Archives for August 2010

Tim Bavington can see the strip from his studio, which is part of what he likes about Las Vegas. Aside from the cheap space, cheap shrimp cocktails and free parking, he likes the neon at dusk. Dusk is the magic hour, when the signs smeared against the sky fight the dark.

The first time he saw Vegas he was 14, visiting his father after the divorce, leaving the airport in a Cadillac. From a bleak London neighborhood, Bavington rode into the culture of flash American Etch-A-Sketch.

He’d grown up drawing. Drawing is as natural to him as brushing his teeth or turning on the telly. By the time he met Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Bavington was making good money working on The Simpsons, drawing everything but the animations. (Pick up a Simpsons’ calendar or comic book from the ’90s, chances are pretty good you’re looking at his work.)

Abstraction intrigued him. He followed Dave Hickey‘s advice and enrolled in graduate school in Las Vegas, where Hickey was on the faculty. Hickey isn’t for everybody, but for Bavington, he was key to a wider world.

As a painter, he especially admires abstraction from the ’60s, first, Bridget Riley, but also Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. They were all improvisers from the jazz tradition, but Bavington is not only a planner, he’s rock ‘n’ roll to his boots. When he gets to jazz, it’s through rock, as in, John Coltrane from Jimi Hendrix.

Admiration of elders is a necessary first step, locating an artist in a particular territory, but as Lester Young told the teenage drummer Max Roach, “You can’t join the throng till you write your own song.”

Currently at Greg Kucera, a survey of Bavington’s terrain: echoes of Ed Ruscha, but in color, not language.

IT’S GOOD (TO BE FREE), 2008 Synthetic polymer on canvas 54 x 72 inches

Using synthetic paints, his colors have a digital glow. Their edges are vague, as if their focus
needs adjusting. In their shimmer is a kinder, gentler version of his ’60s forerunners. Some of his stripes are based on
commercial bar codes writ large and radiant. Others relate to music. But
instead of the metaphoric music/art tradition of early 20th-century
modernists such as Kandinsky, Bavington’s in sync with a wised-up
literalism.
He matches the 12 tones of a musical scale with 12 tones from the color
wheel, assigning each note a particular color,  the bandwidth of
each stripe determined by the length of each note with a musical
sequence.

OUT OF TIME, OUT OF TUNE (FRETBOARD), 2010
Synthetic polymer on canvas
12 x 112.5 inches

Much has been made of Bavington’s methods – the match between color and sound a deadpan echo of Kandinsky’s early 20th Century efforts to paint music. His success is not in his self-assigned marching orders, however, but in the march itself. His colors are candy, but they have the toughness of black and white.

Lester Young also warned Max Roach about being a “repeater pencil.” Bavington, like Roach way before him, is in no danger of that. His strategies are elastic, with his latest work resembling some sort of merger between Gene Davis and Uta Barth, veering back to Rothko.

JUMP ON IT, 2010
Synthetic polymer on canvas
24 x 24 inches

Through Oct. 2.

Like the unnamed narrator of his first novel, Life With A Star, the Jewish writer Jiri Weil had a chance to escape from Prague just before the German invasion in 1939, but he couldn’t bear to leave.

Life With A Star:

I was born here, I knew almost every street, I had my own cafe, my movie house, my newsstand and tobacco shop.

Weil faked a suicide so his name would be struck from the Nazis’ list; he survived the war in hiding. His characters didn’t fare as well.

At one time we all dreamed of miracles and now we didn’t like it when they occurred. We would have preferred to live calmly and simply, instead of on the edge of our seats….

Digging our graves, we counted every minute separating us from death. As long as we held the handles of our shovels, as long as our fingers held a handle, as long as our fingers were freezing and the skin on our hands was raw, we were alive…

We would never have admitted that our lives were worthless, because they were our lives, our unique and unrepeatable lives.

I thought of these sentences looking at Jesse Edwards‘ photos of bleak marginalia. Our unique and unrepeatable lives….

And I thought of the video tribute to The Hooters, below. We are still living in the hangover of those European murders, but as Weil who witnessed them was able to report, the important thing to the victims was not their deaths but their lives.

First a story from 2006:

Three ace P-I business reporters, Todd Bishop, John Cook and Dan Richman, were strolling past the Olympic Sculpture Park, which will open Jan. 20 on the Seattle waterfront. Richman asked his friends what they thought of the eraser. What eraser, asked Cook. Bishop looked around and nodded. Yeah, what eraser?

(Photo via)

Cook and Bishop are too young to have used or even seen a typewriter eraser. By the time they were old enough to correct a text, they let their pudgy fingers do the walking and press delete…To somebody who has never seen the original model, Claes Oldenburg’s eraser looks like an odd abstraction, maybe an orange wheel attached to a beat-up broom. (more)

Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala

Dalton Ghetti

Robert Lazzarini

Tim Roda

Zack Bent

Mira Morse

Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer A Nail

Grant Barnhart

Original post. Suggestions from readers below. Thank you all.

From MWnyc, at the Metropolitan Opera House

From Gala, Appendix Project Space: Tabor Robak

From Emily Pothast, Adam Ekberg‘s Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, via Platform Gallery

From EllenL, Todd Simeone’s Record Cover in a Flash (Air Supply), 2006
Ultrachrome Inkjet print
28″ x 28″
Ed. 1 of 3, via James Harris Gallery

From Jill, Dave Muller’s
Centers & Radii b/w
Celebrity Top Tens, via Anthony Meier Fine Arts
From Netherzone, John Armleder, (first image via)

Laura Castellanos, from Laura Castellanos

My original post concentrated on the romantic use of sepia and related tones. Part two is its opposite – anti-romance sepia, following James Joyce, that the past is a nightmare from which he is unable to awake.

Jason Mitchell, Portrait of Scott D. Wilson

Marsha Burns, from Portraits of Auschwitz and Buchenwald

Christopher Knight’s disdain for Jerry Saltz has a religious quality. (What is truth; said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.)

Knight:

Never pass judgment on the merits of art you haven’t actually seen. I would no more review art from reproductions on a museum’s website or in a magazine than I would from seeing it on a TV show. Be there or be square.

My surprise in finding myself stating what I’ve always thought obvious comes from reading an item posted Wednesday on New York magazine’s website. New York’s Vulture blog (Editor’s note: i.e., Saltz), opines that “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” created a new way to practice art criticism. In online forums and the comment sections of blogs and across Facebook pages, “people who would otherwise have no access to art-world opinion, criticism or power were given voice.”

Really? Art criticism is about having “access” to establishment art-world power?
…

Needless to say, virtually all the “Work of Art” Twitter feeds and
comment threads on all the blogs were written by people who — like me
— have not seen Abdi Farah’s paintings, sculptures and drawings, except
as mediated through a camera.

Art criticism tends to be pretty low-grade without real access to the art.

In
fact, for criticism that’s the only access that really matters. The art
is where the authentic power does or does not lie. Viewers of Bravo’s
TV show haven’t had that chance, although those who do go to the
Brooklyn Museum to see Farah’s work can then expound. (more)

Get thee behind me, Satan, all ye who confuse replicas with the real. Knight argues for an absolute division between real and fake (virtue and vice). I doubt there’s an art critic alive who doesn’t, on an emotional level, agree with him, especially about painting, even realizing, as John Russell put it, a painting is a “vegetable construct that changes in time.”

A direct encounter is the key that slides into the lock and turns the tumblers, but before getting to the nature of that encounter, let me pause to say that critics who rear up to declaim this first principle as if were a rock solid have begun to sound like Bible thumpers.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me… (more, always more)

To brush up on the complexities of the encounter between viewer and the viewed, I suggest Knight click over to John Perreault’s blog and read his entry, Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced the Real? The answer for me is no, as it is for Saltz, for Perreault, for Knight and for all those hundreds of thousands of people who pour every year into art museums instead of being content to click through images on their laptops. But it is a no inside a muddle instead of a clarity. We can’t go on, we go on.

Perreault:

At a 2007 conservation workshop at London’s Tate, there were “collective
gasps” when an original Pevsner, now looking like a “plate of Doritos,”
was shown next to an image of a recently constructed replica of what it
had looked like in its glory day.

Nobody settles for replicas; we all settle for replicas. Why is it that when the homicidally-repressive governments in Russian and China cracked open enough to let art in and out, the West found artists who’d evolved their work from premises of Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol, with whom they’d never had a direct encounter? Credit goes to reproductions in illegally obtained art magazines, passed hand to hand.

We can’t go on, we go on. No need to be so desperately rude about it. As Carolina Miranda so aptly wrote of Knight, meow!

From scraps of fabric not worth saving, women used to make what they called yoyos – fabric bouquets for ornament. Kathryn Glowen makes them from men’s ties as an all-over field – abstraction from personal craft.

Detail:

Reducing men’s ties to knots (even floral knots), is (however sweetly) an emasculation of the male. Glowen’s insistence on the feminine, however, is less a critique of the male than a celebration of a certain kind of woman who is anonymous inside a female sphere: the career-waitress at a cheap diner, the divorcee who picks up her morning paper wearing pom-poms on her slippers, the hat check girl at the roller rink. Be they ever so humble, they dress up.

Instead of being tough and funny, as in Rachel Lachowicz – Untitled (Lipstick urinals) (in 3 parts) Lipstick, wax & hyrocal 15 x 9 x 6 in. 1992
Edition ed. 5 (via)…

or Sherrie Levine, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp),
brass, 12 3/4 x 14 1/2 x 24 3/4″, 1991…

Glowen has more in common with Nancy Drew – Flag Painting (Illuminati)
(45 x 30) glitter on canvas, 2009, after Jasper Johns.

Surrounded by fake flowers and wearing glitter eyeliner, girly-girls don’t care what you think. Feminists didn’t embrace the type until transvestites had, which means that in these bodies of work, Drew and Glowen derive not from female sources, but male ones.

When the Bellevue Arts Museum shut its doors in 2003, the board said the museum had been hobbled by a tough economy, a difficult new building and a failure to find an audience. In 2005, it reopened with a focus on crafts.
Even in craft circles, plenty of people didn’t think it would work.

As Vicki Halper, Seattle crafts curator, put it at the time:

It didn’t work as an art museum. If it doesn’t work as a craft museum, maybe it can be a cat museum. (more)

Halper deftly summarized Seattle’s attitude toward its nearest neighbor, the shopping capitol of the region. Seattle does a lot of sneering at Bellevue, but the city’s only museum has earned respect. Not only is BAM still here despite the increasingly grim economy, it has racked up serious credit for a strong lineup and an intelligent commitment to artists in the region.

This summer, however, BAM drifted into abject amateur hour. 

The Art of Discovery: The Northwest Art Collection of the Junior League of Seattle is a mess. There’s good local art here amid the forgettable, but the presentation is completely uncurated.  As the admirable Ken Johnson recently observed in another context:

Art just isn’t the kind of thing that lends itself to no-budget, laissez-faire populism. You need a higher order of selectivity by and coordination among organizers to produce something that people in the art world are going to feel compelled to see and talk about. (more)

Arline Fisch: Creatures of the Deep is too cute for words. It isn’t art, and it isn’t craft. Maybe, following Halper’s prediction, it could pass muster as cat toys.

I have high hopes for BAM Biennial 2010: Clay Throwdown! It debuts Aug. 28 with an excellent lineup. Also promising is Ginny Ruffner: Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle, opening Oct. 5.

With its current lineup, however, BAM is doing its best to confirm its detractors’ view. That view remains hearty because of the way BAM closed its doors in 2003. Clay Body had opened three days earlier, set for a three-month run. Its curator, Miriam Sternberg, lost her job in the shuffle, and the three artists featured – Claudia Fitch, Patti Warashina and Akio Takamori – did a lot of work for nothing. Seven years down the road, isn’t it time to give that exhibit the run it so richly deserves? Throw in a catalog this time, and bygones will be bygones.

Fitch:

Warashina:

Takamori:

The Frye is Rip Van Winkle with a sequel. It slumbered through the 20th Century and woke up in the 21st. Here’s the sequel: After striving mightily to keep its eyes open, it’s once again nodding off.

Little that Charles and Emma Frye acquired rises to the ranks of first-rate. Charles Frye saw Modernism as an unworthy aberration. Ida Kaye Greathouse, who followed her husband Charles Walser as the museum’s head, was if anything more conservative, although I am fond of a core of her late 19th and early 20th-century American purchases. Yes, she was after big names at reduced prices, rather than the best possible examples of same, but even so she managed to snag some great pictures. 

Senior curator Robin Held sees it as her job to present the collections in the best possible light. She even brought on staff a specialist in the so-called Munich Secession, to help her. Fine, I thought. Let Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker handle the mixed-bag legacy and allow Held to focus on the contemporary moment. That’s her strength and the reason the Seattle audience  developed high expectations from a dubious little institution.

Instead, legacy is in the driver’s seat. Everything now on view dares to be dull.

First up, Ida Kay Greathhouse: A Tribute. Where are her American greats? Not on view.

John Singer Sargent must have been short of cash to paint the vacuous flattery known as Mrs. Frederick William Roller from 1895. Those to continue to see him as shallow can bolster their viewpoint at the Frye.

Thomas Moran did his best work at Yellowstone National Park. He’s a large part of the reason we have national parks. In Venice in 1908, however, he turned in a poor imitation of Turner.

Greathouse adored the Russian expatriate Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin. I imagine she had her pick of that market. Below, Lady in Pink (Portrait of Natalia
Podbelskaya), 1912.

Onward to another Greathouse tick: Northern Latitudes: The Frye and Alaska, featuring  Jules Dahlager, Ted Lambert, Sydney Laurence, Fred
Machetanz, Theodore Richardson, Cleveland Rockwell, Jonathan Van Zyle,
and Eustace Ziegler.  They’re not all terrible painters. I like Rockwell, but why these painters? And why didn’t she pick better examples? Most of the ones she brought home are bombastic at best.

That leaves
Tête-à-tête: 150 paintings from the Charles and Emma’s overexposed, profoundly mediocre holdings; Fred Machetanz (1908-2002) photos lithographs of the standard sublime in Alaska, and the somewhat interesting A Day in Skaguay, filmed by Burton Holmes (1870-1958), who in 1904 coined the term travelogue to advertise travel lectures with projections of hand-painted glass-lantern slides and early films. Interesting that everyone was fashionable and white in Alaska during those early years.

Out of kindness I’m skipping the exhibit exclaiming over Charles Frye’s entrepreneurial efforts. (He was a meat packer and landlord.) Museums need to remember that’s it’s OK to take the money, but they don’t have to kiss the customer on the lips.

The Frye picks up the pace in the fall.

Opening Oct. 9, still more about the Munich Secession: Séance: Albert von Keller and the Occult, but there’s also Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why, featuring sculptures, costumes, props, masks, video- and photo-documentation of
selected past performances of the Seattle performance group as well as a new performance created for the Frye. That could be good. Who gets the catalog? Keller and his swooning ladies, of course.