Archives for 2010

The last gasp of a dying order or the revitalized root music of American racism?

From NYDailyNews.com. Full story here.

Artists who painted a mural at an elementary school in Prescott depicting four students, with the most prominent being a Hispanic boy, were asked to lighten the faces amid taunts and tensions.
R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the Prescott Downtown Mural Project, told a local newspaper passersby regularly shouted racially charged comments at his group while they were creating the mural at the Miller Valley Elementary School.
“You’re desecrating our school,” “Get the ni—- off the wall,” “Get the sp– off the wall,” were common, Wall said. “The pressure stayed up consistently,” Wall said. “We had two months of cars shouting at us.”

Hinshaw/AP
Pamela J. Smith and R.E. Wall sit on the scaffolding in front of the
Miller Valley School Mural titled “Go on Green” in Prescott, Ariz.

Wall said his artists began touching up the mural earlier this week.
“They want us to lighten up the forehead and the cheeks [of the boy in the center], and make him look like he is coming into the light,” he said. The school told Wall they want the children to appear more “radiant and happy.”
The school’s principal, Jeff Lane, told the newspaper he asked the artists to “remove some shadowing that made the faces darker than they are.”

Lots of comments on this post. I want to thank the artists themselves, who graciously offered the most basic metaphoric response imaginable, and everybody else. 

Apocalypse Now surf scene, homemade 2010 Afghanistan update (to Gaga). Via. If we were fighting with this music video instead of weapons, wouldn’t everybody be dancing in the streets?

Blake Fall-Conroy via Wasteman Wonders

Blake Fall-Conroy Minimum Wage Machine (Work in Progress)
2008
Custom electronics, change sorter, wood, plexiglas, motor, misc. hardware, pennies (approx. 15 x 19 x 72 inches)

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.

And (good god) sexism. That’s what it sounds like when Marly Guthrie covers Nelson’s Travelin’ Man. (Via Molly Lambert, who titled her entry, Ricky Nelson never had immigration problems.)

Andy Warhol considered himself a camera. He was more like a mirror. Into his mirror the culture gazed. Every little thing about the people in it – from the soup in their bowl to the money in their pocket – is art.

In my youth when visiting friends, a photo of the host on the wall was worrying but not conclusive, especially if some other person, place or thing shared the frame and could be considered the point: a favorite haunt, horse, child, lover, dead parent. Two or more photos of the host alone? No need to ask which way that wind blew – into a full-blown case of narcissistic personality disorder. I might wrap that person up but never take him home.

Today guileless youth post hundreds of photos of themselves on Facebook. They carry themselves in their phones and on their laptops, never far away from the chance to take more photos of the subject dearest to their hearts, as if they were each their own church, genuflecting at their own altar. 

Someone peripherally involved with a struggling chamber orchestra recently confided that the problem is the music director. He tries to sell the idea that art is worth an encounter rather than the reassurance that the community already owns the art and has a home there.

Again and I know I’m being an old fart: For me the appeal of art was that it offered something greater than myself, and that by engaging it, I could find my way into the deep end of the pool.

Enter Warhol, whom I long resisted. I used to think he made the idea of the deep end obsolete, and I mourned its passing. In time I realized that he made the idea of the shallow end obsolete, that everything can open up and contain a world.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum, Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death: Andy Warhol Media Works is Warhol at his most unguarded. He loved the people represented here, and they loved him. For him, they dispensed with the shellacked smiles of the camera ready, caught the mood of their moment and reflected it back to him.

Himself he didn’t spare. Why is it that Warhol’s version of himself as an old drag queen has a Wife-of-Bath elan while Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits as aging matrons are dry at their root? Adrian Searle wrote of the series that Sherman’s work is “more durable than it looks.”  Searle is brilliant, but what does that mean in the context of now? Like Oscar Wilde before him, Warhol taught us to judge by looks.

Curated by Marisa Sánchez, Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death is a clean, straight shot of Warhol, including his Screen Tests projected large across two galleries, photobooth strips, sewn photos  and Polaroids. The man who had a lot to say about being alone was almost never alone. These are his people, his team pre, during and post Factory. On the evidence of this show, despite being shot, being the subject of endless bad reviews and in possession of many personal foibles, it was great to be him.

Only one quibble: the title. Why Love Fear Pleasure Lust Pain Glamour Death? Isn’t that title taken already? I refer of course to Bruce Nauman’s 1983 neon circle: Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain.

Billy Howard’s gallery on the northern edge of Pioneer Square is open for its final First Thursday Gallery Walk tonight, 6-8 p.m. (Previous post on his closure here.)

Howard’s last exhibit is Patti Warashina, a pioneering figure in West Coast ceramics, one of a trio who brought Seattle ceramics to national attention in the 1970s. (The others – all from the art faculty at the University of Washington – are the late Howard Kottler and the late Robert Sperry, the latter her husband.)

Kottler had no false moves. Sperry had one great one – cracked, sea-foam surface plates. Warashina is the most erratic – across her long career scoring big and striking out. The nerve and wit of her best work derives from a fundamental simplicity. Her worst is overworked, sporting surface decoration that has little to do with the figure underneath it.

Besides being way too crowded (the gallery’s fault), the current show presents Warashina at her most festively inert.

Patti Warashina
Figure D
2010
whiteware and mixed media
22″ x 18.5″ x 17″

For comparision, consider how Claudia Fitch uses color on a ceramic figure. (There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit….via)

TORSO (2), 2006
Ceramic porcelain
13.5 x 7.5 x 6.5 inches, Greg Kucera Gallery

Through June 12.

In the life of rural America, rocky outcrops include the possibility of a hole.

Peter Sutherland is drawn to places that are filler on the country’s psychic map, places where time lags between meals, and nothing in particular looms on the horizon. What drew him to the hole above was not the possibility of a bear within but the youth without. They decorated the edge of the dark as a homage.

Boredom interests him. Sutherland makes art of odd games, twists of light, lying around. Ordinary burdens and accidental beauties pause for him to take their picture. About his exhibit last year at the ATM Gallery, Blame It On The Dog, Roberta Smith wrote:

Mr. Sutherland is something of a multitasker. In addition to writing
rather well (in the show’s small catalog), he is also a filmmaker.
Whatever he does seems to celebrate the potential for inspiration in
even the most pedestrian and barren facts of American life. Every
instant is a possible image; every image a likely story.

The last image, of the artist balancing a knife on his palm, is a still from a video. It’s the first thing you see upon entering Lawrimore Project. If you’re not planning to enter Lawrimore Project, you can see the video online by going to Sutherland’s Website, here, and clicking the last word of his essay, which is joy.

Through June 26.

If painting is what John Russell called a “vegetable construct that changes in time,” there’s no reason a painter can’t accelerate the progress. Before Plank Lean Painting left Andrew Dadson‘s studio in Vancouver B.C., he retracted it.

Andrew Dadson Plank Lean Painting #2, 2010.
Oil on canvas.
60 x 60 x 10 inches

Plank Lean Painting, detail

What symphonies of old-time push and pull are buried underneath the black? Leftover colors gather at the painting’s edge like clues at a crime scene. And this is the truth about painting. Dadson’s attempt to kill it gave it license to rise again in another form, from bloom to blight, channeling Rothko.

Voter’s Ink, 2008
Iraqi voter ink on canvas
framed with UV Plex
42 x 32 inches (reversible vertically)

Making a painting from Iraqi voter ink embraces accelerated change.  The piece will continue to develop in the light, losing purple and gaining gold, its specifics lost in an atmosphere over which the artist has no control. For someone who is not primarily a painter, his contributions to a medium that only momentarily has his attention are extraordinary.

Through June 26 at Lawrimore Project. Jessica Powers on Dadson here.

Say you are represented by the most innovative gallery space in the Northwest – simultaneously a  warehouse, salon, white cube and video theater. It’s your turn. You can do whatever you want there, take as much space as you want. If you’re Matt Browning, you want to burrow into the furthest corner of the deepest back space (in the salon), wall off the fireplace and use its top as a shelf for a miniature forest of palm-sized, reconstituted  trees whittled into cone-like wedges full of boiled pine sap. Other than that, the room is empty.

In the middle of the worst environmental disaster since the Ice Age, Browning’s modesty is appealing. Appealing and deceptive. It takes a major artist to pull off this kind of scale shift.

And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.

A. E. Housman

But begin the game anew…too little, too late, but imperative nonetheless.

Browning, detail:

Titled Tradition as Adapative Strategy, Browning’s foray into the world of back-porch whittlers builds the conceptual from a foundation of masculine craft. Each piece comes from one block of wood he carved into a cone suspended from a brace. He poured the pitch into the cones, which are also funnels.

And  time machines. Like oil in water, the pitch will continue to move at its own leisurely imperatives. (See Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland.)

Browning conceived of his show before the Gulf of Mexico promised to become a dead zone, but surely he saw it coming. A consumer society consumes itself. After eight deregulated years of the Bush administration, the self-consumption is an orgy. Browning’s adaptive strategy offers no solutions, save for the most basic.

In the face of ruin, the handy man make something. He jerry-rigs a repair and failing that,  fashions a memorial. Drawing on skills passed down from generations, he speaks to future generations with his actions: Take up your bed and walk, or, as Fergus said in The Crying Game, pick up your teeth with broken fingers.

Jen Graves on Matt Browning here. Through June 26.