Archives for May 2010

It’s ignorance, of course, especially for those who don’t understand a language that is printed on their shirt or tattooed on their body.

Case in point: Visiting a sister who lived in an apartment a short train ride from Tokyo, I joined her and her two small sons in a visit to a nearby park. Also in the park was an impeccably dressed young mother of my sister’s acquaintance. The legend sewn in pink lettering on her crisp white sweatshirt was an invitation to engage in oral sex disguised as a platitude: Kiss All My Lips.

I wanted to tell her. My sister, who prevailed, didn’t. She argued that woman wouldn’t wear a sweatshirt in the city. Tourists didn’t come to this suburb, so the chance she’d be laughed at was remote. Even if the woman encountered other English speakers in the park, they would be unlikely to say anything either. Confrontation causes face loss. What is not spoken of can be ignored.

My sister speaks four languages. She could afford to feel a touch superior, which she did and denied. Speaking only one, I identified with the woman’s plight. At the corners of our single-language consciousness are other worlds we cannot enter, because we lack the linguistic pass.

Some monolingual English speakers fail to demonstrate the humility their condition requires. They’re proud of what they don’t know. Isn’t simple jealousy part of the Arizona problem? Because they live in one world, they hate the sight (and sound) of those brave enough to attempt two.

The New York Times recently posted a series of photographs documenting the mangled English on commercial signs in Shanghai. As we laugh, we who do not understand Chinese should consider how well we’d do in Shanghai, relying on our English-Chinese dictionary to get the job done.

Image, New York Times

In response to this post, which notified the avid public that Seattle’s Charles
Krafft and Mike Leavitt
are showing at London’s Stolen Space
Gallery, Krafft sent the following comment:

We (Mike Leavitt and I) were taken to dinner the night before last by Jason Zeloof a partner in the Stolenspace Gallery which is on Brick Lane in The Old Truman Brewery in London’s trendy East End. Our fourth at the table was Robert Lands of Finers Steven & Innocent LLP who is the personal solicitor of the mysterious and beloved Banksy. Afterwards we repaired to the rooftop bar of the Shordich House, a private club in the neighborhood where I ordered a “Gay Butler” – soda and bitters on the rocks. There were lots of attractive women there. They were attractive because their blouses were lightly starched and their downy little arms curiously devoid of tattoos.

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise
Auden

Consider the case of Bruce Nauman. Along with David Hammons, Nauman is point person for the late 20th Century, early 21st Century divide. He’s the Samuel Beckett of the visual realm, documenting his body in space, from its most routine motions to its grunts and sighs, its failed dime-store dreams and dashed desires. Because his work has been absorbed into the body of contemporary art, it
mutates every day into other people’s uses of it.

In his studio on his ranch in New Mexico, however, the world that considers him a currency is far away. His ratty table before him, he sits on one of those expensive chairs favored by those with bad backs, his one concession to his status. Maybe he hears a horse whinny or a dog bark. He’s alone but not as alone as he imagined. Flipping through a manuscript, he finds mice turds and nibbled pages.

Enter rodents, stage left.

Office Edit 11, a video loop from 2001, presents what a surveillance camera discovered when left on in his studio overnight, sped up for the video. Furry interlopers the size of a toddler’s fist streak through space, stop dead and streak again, like paint brushes trailing invisible ink. Just as the human body is an instrument of its consciousness, Nauman’s mice play themselves like violins.

His studio becomes a stage, and all the mice are actors on it. It’s a tale told by a mechanical  idiot, otherwise known as a camera. The image shifts in tone, from porous and flat to an old-world shine. At one point, tired of verisimilitude, the image stands on its head.

Office Edit II is in Box with the Sound of Its Own Making at Western Bridge. The title comes from Robert Morris, whose 1961 sculpture of that title is owned by the Seattle Art Museum. The title is Morris’, but the artists in it (who are not Nauman) have hitched their wagons to his star.

The brothers Elias Hansen and Oscar Tuazon are in the parking lot with Use It For What It’s Used For, a piece that first appeared in New York in 2009 thanks to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. With poured concrete floor, skewered metal beams and solar-powered lights, it’s best seen at night. Like Nauman pacing off the steps he takes to walk circles in his studio, Use It For What It’s Used For  goes nowhere. Completing it would be a stain on its silence.

(Image via)

Jonathan Monk‘s Nauman tribute is direct, transforming Nauman’s deadpan absurdity into visual vaudeville. Monk’s white neon sculpture from 2007 is titled, The Space Between My Index Finger and My Middle Finger Enlarged to the Size of the Space Between My Legs, riffing on Nauman’s A Cast of the Space under My Chair, from1965-68. (Nauman made that piece and moved on. Decades later, Rachel Whiteread picked up the theme and made a career of it. She is her own Nauman cover band.)

Three or four years ago, when Western Bridge exhibited Jason Dodge’s Into Black from 2006, I thought the project came perilously close to nothing at all. Today the economy of its means strikes me as oddly moving. It consists of undeveloped photo paper exposed for the first time at sunrise on the vernal equinox 2006 in eight different places in the world. The sheets are blanks aspiring to color, darks groping toward light.

Maybe it’s the company Into Black is currently keeping, not just the other artists in the show, but other work by Dodge, including your death (copper pipe) and a current (electric). Both are a lovely kind of pared down poetry.

That leaves Ryan Gander and his process wallpaper. (Image of detail from Felix provides a stage, from A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, from 2008.

He failed to achieve a likeness, but his documentation of that failure is robust.

Through July 31. Open Thursdays-Saturdays, noon-6 p.m. Free admission.

Among the Seattle exhibits I missed writing about last month, when I was first in New York and later part of ArtsJournal’s malware attack that shut the site down, is Adam Satushek’s Annex at Platform Gallery.

His photos have a whistle-while-we-work nuttiness. With the lightest of touches, Satushek documents the exuberant irrationality of never-say-die. Missing is any sense of disdain, as if the photographer also believes that mice can be men, and a Mr. Fixit approach to decor can turn a tracked home into a forest.

The sun hangs like a phlegm in the dirty handkerchief of the sky in Oscar Tuazon’s recent installation at Maccarone: post-apocalyptic desolation in a fine-boned body, corrosive content merged with grace.

(Tuazon images via)

Meanwhile, in Seattle, his brother Elias Hansen talked about his exhibit at Lawrimore Project last Saturday, the show’s last day.

Here’s Eli’s sun:

It’s a lens, the kind used to spark a fire in the woods, or maybe the bottom of a Coke bottle. Tuazon and Hansen see darkly, like fogs condensed, but there are differences. The former has the feel of a massive utterance, and the latter mutters into his hands, his useful, practical hands.

Another difference: Aside from collaborating with his brother, Tuazon appears to be a bit of a solitary. Hansen almost always works with others and makes art about being with others, specifically, what they did in their youths, looking for shots of sainthood through drugs and kids’ salvage saved in cigar boxes under the bed.

Hansen is also a glass blower, which is inherently a collaborative medium. As Jen Graves noted, there’s more than a touch of Dale Chihuly‘s Venetians in piece below, especially the concrete urn at the lower right:

Like Mark Zirpel, Hansen is a new future for Northwest glass. Stripped bare of an interest in the decorative, their brides no longer look to Versailles or Murano. They use the trains of their dresses to make tents, and the cakes they eat come from ovens they build themselves. (Previous post here.)

Seattle’s Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London’s Stolen Space Gallery, May 14-30. London is a tea and toast town, and that’s exactly what Krafft and Leavitt have to offer – tea and toast.

Krafft:

Leavitt:

Via

Becomes a headline.

Dash Snow, Untitled, 2007, Collage on wood, 70 x 70 inches

Somebody’s always throwing bricks…

Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Vachel Lindsay

Robert Arneson
Brick with Hand of
1991
modeled 1972
bronze
9 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 4 inches

Before Robert Arneson achieved his signature style, he was so enamored by Peter Voulkos‘ corrosive clay that Arneson almost followed him from the Bay Area to L.A.

Instead, Arneson went North to teach at U.C. Davis, where the West Coast Funk dynasty took root and grew, partly inspired by Chicago’s Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, key Hairy Who figures in briefly California, drawn by the prospect of a paying job (his).

Manhattan is not the first place one would be expect to see an excellent exhibit tracing the roots of Arneson’s journey, from boundary-pushing potter to Rabelaisian, high-style story-teller, but New York is where you find everything; including, creeping in along the edges, an acknowledgment of the West Coast beyond L.A.

For this museum-quality trip through Bay Area art history, 1956-66, N.Y. can thank the George Adams Gallery. It proves that instead of starting out as a second-class Voulkos, Arneson was always himself. Although both were equally committed to clay, Arneson loved the world’s cheap charm (and New York’s Pop)  too much to be entirely comfortable in Voulkos’ high-minded clay version of Abstract Expressionism. While Voulkos tore into his slash and burn, Arneson’s achieved his own kind of comic and forlorn lumpiness, a version of Ab Ex unknown at the time but later explored to great effect by Philip Guston.

Arneson, Egg Pot
1959
glazed ceramic
10 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

That pot eventually led to this glory: Pei-Pee
1964
glazed ceramic
9 x 19 3/4 x 14 inches.

Also terrific:

Richard Tuttle (drawings and installation) at Sperone Westwater. This must be a no-hard-feelings show, as Tuttle left SW for Pace. Tuttle is the 21st Century’s Paul Klee. Nobody else who’s now alive can take a line for a walk with such understated power.

Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone. Three large video screens, cheap jokes in the Richard Prince vein taken in another direction, haunting, heartfelt and unlike Prince’s, genuinely funny.

Glenn Rudolph at Bruce Silverstein, selected by Matthew Higgs.

Rudolph Cherry Picker 2002 Archival inkjet print 30 x 30 inches

Nice to see Rudolph in New York, especially because, living in Seattle, he no longer has a Seattle gallery. I’d love to see Rudolph’s train photos paired with Justine Kurland’s from This Train Is Bound For Glory.

Higgs:

I first saw Glenn Rudolph’s work in 2003 in Portland, OR. I was living
in Oakland, CA, at the time and I’d been invited to Portland by the
artist Harrell Fletcher to give a talk. The talk was held in a gallery
space where Glenn’s work was on display. I’d never heard of Glenn or
seen any of his work. I’d no idea where he was from, how old he was or
what he’d done before. His work immediately made me think of other
artists’ work – all great art has this effect. Glenn seemed to have
absorbed the history of American photography and then distilled it into
something uniquely his own. His work is profoundly local. This is
important to acknowledge. Even though I knew nothing of the people and
places depicted in his images, Glenn’s evident empathy for his subjects
made them strangely familiar. This is hard to pull off and it’s not
something that can be taught.

Catherine Opie at Barbara Gladstone. Opie at her most voluptuous. New York poet Eileen Myles is in this show, rounding out her life in photography. Robert Mapplethorpe shot her in the 1970s. On hearing she was a poet, he advised her to put together a band. The Mapplethorpe hangs in her tiny apartment in the East Village, in a bathroom too small for a shower, never mind a tub. Really good poet, but poets who do not form bands (and do not get tenure) tend to live large only in their spacious minds.

Obviously not a poet:

Jenny (Bed), 2009 Chromogenic Print; (37 1/2 x 50 inches)

Finally, Rina Castelnuovo at Andrea Meislin, documentary photos along the Palestine-Israel divide. Castelnuovo gives both sides full human weight, although the image of an Orthodox Jewish man casually throwing his drink at a cowering Palestinian woman whose only crime is to try to pass him on the street, upends the show. He is so casual in his contempt, and she is so afraid.

Via

Still the best word on art & DNA is Robin Held’s 2002 exhibit, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Gallery, my review here.