Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
The casual unfolding on the street, the elaborately effortless ritual, the bit with the dropped paper (working with accident), the deep friendship, the art of the body in motion: I love these dancers and this video. (via)
Dancers: No Noize (red jacket), Man (back jacket), BJ (striped shirt), Dreal (white shirt).
Directed and edited by Yoram Savion, Music by Erk tha Jerk!!
Imagine that the three top contestants on Work of Art were felled by injuries. A sad situation would have ensued. On So You Think You Can Dance, the talent was far deeper. Even though the top dancer (Alex Wong) and two close seconds (Ashley Galvan and Billy Bell) were either taken out or compromised by injuries, they left the show in good hands.
About those injuries, here’s a reasonable comment from Sara Marsh:
The intensity has doubled for the contestants this year, which is
something that the judges have regularly mentioned. Often, we hear that
it’s amazing when a dancer performs well in a new style, because last
year the dancers weren’t expected to be at the same point. There were
twice as many of them, and the learning curve was lower. Each contestant
danced half as often as they do this year.
I wonder if the new
format – picking only the top ten (or eleven, in this case) instead of
the top twenty dancers from Vegas week – is taking too great a toll on
these young dancers. Injuries like the ones Alex and Ashley sustained
are not trifling; these kinds of injuries can get in the way of a
dancer’s potential and career. (more)
Judges on both shows had problems (here and here), not that frustration with those in charge is anything new.
Gabriel Cornelius von Max – “Monkeys as Judges of Art” 1889 (via)
For the finales, both sets of judges pulled themselves together and made a case that they deserve to be there.
Lauren Froderman won So You Think. Any of the top three would have been good choices. Abdi Farah won Work of Art. By no stretch is he a stellar representative of who’s out there, off the major career track and deserving a spot. I was rooting for most of the season Miles Mendenhall but could have voted for Peregrine Honig.
It’s true Farah stepped up for the final show, pushing past his insularity and conventional aesthetics to get a toehold into the plausible. Considering the artists working across the country without any particular notice who could have delivered on the show’s premises, the original question remains: Who picked these people?
The moment I saw John Travolta walking to a Bee Gees’ beat down a Brooklyn street, I began to take pop-culture dance seriously. Looking back, the movie is weak in the way all but the best dance movies are. The plot’s creaky to the point of unendurable, and that’s not counting the ’80s clothes and hair. Travolta’s dancing still shines. Thirty years after the fact and trapped in a bad movie, he works silence into cheap dazzle to get gold.
He the man, but what hung over the dance floor continues to make its appearance in art. Below, the disco ball as contributory influence on discards, broken lights, dead planets and chandeliers. Echoing behind all is the music of their sphere: You can tell by the way I use my walk… Rhythm, ladies and gentlemen, rhythm, even when, in David Thompson’s phrase, playing torch songs on dead batteries.
Jabu Arnell Disco Ball #2,3 and 4 2009
Arnaldo Pomodoro, DISCO bronze with gold patina, 36 inches in diameter, 1966, second artist’s proof from an original edition of 3 (via)
Chris Burden Medusa’s Head (American, born 1946)
1990. Plywood, steel, cement, rock, model railroad trains and tracks, 14′ (426.7 cm) in diameter.
Gretchen Bennett, The dull flame of desire
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
Birth was the death of him.
SuttonBeresCuller – Working for a living
Alex Schweder – Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice…
Adam Satushek – a cup to lip problem
Brian Tolle– building your home on family values
Hans van Meeuwen – We’ve got to get out of this place
Fred Muram– romancing the unavailable male…
Edward Curtis, 1958-1952
More from those who are not afraid to go back in order to go forward.
Dan Carrillo, Jason Hirata, 2010
The Quileute on the Northwest Coast did not anticipate hordes of visitors would seek them out to say they are way cool. How could they? Previous to the Twilight saga, they were not exactly on pop culture’s radar, and now they’re bright lights based on false information. Yes, in Quileute mythology they dervive from wolves, but not (crucial difference) werewolves.
Wolf headdress, late 19th-early 20th century, Quileute, wood, paint, hair, 6 x 13 x 5 ½ in., Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
Working with Seattle Art Museum’s Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American art, the tribe has decided to let its objects tell the tale. Behind the Scenes: The Real Story of the Quileute Wolves opens August 14 with a performance by the Quileute tribe, (1-3:30 p.m.) with an exhibition blessing at noon.
A small Native community, knit together by ancient beliefs, living in their ancestral homelands–a remote coastal village, ringed with primordial forests and in the shadow of Mt. Olympus–seems like a fitting scenario for a supernatural story line. Cast as shape-shifting werewolves in the Twilight saga books and films, opposite a band of sophisticated vampires, the Quileute really do have ties to wolves–but not werewolves!
Quileute oral traditions trace their distinguished ancestry back to myth time when the powerful transformer, Kwa-ti, changed a pair of wolves into the first Quileute people. Thus began a long association with the wolf. I don’t know if Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, knew this but her mention of the mysterious Quileute tribe and an ancient treaty with vampires catapulted their small nation into notoriety.
From my point of view, they have shown remarkable poise in dealing with their new-found fame. In fact, they have collaborated with the museum for the last several months on a special exhibition of their art, most of which has been in the storehouses of major museums, in order to tell the authentic story of their wolf connections.
The wolf headdresses, sculptures of spirit beings, rattles, drums, and other objects–some more than 100 years old–were collected at a time when Quileute traditions were suppressed. What you will see when you come to the exhibition at SAM are those old traditions but, more importantly, how they have been kept vital and alive.
If an art critic wrote that he/she was startled to see a work of genius made from found objects, that critic would be consigned to the school of out-of-it. Since the early 20th Century, reworking found objects has been a staple. Needless to say, that critic would not be employed by the New York Times, where Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Ken Johnson and Michael Kimmelman set a higher standard.
Dance criticism is another matter. The school of out-of-it is in session at the Times whenever Alastair Macaulay ventures into the contemporary. In ballet, Macaulay has few peers. He conveys the depth of his understandings with clarity and even elegance. And yet contemporary reminds for him a mystery. Remember that he is the only full-time dance critic one of the only full-time dance critics employed full time at a newspaper in America. (There’s also Sarah Kaufman.)
Here’s Macaulay’s opening sentence for a Mark Morris review:
It’s startling to see a work of genius composed largely from movements as basic as walking, running, hopping, skipping, lying down and the like. (more)
Startling? Dance made of ordinary movements is, like the found object in art, ubiquitous. More than that. Following Paul Taylor’s Esplanade from 1975, it has become the single most important element in dance of the last 35 years. In her review, Arlene Croce heralded Esplanade as conferring “a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives.”
I saw it in 1975 and was struck dumb by joy. That version is now available on YouTube, with the endlessly great original dancers.
…more is better. Stacked, clumped, stored and piled. Below, a dip into the ocean of those who use repetition as an aesthetic principle.
Jannis Kounellis
UNTITLED, 2006
Found wooden tables, bowl, knife, red fish
32 x 172 x 179 inches
Chris Engman ABANDONED CRATES, 2007
Archival inkjet print
40 x 49 inches
Edition of 6, and THE AUDIENCE, 2004 Archival inkjet print 40 x 48 inches
Zelig Kurland File Room, Multnomah County Courthouse
2004 chromagenic print, edition 8
Colleen Wood, Pencils via I’m Revolting
Ed Wicklander He loves his kitties and has the carvings to prove it.
Kate Ericson / Mel Ziegler
Statue of Liberty, 1988
Etched glass jars and paint on metal shelves
72″ x 5″ x 5″
Jonathan Seliger Stretched Snowman, 2007
Automotive enamel on aluminum
99″ x 28″ x 26″
(For more of similar, see Things Organized Neatly.)
The Cartoonists Network is in favor of freedom of expression. I would have thought that went without saying, but considering the many death threats leveled at cartoonists around the globe, they must have felt the redundancy necessary. Petition here, signed by screens full of scribblers, sent by email from Seattle’s Molly Norris. She is one of the cartoonists the Network defends. If Norris were any sweeter, she’d cause cavities. Threatening her life throws into high relief the insanity of radical Islam. Typical Norris cartoon below:
an ArtsJournal blog
