Archives for July 2010

There’s a one-word hint in Michiko Kakutani opening paragraph that her review of Laurence Gonzales’ novel will take a disparaging tone:

Think of a contemporary version of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in which an egotistical scientist’s creation is not a hideous-looking monster but a well-mannered teenage girl who quotes Shakespeare, listens to Tom Petty and uses Facebook and YouTube. This is the high-concept premise of Laurence Gonzales’s lumpy new novel, “Lucy.” (more)

Right. It’s “lumpy.” When lumpy is the first descriptive in a book review, that review will fall short of rave. The same can’t be said in visual art, where a critic might easily use the word as praise. In visual art, silky is not a top and lumpy a bottom. They are just another spectrum across which artists secure a place.

(Via)

Click here, via Molly Norris.

From a physical understanding of volume, Peter Millett built a cake.

His triangles join, like cupped hands, to make a bowl.

FEAST BOWL, 2009
Painted wood
25 x 21 x 8 inches
$7,500

He moves back and forth between wood and steel, from carving into a solid to manipulating the empty skin of metal. In metal he can extend and twist a triangle. When triangles try to become a square, they fail, just as, in Millett’s mind, the American effort to remake Iraq in its image will fail.

OPEN SQUARE, 2009
Welded steel
38 x 40 x 6 inches

He makes no models or drawings for his sculpture, preferring to work directly with what he calls the “real stuff.” While real stuff is in his hands, real stuff is in his head. His current exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery, titled Skyscrapers, is a tribute to architects who blur the line between sculpture and buildings, making art that people inhabit high in the sky.  With a tough elegance that compromises on nothing, his sculptures and
drawings collaborate to create a weathered sense of place.
Lisa Corrin called his
work “disembodied architecture,” and that’s certainly part of it.

In HOTSEAT  (2010
Welded steel
60 x 22 x 12 inches), his imaginary architecture becomes an emblem of mourning. The moire-pattern of its skin function as windows, something like the Bridge of Sighs but more what prisoners in their Guantánamo Bay holding cells might see through chain-link. The few accused with evidence of substantial crimes mingle with those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and those who are guilty of thought crimes.

Decades ago, traveling in Iran, Millett was struck with the spare
beauty of the cities, how homes and mosques had almost no furniture, and
how light streaming through windows was filtered by latticework grills,
giving the emptiness inside a patterned sense of form. 
An affinity for Middle Eastern architecture and decor is fundamental to
his work. It’s hardwired into what he does. He’s not as much influenced
as drawn to admire.

That admiration is the subtext of his modernist
form. Following Brancusi and Noguchi, his work is more elemental than
minimalist, rooted not just in nature but in human
nature. Millett has his rich color sense largely in check, giving free rein
only to rust. The range of his rust tonalities is a marvel, from cold
and dark to dappled across a fluid expanse and warm in places as
oven-baked bread.

Through August 14.

The Northwest sound continues to evolve.

Following William Blake, M. Ward turned Buddy Holly’s song of  innocence into one of experience. I love how Ward lags slightly behind the beat, taking the plunge but knowing it won’t go well. The lyrics make more sense Ward’s way: “When you say, I love you, I say, rave on.”

Correction: The narrative in this post contains a crucial error. While Molly Norris published her cartoon – Will the Real Likeness of the Prophet Mohammad Please Stand Up? – she did not launch the Draw Mohammad Day facebook thread. 

After Comedy Central censored an episode of “South Park” that featured Muhammad in a bear suit, The Simpsons responded:

Who were they afraid of? The usual thugs ready to kill anyone who doesn’t see the world their way. Seattle artist Molly Norris attempted to lighten the issue with humor. Can’t depict Mohammad? How about as a purse, a cherry or a spool of thread?
Thinking like would attract like, she opened a facebook page and invited everybody to participate in Draw Mohammad Day. She was right; like did call to like. There was humor, a significant amount of art savvy and a gentle protest against those who make death threats against cartoonists.
.Then the haters showed up and filled pages with their contempt for all Muslims. Dismayed, Norris tried to shut it down. Too late, because hate also calls to hate.

According to a Sunday story in the New York Daily News, Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlakih has singled her out for death, calling her a “prime target.” The FBI told her they are taking the threat very seriously.

If that isn’t bad enough, Huffington Post columnist Eric Lurio weighed in with his own attack on Norris, saying that her interest in gentle satire makes her a wimp and her interest in staying alive makes her a coward.

Dear Mr. Lurio: If you’re so interested in getting murdered, why don’t you go taunt a killer or two? How about thousands of killers? Want your name in their rifle sights? I don’t know if you’re a coward, but I do know you’re a bully, a bore and a fool. Crawl back under your rock and leave Molly Norris alone.

Below, Norris in 2008, on the right. On the left, her collage, Nat King Cole, 2008, Paper, wire, gator board, paint, and glue, 60 in. x 32 in. x 9 in. 
IMAGE REMOVED

Ries Niemi, commenting on this post, On Dale Chihuly’s tide, other boats can rise, wrote:

I am curious, “Pro-Chihuly”, and others – please name a single Chiluly artwork that you consider a masterpiece. Or even one that is a great work of art that deserves to be pictured in the next version of Janson.
Cause I have seen a lot of em, and they are all middling examples of production craft, from my viewpoint. And, having worked in the production craft world, proudly, for over 15 years, I have seen a LOT of production craft.

There are, without doubt, Glass ARTISTS out there- Therman Statom, Richard Marquis, Larry Bell, Josiah McEleney, William Morris, Mario Mertz, Lucas Samaras, and lots more artists making sculptures from glass.
And there are quite a few excellent, unrepentant craftsmen and women who make objects of utility and beauty from glass.
A good two or three dozen of whom I would rank well above Chihuly in the “importance” scale, when it comes to glass art.

Don’t get me wrong – I, like everyone else, wore that Chihuly oil in the sixties- I still like the smell.
But aside from his big assemblage pieces, not a single one of his works had any character, or soul, or presence to lift it from run of the mill production glassblowing, and to counteract its failings, it falls back on the old crutch of the essential beauty of the medium.

The big groupings work, I suppose, in a classic Morris Lapidus, More is More kind of way, but compared to other artists who overwhelm with volume, like Tony Cragg or Armand, they lack all the cultural signifiers, history, meaning, and layers of information that make a good Cragg or Armand hold up.
As they say in Texas- All hat, no cows.

In other words, name that masterpiece. Masterpiece? If the word were a game, nobody would play. Not only is it freighted with internalized exclamation points, it has devolved into a sales tool. When auctioneers use it, they mean anything that opens at $20 million.

For the purposes of answering Niemi, however, I’ll say it’s a piece that rises from a significant body of work to achieve the artist’s potential. Since Chihuly is noted for his riotous color, the pair of chandeliers hanging at the ends of the block-long lobby in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall might seem an odd choice. They are muted yellow and white silver. But Chihuly’s power as a colorist is most evident when he dials down.

DALE CHIHULY
BENAROYA HALL GOLD CHANDELIER, 1998
15 x 10 x 10′

BENAROYA HALL, SEATTLE, WA
DALE CHIHULY
BENAROYA HALL SILVER CHANDELIER, 1998
20 x 10 x 10′

Detail, SILVER CHANDELIER

Pure as Communion wafers, these chandeliers have bawdy hearts. They push the idea of the decorative past beauty, past reason and past Surrealism, into a
kind of hydroponic glass-art gardening.
They reveal his extravagance for what it
is, the urge to make a life form. He wants to freeze the motion of hot
glass without stopping its molten flow.

The decorative remains controversial in contemporary art.

Kenneth Baker:

A fair-minded critic must ask why Chihuly’s work cannot be taken
seriously as sculpture. Sculptors of acknowledged importance have at
times made good use of glass: Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Christopher
Wilmarth (1943-1987), Barry Le Va, Kiki Smith. But all of them shunned
Chihuly’s forte: decoration. (more)

Baker is fair-minded, but he came of age during the height of Minimalism, honed his vision then and never expanded it. Why should he?  Life is short. Baker is clean, but attacks on the plan to create a Chihuly fun house in Seattle Center tend to be dirty. They’re not about the man’s art. They’re about him.

The Stranger doesn’t bother with aesthetics in its unremitting campaign to discredit him. It expresses something ugly in the core of Seattle’s character, a desire to cut large-scale locals down to size. After Chuck Close first hit it big in New York, he stopped by First Thursday to say hello to old friends. Close said later that few would talk to him. We like to think we’ve changed since then, but have we?

Good piece on Chihuly by Tina Oldknow.

Zoe Strauss, from her as-yet unedited file of photos taken in the Gulf. (Story via, with headline from a comment on her site by rolopix.)

Being a British company, BP is best understood by British stand up. (Translation to American models is seamless.)

Clarke & Dawe, The Front Fell Off

Andrew Graham-Dixon on David Shrigley’s contribution to the Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, an indignant yet deceased feline on a plinth:

This defiantly ambiguous object could be seen in a number of ways. Is it
Damien Hirst redone as taxidermical stand-up comedy (its theme, after
all, is pretty well identical to the title Hirst gave to his original,
Saatchi-sponsored shark in formaldehyde, namely The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Someone Living)? Or is it Monty
Python’s Dead Parrot sketch reworked as a piece of Conceptual Art?
Then again, if Cedar Lewisohn is right, maybe Monty Python’s parrot
sketch was a piece of Conceptual Art in the first place. (more)

Jean Marc Calvert

Mike Simi Beef Stew Monster
Custom fabricated robotics and software program, cast plastic, wood 2007 (Video here)