of this project. (This does contain graphic imagery.)
Please forward this announcement widely!
Looking forward to seeing you there.
All my best, Wynne

In the west plaza of Seattle’s Safeco Field is a 5-ton granite boulder that sculptor Peter Shelton found in the Cascade range. It’s an object with the power to bring wilderness into the city.
Shelton honored it with a shadow, a black bronze replica that offers mass without weight. Woven on its surface are horizontal waves that respond to the surface nuances of the rock and answer its chaos with order. Titled “rockshadow,” the piece plays with the nature of inside and out, form and shadow, the real and fake, the found and created.

Despite the challenge of his subtlety, Shelton enjoys considerable success in the realm of public art. Controversies such as the current one over his sixbeaststwomonkeys, an ensemble of eight sculptures installed in front of the LAPD’s new headquarters, are rare.

(Photos LA Times)

One of two bookends:

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez kicked  off the commentary with one of his I-wander-the-city essays. In a similar vein, his columns on homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers became a book and later a movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx. (In case somehow you missed it, NPR story on their friendship here. Good movie.)

Here’s Lopez on Shelton:

As luck would have it, the nearly completed LAPD headquarters is right outside my office window, so I’ve been bird-dogging the project from Day One to make sure taxpayers don’t get ripped off. Which brings me to the $500,000 worth of public art that’s just been installed on the west side of the building.

The cast-bronze sculptures consist of six large black blobs, with two tall, skinny structures on either side.

I wasn’t sure what to make of them, so I went straight to the top: It looks like “some kind of cow splat,” said Police Chief William J. Bratton, who sounded as if he were personally insulted by the installation.
Bratton said he first drove past the work and later walked back to see whether “it’s as ugly up close as it is when you’re driving by.”

The answer was yes, and he sounded mad enough to have the artist arrested.

Lopez’s aw-shucks style appears to preclude research. If he did any, it’s not obvious. LA Times art critic Christopher Knight had to respond, but such responses are tricky. Knight cannot shoot inside his own building. While he can be tough as he wants on targets outside the Times, inside he treads lightly.

[Read more…] about Peter Shelton and the peanut gallery