Archives for 2009

In 2006, when Robyn O’Neil was at the Frye, I wrote:

Houston’s Robyn O’Neil
draws dense, dainty tableaus that make light work of heavy symbolism.
Her heart’s in the radical scale shifts and hallucinated oddities of
art history: Hieronymous Bosch without his silky spatial connectives, or Pieter Brueghel
without his interest in community. Her humans are loners and her
animals lost causes. Even when she crowds her space, nobody’s home.

O’Neil, The Passing

Jennifer Zwick managed to convey the same thing at the same time, wordlessly.

Zwick, Robyn O’Neil, Wall Text, 2006

Zwick, Robyn O’Neil, Oh, How the Heartless Haunt Us All, 2006

From Steve Bloom’s Nairobi Merchants via This Isn’t Happiness.

Why Eirik Johnson? There’s nothing wrong with Johnson’s work, but why him for a solo exhibit at the Henry Gallery? The Henry heaps few such honors on Northwest heads, which makes him an unlikely candidate. He’s a photojournalist with a solid idea. For years he has traveled through what’s left of the logging towns along the Coast, documenting life in the shadow of a once-flourishing industry.

I’d seen his work at G. Gibson Gallery and thought, nice enough, but it doesn’t inhabit its own experience. What Jasper Johns said about sculpture – Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. – also applies to photographs. There’s something loose and unresolved about Johnson’s imagery. His are impressions too faint to score on their own. Had the Henry wanted to explore the myth of the West rattling around in the wrecked present day, it would have been far better off with Glenn Rudolph. Each of Rudolph’s images is a world.

The exhibit turned out to be better than I imagined. Turns out, loose and unresolved can be virtues in the right context, like mist on a moor.

Chief Henry curator Elizabeth Brown gave Johnson the chance to rise to the occasion of his formidable backstory. In smaller galleries leading to his are 19th and early 20th century logging photos by Darius Kinsey and Carleton Watkins. They capture the grotesque sublime of a booming industry chomping its way through forests as if other old growths would rise magically in their wake to be logged in turn.

Magic is gone by the time Johnson shows up. He documents the makeshift instead of the magnificent.

He’s one of those artists whose work resonates in its own company. He offers not soloists but a chorus.

Johnson images via G. Gibson Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery.

I was sold on this show until stopped by Morris Graves, whose Abandoned Homestead hangs in an adjancent gallery.

Graves, U.S. (1910 – 2001) 1934 – 1937, Oil on canvas 37 3/8 x 43 9/16 inches. Morris Graves Foundation — Robert and Desireé Yarber

It knocked Johnson clear out of my mind, and I’d just seen him. Through Jan. 31.

Neither here nor there but somewhere in between, standing on a ledge, looking over a curb or hanging in the air like a parade float:

Tim Hawkinson – Bloat is beautiful.

Jeanne Silverthorne – Staring at her future, which is behind her.

Christopher Rauschenberg – Feet in muddy water, head in a cloud. (detail)

Juan Munoz -The isolation of the outsider.

Claudia Fitch – Fear of heights, stuck in a high place.

Bought many postcards from museum shops lately? I thought not. There was a time that travel required them, as keepsakes and to let folks at home know you’re not only in Houston but at the Menil, not just in Chicago but enthralling yourself with Seurat.

Given the recession, there’s also less reason to buy nonessentials on a whim, which pretty much deals a death blow to the rest of the stock. Exit cash cow, enter space waster.

The problem used to be acute at the Henry Art Gallery, where two different vendors brought in to run the gift shop went belly up. Last year, the Henry stopped pretending it had a gift shop. There were books on a small cart near the admissions desk, and that was it. The room behind the cart was dark.

It’s dark no longer. Painter Matthew Offenbacher proposed turning it into an artist project space, and the Henry said yes.

Offenbacher:

The Henry museum shop has been in deep hibernation since last year, an inaccessible space of institutional dreaming, a snoring lacuna in the museum’s lobby–but not for much longer. Beginning the last week in August this project will turn up the temperature, transforming the shop into a hot house, a catalyst, an incubator for Northwest artists. Exhibitions will fall like dominoes: a cascading cavalcade of adventurous, collaborative, celebratory artistic energy. How do artists work together? What can an art exhibition do? What is an audience? Who are you? What can we learn from each other? I hope you’ll join us.

It didn’t open in August, although the original date is still on the Henry’s Web site. It opened in October and was worth the wait. Offenbacher assembles artist teams by picking their names out of his hat. First up are Joseph Park and Jennifer Zwick with a sad-sack video installation.

Gift shop shelves are empty, which adds to the dishevelment. All the action’s in a corner in the dark, where the artists’ images are projected onto their cut-outs on a makeshift stage. They spin on a pair of Lazy Susans, kick box, dance and stand with silver tinsel at their feet and sing.

Friviloity is hard to pull off in an art context, leading so easily into self-indulgence, but Park and Zwick are adorable.

Next, Claire Cowie, Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata open Nov. 14 with their version of a Northwest Coast Indian potlatch, The Gift Exchange.

Charlie Roberts, The Cave (Via Jennifer Zwick)

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:

[Read more…] about It’s Not In The PI

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.