Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
Tamara Sussman hit on a compelling metaphor for bad news that doesn’t end – the lost loved one, the missing limb, the wars, the warming, the crazy within. In photos and text, she documents a low-intensity earthquake that continues to vibrate, day in and out.
Geraniums (from The Tremble Series). 2007-09
Chromogenic prints with vinyl text
20 x 30″
Edition, 5.
The earthquake started so modestly only the geologists noticed…. (more)
The Seattle newspaper that failed last March after a 146-year run is the subject of a play, titled “It’s Not In the PI: A Living Newspaper About A Dying Newspaper“. (Ticket info here.)
It’s not in this play, either. Plenty of former staffers at the Friday night opening slipped out at intermission.
(Photo, Josh Trujillo)
The play is structured as a newspaper, with stories jumping inside. (Unlike a newspaper, they jump back out to the front again.) I can’t imagine how anybody who didn’t work there could make sense of it.
That story about a feature writer and photographer sent to Detroit to produce a sports-related color story prior to a Seattle-Detroit big game? PI ace writer M. L. Lyke had the assignment in real life, with grizzled, always game photographer Grant Haller. They wound up in a strip joint. Lyke and Haller also went to Iraq as the embedded odd couple, but that story didn’t make the theatrical cut. If you didn’t know the origin of the stripper saga, you won’t learn it from the stage. That version is just a muddle.
More from the stage: History stomps by as a procession in the rear. Some reporter is trying to cover it, and an editor tells him not to upset the advertisers. Never did I ever heard any PI editor telling any PI reporter not to upset advertisers.
Why did the PI fail? The play suggests it was bad management, the cold-hearted Hearst Corp. as well as the diminishing fortunes of the industry. The last factor is undeniable, but the other two are wrong.
The team at the top, publisher Roger Oglesby and managing editor David McCumber, were by far the best in my two decades at the paper. Class acts, they broke with the PI tradition of eccentric, even bizarre top managers. As for Hearst, it fought fiercely to save the PI when the Seattle Times tried to bury it through a court action in 2003. Instead, the PI triumphed in 2007. Justice was on our side, but that wouldn’t have mattered if we didn’t have Hearst’s deep pockets to pay for it.
At that point, smart money was on the PI to survive and the Seattle Times to fail. What happened?
Dan Richman’s story in the PI is as good as any.
Here’s my version:
Elizabeth Jameson opens at Fetherson Gallery Thursday night, 6-9. (Previous)
I’m talking to a friend about why I don’t want to post a video questioning Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays on ArtsJournal’s main page ( I mean, how tiresome, give it up for the big guy), and I mention that Shakespeare invented 20,000 new words. Meanwhile, my friend is typing on his cell phone.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m Twittering your comment about 20,000 new words.”
“STOP,” I cried in alarm. “I was just talking.” (Turns out it was 2,000 words, give or take a word here or there.)
The exchange reminds me of this poem by Robert Creeley:
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1936, he didn’t consider the possibility of the work of art as mechanical reproduction. Its aura is in its multiplicity, the quality of its presence not depreciated but secured.
Jason Salavon, Every Playboy Centerfold, 1960s, 2002 (Image via)
Benjamin’s essay – one of the most beautiful in the history of art writing – remains essential for its ideas, cloaked as they are in the political realities of his time and place: Fascism as an immediate threat, Communism as a Utopian possibility.
Michael Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-1978 opens 13 years after Benjamin’s study and is informed by its premises.
Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses.
Confronted directly by the masses….
The purpose of museums is to be safe havens for art and to present that art to the public. The real threat to the aura of an artwork in a museum setting, however, is the public itself.
That’s why the most esteemed work is no longer visible there. To see the Mona Lisa amid the whir of cameras in a murmuring crowd is to not see it at all. The rich and influential can arrange private tours of the Sistine Chapel. I know someone who stood alone in that room, not even a guard to keep him company. He lay down on the floor and stared. Every time I’ve been there, the floor was a cattle pen and the cattle restless, eager for an experience they weren’t sure they were having.
I’m all for visitors being able to take photos of art in museums, and also for them to draw, paint and sculpt their reactions to their encounters, even (shudder) organize their own tours led by themselves for their (inevitably rowdy) friends. Unless the community feels ownership of museums, they will not thrive. Patronage of the precious few is not enough. But the pleasures of seeing art with few or no others in the vicinity cannot be denied. It is in those solitary moments that real connections occur. Numberless times in museums and galleries I have yearned to tell those around me to shut the fuck up. Art museums must attract the public but also manage the public they attract. None of that is easy.
I’m writing this in response to an earlier post, If it isn’t spreadable, it’s dead, because that post made it sound easy. I can only add I’m glad I’m not in charge.
The light dissolves intention, starting at the legs and paralyzing upward.
No Standing At Any Time, via
The crazy bone in the country’s body is the right to bear arms. From The New York Times:
The rampage recalled other mass shootings in the United States, including 13 killed at a center for immigrants in upstate New York last April, the deaths of 10 during a gunman’s rampage in Alabama in March, and 32 people killed at Virginia Tech, the deadliest shooting in modern American history.
The shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is a psychiatrist. Where did he get the guns and why did he have them?
Again, The NYT:
“He could have just brought (them) onto the installation,” Colonel Rossi said.
We know what will happen next. Any Muslim who knows Hasan, especially one who sympathized with his doubts about U.S. policy in the Middle East, will be in for a harrowing experience. All it takes is an email saying, “I hear you, brother.” Who doesn’t have doubts? We’re in the wrong. Of course the government needs to investigate. What they won’t investigate is the thing that makes carnage easy:
Justin Colt Beckman, digital collage of the artist’s face on found photograph
Karen Ganz, even in our dreams
Speaking of carnage: today in Seattle, here.
Roy Lichtenstein, Gun in America
Update: From Orlando, more shootings today, here. Easy access to guns makes the entire country a war zone. Deadly violence can pop up anywhere, in any church, business, home or on any sidewalk. And from the department of stupid headlines, from the Houston Chronicle about the Fort Worth Hood shootings: Motive is Biggest Unknown. Motive is biggest unknown? Hasan’s motives are obvious, although it would take Shakespeare to plumb their depths.
Steven Brekelmans‘ paper set, Kit Bashing (via)
Arjan van Helmond’s Drums (ink, gouache, acrylic on paper)
Update: Expanding the theme to useless drums in other media, Scott Wayne Indiana suggests Claes Oldenburg’s drums in canvas. (Image via)
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