Archives for February 2010

From Seattle’s Klara Glosova

On my recent road trip I got inspired by a huge FRESH CHERRIES sign in
eastern Washington. The letters in the photo are just a mock-up, but I
plan to make it real.

This is what happens when you take your house for a walk.

Open House : Nepo (A HUMOROUS APPROACH TO THE SERIOUS ART OF LIVING)

Please come curious and prepared to use you investigative skills. Expect
a homespun, high-end affair: a visual experience perched on the
threshold of spontaneous creative experience and perfected mastery.
Among our auditory attractions will be Live Poetry Juke Box and The
Purple Dots, a five piece band of eight-year-olds (band name is
subject to change). Not Decent Docent will be available for those
needing a little interpretative help.

February 27th 2010, 6:00 pm – 11:00 pm
1723 S Lander Street
Seattle WA 98144

On Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof’s The Art Blog, writer Andrea Kirsch breaks out the hymnal in praise the female sex organ:

Explicit views of women’s pudenda have never been in short supply in
New York City but one found them on 42nd St. (before Disney arrived),
not in established art galleries. Inspired by Eve Ensler‘s Vagina Dialogues, Francis Naumann began collecting work for an exhibition and when it grew too large, enlisted David Nolan to join him; the exhibition, The Visible Vagina,
continues at both galleries through March 20.  The results include the
entire range of responses one might expect from women to their own most
singular parts, and respectful, appreciative study by men of the most
mysterious parts of women.  This is an important exhibition.

What if this were a penis show? Would Kirsch approve only of “respectful, appreciative attention” from women artists? And would she indulge men who are in awe of their “own most singular parts”? The vagina is not the most mysterious part of a woman. That honor goes to the brain, as it does for men.

These exhibits might be swell, but surely not because their artists’ treatment of the content is “respectful.” Art cannot be judged on its manners, good or bad, or its attitudes.

Below, a watercolor on the theme by Seattle’s Amanda Manitach from her blog, My Heroes Died of Syphilis. I like it not because I have a weakness for the genitalia of female syphilitics, but because it makes its own atmospheric world, both ruined and lovely.

Other stories:

An Aesthete’s Lament noticed the floors in The King and I:

My family and I were watching Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in The King and I a few weeks ago and one aspect of the sets caught our mutual attention–the high-gloss floors.
Jet black, pale blue, jade green, and shocking pink, King Rama IV’s residence in Bangkok, the Grand Palace…was all about super reflective, boldly coloured floors and masses of airy chinoiserie. For one mad moment we discussed painting our wood floors similarly, then remember what hell was wrought when we coated them with shining white epoxy paint, and the feeling passed.

Just as I suspected: An exposure to luxury goods can turn you into a shit. (Via AJ) For those who are confused, art is not a luxury good. Think Rolex, not Tim Rollins.

The mere exposure to luxury goods can have a corrosive effect on decision-making that pushes individuals to put their interests over the interests of others, according to a Harvard Business School study. (more)

Best art blog lead, from Art Fag City:

If the Meet the Biennial Curators press breakfast is any indication — and it never is — this year’s Whitney Biennial will be really great. (more)

Best new online art magazine – This Is Tomorrow. For the images alone, it deserves a prize, but there are also excellent reviews with a global reach.

Cynthia Gutierrez

Brian Jungen – Wasp

Art Chantry

More here.

The great Marsha Burns, no Web site, no longer represented by a gallery.

Kushner:

At least I never voted Republican.

via

After she bungled a question in the Miss Teen USA pageant, contestant Caitlin Upton become her own event horizon. No light penetrates past her media coverage. Jesse Edwards‘ painted her pixelated to the edge of her form. His version of Pointillism is a critique on fame that lights up the Web, like fireworks in a night sky, except it trails after its subjects forever. Even if Upton becomes a Rhodes Scholar, her misadventure in front of a microphone will be there whenever anyone clicks on her name.

Detail:

Pageant (oil on linen
40 x 36 inches) was part of Edwards’ show at Flatcolor Gallery last month. I saw it on the last day and didn’t intend to write about it, but it stayed with me.

The rap against Edwards in Seattle is that he’s all over the map. It’s true. Then there’s the fact of him. Below, the opening of a profile I wrote in 2006:

Jesse Edwards lives in a downtown studio that is packed with his paintings. They lean in stacks and protrude in piles. His bed is a sack on the floor, which is littered with fast food packaging, art books and objects he uses for his still lifes, including a skull, a skateboard, pop cans, bongs, porn magazines, shredded dolls, a toy cop car and the odd piece of fruit.

He has a computer covered in graffiti on a wrecked table beside half an office chair, foam spilling out, that he found on the street.
Creature comforts are not his thing.
“I’m an artist,” he said. “I want to paint in oils like the old masters.”

An aspiration to old master painting is not the first thing that comes to mind on meeting him.
He looks like a thug. At 29, he’s tall and lean with thick muscles running up his tattooed arms and down his torso. His smile doesn’t often reach his eyes, which bore into people.

“I’m an ex-thug,” he said. “In the old day, I’d stomp people who disrespected my tags.”

Stomp?

“Put them down so they don’t get up. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better.”

His landscapes look as if they’re sweating – open stretches of summer fields working hard for the money.

Landscape oil on linen 60″ x 40″

Some of his ceramics are tributes to his adventures as a graffiti writer. (Image via)

The art world breaks artists’ hearts. First to break are those who ring wrong bells when they walk into a gallery. Edwards can’t change that, anymore than Caitlin Upton can, but she could learn a lot from him. He’s stout-hearted and keeps on keeping on.

White Fear, oil on linen, 38 x 28 inches

Title a variant on a theme.

About artists and serious books, Robert Storr sees a divide.

There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many.

Increasingly, however, artists treat books as objects. They empty them out or roll them like stones against the mouth of a cave.

Jill Sylvia

Stella Waitzkin

It’s a self-portrait. Beres is a member of SuttonBeresCuller, but he draws alone. (image via)

In response to comments made about this post, Sylvia Mendel wrote:

Yes, I expect that if any group is invisible in certain organizations
or societal settings it’s worthy of question. For, you may be the one
who is excluded at some point in the future. If you are a curious
person you’ll notice that older women artists are invisible in the art
world and most other arenas of life, unless they’re generous
philanthropists or volunteers – which I call work without pay.

 I have
actually experienced this invisibility/exclusion recently. A Chelsea
gallery owner saw my work on a website. She made an appointment to see
the actual work. She saw me in person when I visited her gallery to
check out the space where my work might be shown. I said I was looking
forward to her visiting my studio and she canceled the appointment by
email the following day pleading sickness and never rescheduled.

Women
are even more biased against older women than are men. That’s just the
most obvious incident. I recently did a series on age with one piece
called Wear Masks and have been asked to write a piece against this
invisibility for an art publication.

Mendel, Wear Masks and Missing Pages II