Archives for 2010

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles

Marianne Moore
1887 – 1972

Modernism scorned the decorative. More than a century later, its patterned flourishes are a kind of ghostly garden for Claudia Fitch, now showing at Greg Kucera.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, 2010
Graphite oil pastel on Strathmore drawing paper
45.5 x 37 inches

The door leads nowhere, but the windows wake you up. So do her figures. Pried from plinths and niches, they wrap themselves in cultural influences and jump into 21st-Century space, landing lightly.

FLATSCREEN, 2009
Ceramic, steel, gator board, flocked paint
26 x 15 x 6 inches

Love the boots. Through June 26.

Loose from their strings or using them as weapons, puppets in contemporary video, collage and sculpture tend toward the coarse and the brutal. They clump through their lives with a relish that is almost obscene, hypnotized by their own desires.

Artists who stand out in this crowded field include Nathalie Djurberg, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Cat Clifford, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Dan Webb, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Chu, Thomas Schutte and Pierre Huyghe.

Add to that list Martha Colburn, whose Puppet Regime is at Ambach & Rice. Like Kentridge, she draws her tragedies from history, but she adds her own wild hair of pop culture and feminist humor. A dense collage of cutout, found and hand-colored figures collide in her videos and small Polaroid photos. Predator and prey flash by, trailing wreckage. Their score is chaos, and they never miss a beat.

Through June 27.

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (via)

Part 1: Big Kiss

Tanya Batura, Intricacies of Dreaming 1  2004 Clay, airbrushed acrylic paint

Ariana Page Russell, Heat Wave
2008, archival inkjet print, edition of 5
18 x 26 inches

Part 2 – can’t breathe

Tanya Batura Inhale, 2003, Clay, glaze, china paint

Dan Webb, SHROUD, 2008
Carved wood (Redwood)
22 x 7.5 x 11 inches
Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

If as John Russell maintained, a “painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time,” a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.

Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn’t know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.

Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware busts airbrushed with acrylic paint. They look fetal, even though drawn from adult models. Blank but wounded, they are gestating in time’s garden, perfect but born past an unattainable prime.

At James Harris Gallery through June 19.

The princess who couldn’t bear the burden of a pea was not an artist. She is an emblem of the useless sensitivity of a blue blood. In the human garden, royalty is a hot house flower on luxury’s life supports.

Ariana Page Russell is more sensitive (and hearty) than that. She has dermatographia, which means her immune system is always on red alert for blistering news from the outside world. Even the lightest scratch will cause her capillaries to dilate and welt.
While the situation doesn’t scream opportunity, Russell turned it into one.

 In 2005, she began to draw patterns and words on her skin, which she photographed.


Index
2005, C-print, 11 x 16 inches, edition of 8

Flora
2006, C-print, paper size: 20 x 24 inches, image size: 13 x 19 inches;
edition of 8

A couple of years later she turned images from her welted skin into wallpaper and temporary tattoos. Her body is her instrument, but it no longer confines itself to playing a dermatographic tune. Skin is the casing for everyone’s sack of flesh. To ward off the ills it is heir to, desperate measures are taken.

In her current exhibit at Platform Gallery, Save Face, vulnerability becomes war paint.

Gush archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Images of her belly button bloom across her face and chest.)

Seethe
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Sensitive skin becomes sci-fi armor.)
Through June 29.

From Charles D’Ambrosio‘s Seattle, 1974, collected in Orphans, published by Clear Cut Press:

The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc., and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class thrift. A soporific seeded into the clouds.

Christopher Martin Hoff paints the old Seattle alive in the new, what the town looked like before big money and business took hold in the 1980s, making the place famous for its opposite – hustle and innovation.

The Line
2010
Oil on Linen
30″ x 24″

Living in Seattle at the tail end of its coma, New York photographer Joseph Bartscherer paused midway as he crossed against a late-night light in Pioneer Square and gestured around him.

You’ve got cars in the streets, lights in the buildings and towels in the bathrooms. Where are the people?

Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and out
comes…nobody. The light in Hoff’s paintings hits the street like a reprieve from death. Not wanting to be disloyal to death, locals stay home with their shades drawn.

The Blanket
2010
Oil on Linen
28″ x 28″

There’s a tenderness to Hoff’s exactitude, bringing to mind Rackstraw Downes.

The Pulpit
2010
Oil on Linen
24″ x 22″

Even when Hoff’s scene is dry, his streets have the volume of the wet. The Doubloon, image below, has to refer to Captain Ahab’s promise to the first man who spots the white whale. That man will be entitled to pry the coin off the mast and keep it forever in his pocket, unspendable at the bottom of the sea.

The Doubloon
2010
Oil on Linen
20″ x 20″

I’ve been running Hoff’s images on my blog as long as I’ve had a blog. (Hey! Look at this!) But you can’t see their most distinctive qualities in reproduction, their quake and swell, their home-chord of silence, of light making a temporary appearance after a long season of gray.

Aside from other artists, few people know Hoff, even in Seattle. Modest with old-world manners, he avoids the necessity of using them, keeping to himself as he paints on the street instead of from photos in his studio.  For what it is and what it is building into, his work is insanely undervalued.

Through May 29 at the Linda Hodges Gallery.

Can wrap a stair in one.

From Kader Attia: Casbah Jonction Stairs 2

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has proved unpopular with Pakistani censors, who did what they do best: block access.

Here are two of my favorites, anonymously posted to avoid death threats. And death. To avoid death. You want to kill for your fanatical understanding of your religion, we need to beam you back to the 14th Century, where you belong.

Anybody who writes a blog that allows comments gets pseudo-comments, otherwise known as spam. Why do spammers want to be published on blogs? I have no idea. As my grandmother used to say, when asked, for instance, how electricity works, “It’s a mystery.” (The Catholic imagination leaves little room for scientific inquiry.)

The language of spammers could be called English as a non-language. No matter how brief a comment, it can be counted on to contain a grammatical error. Its chief characteristic, however, is vagueness. When in doubt, I check the email address. It’s never real.

Below, a sample of comments taken from a typical day. For every comment I publish, there are six or seven I don’t, sometimes more, from spammers. The green circle on the left indicates a published observation. The gold triangle signifies one waiting to join it. In these cases, the wait will last forever.

Anybody know the motive behind this unending quest to penetrate an art blog?

In the mid-1980s, when Kurt Cobain was a high-school dropout with a guitar, Alice Wheeler was a punk girl with a camera, enrolled in Evergreen. They met in Olympia, both drawn to the music scene. Later, when everybody wanted to take his picture, he’d clear the room but let her stay.

Charles Peterson was the only punk-rock intellectual to graduate from Bothell High School in 1981.
By the time he enrolled at the University of Washington, he had a Hasselblad tattooed on his left arm and was heavy into the Seattle music scene. He remembers the faculty telling him he was wasting his time photographing rock and roll.

Now at the Seattle Art Museum curated by Michael Darling, Kurt surveys Cobain’s profound influence on visual art. (Review to follow.) Wheeler and Peterson are the only artists in the show who knew him.

Peterson’s interest is motion,
the way the crowd looked when the music hit it and the way the musicians
folded their bodies around the sound to push it out from the stage and
into the world. When he zeroed in on an individual, it was to count the cost.

Wheeler cares about relationships, hers to the subject, the subject to the camera, and the subject to the field.

Wheeler, early days:

Wheeler, a couple of years later: