Archives for 2009

Discovered by happy accident in a lab at Oregon State:

Online, it looks a lot like Yves Klein blue, but it’s safe and (when generics appear) cheap.

Glasstire’s Top Ten art activists.
The boom in Doomsday.

Former PI editor Gil Aegerter on the play, It’s Not In The PI, a response to my review:

Finally got a chance to see the play on the final day, and I must say I liked it — with reservations. I agree with Regina that if you weren’t on the inside, you might find it confusing and disjointed. But I thought it captured the quirky character of the P-I quite well (kind of like the Adcock review that’s quoted). And it works as metafiction — the play as newspaper story, reported and written well or poorly, depending on your viewpoint, whether you were skewered. I would like to see the play refined and leaned-out, because there are some fantastic moments. The reporter-politician exchanges were just perfect. The Green River segment was poignant. The comment by the victim’s mom who is grateful to the reporter for not describing her daughter by job or crime — it’s the same care that this play shows to the P-I.

The same care this play shows to the PI? Aegerter is fluent in quadratic equations, reads classical philosophy for fun and could front a band good enough to hit the road. As a theater critic, however, he comes up empty.

Note to Gil: You worked there for years. Did you inhabit your own experience?

If the PI resembled the paper dissected on stage, Aegerter wouldn’t have worked there for a day. Former PI reporter Tom Paulson, who advised the playwright team, told them not to turn reporters into heroes. There’s a lot of ground between hero and nonentity, and this play didn’t find it. Nothing on stage mattered. Yes, Gil, the reporter-politician exchanges were good, but they concerned some harried public official having an affair. Since this is the only moment that explores a reporter doing the real job, why was the theme chosen so trivial?

I’ll agree that the play (more or less) attempted to capture the paper’s quirky character but cut that quality free from its roots, the business of providing the public with news and opinion of consequence. Trivial stories appeared in the PI. Of course they did. Breath and depth gave way to quick and dirty. But every day there was something and usually several somethings I was proud of, something enterprising, hard won and well played.

The PI was unusual in one respect: Despite cutbacks, the addition of good
management at the top coupled with a tipping-point infusion of fine reporters woke the place up in its final years. I know they woke
me up. Thanks to them, we did not fade away but went down strong.

It’s Not In the The PI wasn’t written as an elegy for the PI. What its fact-based fiction tried and failed to be is an elegy for a newsroom. Not a single character interested me, save for the brief (and entirely accurate) appearance of theater critic Joe Adcock. If these characters were a newsroom, it would be one that deserved its demise. Its occupants are self-indulgent, dim-witted whiners. What could they write (draw, photograph, design or edit) that could possibly interest anyone?

The best elegy for newsroom culture arrived this year in the form of a thriller: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow. The paper is the LA Times, which is diminished but not yet dead, despite the efforts of its owner to kill it. Connelly doesn’t get into that, wisely. He has a monster killer to deal with and doesn’t need Sam Zell, the monster Capitalist, cluttering up his copy.

The Scarecrow does not address why we’re losing breath and depth, just that we are, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “wandering between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” In the meantime, there’s a great newsroom fallen on hard times. We meet the narrator, reporter Jack McEvoy, just after he’d been laid off.

Every eye in the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten the word.

From a newsroom friend:

Holy fucking shit, you got pinked!…Man, this ain’t right.

The world ain’t right, Larry.

Like the paper itself, my time was over. It was all about the Internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates…The morning paper might as well be called the Daily Afterthought. Everything in it was posted on the web the night before.

Editor and McEvoy exchange:

[Read more…] about It’s Not In The PI, but it is in “The Scarecrow”

Sloth’s best. Lolling on a sofa
In a Chinese dressing gown

With the windows open in the heat,
The breeze rousing the leaves.
The flies dozing on the ceiling.

Makoto Saito (Image via)

Robert Yoder

Job

Whence comest thou?
From going to and fro in the earth, and from
walking up and down in it.

 Scherrer

From Jennifer Zwick, image via

Previous in the same vein, Zwick’s 100 Answers To What Might Go Wrong.

John Sutton, Ben Beres and Zac Culler teamed up ten years ago as students at Cornish College, building a brick wall to block entrance to the faculty parking lot. Their current exhibit at Lawrimore Project gives them a chance to look backward to assess their accomplishments.

The Answer, My Friend…, 2009
Acrylic, electric fans, 56 cubic feet of circulating air
88 x 34 x 34 inches

 
Every fan whirs away, generating nothing. It’s not easy being the joker in the pack, the sane man in King Lear’s court, the forward momentum surrounded by inertia. Even artists who play it straight are surrounded by what opposes them, be they those rarities encased in success or the more common breed, hearing the echo of their actions bounce off the walls of empty rooms.

Nobody called, nobody came in, nothing happened, nobody cared if I died or went to El Paso.

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, talking to himself in The High Window.

SuttonBeresCuller cannot claim to be talking to themselves. The admiration that is strong in Seattle increasingly extends beyond it. One stage performance which I didn’t see earned them the honor of a take-’em-out review by Jen Graves.

Their response is in the current show. On beach stones they incised every single word.

Crouching down for a better look, I found shallow, hoax and my name, the last because her piece included an attack on me, for this review. (Its headline is unfortunate. Critics employed at newspapers don’t write their own and yet, if their reviews live at all, they live on their headlines.)

Incised words on stones are a sweetness-and-light stable in gift shops. The art world has even more reason to look favorably on piles of precious things, trained to do so by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. A Dissent is both funny and effective. Change the joke and slip the yoke, what Ralph Ellison called “a kind of jujitsu of the spirit, a denial and rejection through agreement.”

In 2002 at the now defunct ConWorks, SuttonBeresCuller offered a giant pencil suspended from the ceiling which audience members could push in order to draw. When Lawrimore Project opened in 2006, SBC installed it as a stand-alone sculpture.

What a difference a day (or two) makes. Here’s their current version:

In her review of the current show, a backpedaling Graves noted the work is marked by frustration and exhaustion. To make art about exhaustion is not the same as producing exhausted art. But I digress as well as sympathize. Backpedaling is frustrating and exhausting too.

Barely in Need, SBC panhandling performance. 2003

SBC’s most ambitious foray into public art, an attempt to turn an abandoned gas station into a park, has been blocked at every turn. And yet, four years in, they’re still at it, with a model of the ultimate result in the show. (My story about the ecological complications here.) They may be insane, but they are not exhausted.

Onward, into the future.

Flight Path, 2009
Mixed media (always installed facing the highest
concentration of U.S. military forces)

Christiane Haase

Dan Webb

Andrea Salvino

Storm Tharp

‘

On the same block of Seattle’s Capitol Hill are two galleries that take chances while hedging their bets. Both Grey Gallery and Vermillion are also bars. If
the art doesn’t sell, the drinks will. Even in the current climate,
however, the art tends to move more quickly than in Seattle’s gallery hub in Pioneer Square.

Of the three artists showing currently at Vermillion,
painter Ryan Molenkamp has almost sold out. With one exception, it’s been a long time since that many red dots appeared in the Square.

If I were going to imagine a stage set for college professor’s suburban interior in
mid-20th Century America, I’d put one of Molenkamp’s paintings over the
sofa. The people who lived there would have loved high and loathed low. The abstraction they’d like best would be European, as the New York School would have seemed a trifle crude. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, showing up later in the decade, would not have qualified as artists at all. Yes to Satie, no to Chuck Berry.

Early in the 21st Century, Molenkamp’s style of painting is most frequently found in Goodwill. What goes around comes around, but possibly because I remember the off-putting originals from my childhood, Molenkamp’s updates are a problem I’m not equipped to solve. He’s a better painter than the anonymous stereotype I have in my head, but that stereotype blocks my view.

Sharon Arnold weaves and cuts with a gentle hand. Because her work evokes more exuberant versions by others, the word that I couldn’t push away is timid.

Here’s Claude Zervas‘ version of an adding machine spitting out clouds, from 2002.

Cumulus, Receipt printer, computer, roll paper
48″ x 48″ x 48″ variable

And here’s Arnold’s:

[Read more…] about Belly up to the art at Vermilion Gallery