Archives for 2010

Seattle’s Charles Krafft and Mike Leavitt are showing at London’s Stolen Space Gallery, May 14-30. London is a tea and toast town, and that’s exactly what Krafft and Leavitt have to offer – tea and toast.

Krafft:

Leavitt:

Via

Becomes a headline.

Dash Snow, Untitled, 2007, Collage on wood, 70 x 70 inches

Somebody’s always throwing bricks…

Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Vachel Lindsay

Robert Arneson
Brick with Hand of
1991
modeled 1972
bronze
9 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 4 inches

Before Robert Arneson achieved his signature style, he was so enamored by Peter Voulkos‘ corrosive clay that Arneson almost followed him from the Bay Area to L.A.

Instead, Arneson went North to teach at U.C. Davis, where the West Coast Funk dynasty took root and grew, partly inspired by Chicago’s Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, key Hairy Who figures in briefly California, drawn by the prospect of a paying job (his).

Manhattan is not the first place one would be expect to see an excellent exhibit tracing the roots of Arneson’s journey, from boundary-pushing potter to Rabelaisian, high-style story-teller, but New York is where you find everything; including, creeping in along the edges, an acknowledgment of the West Coast beyond L.A.

For this museum-quality trip through Bay Area art history, 1956-66, N.Y. can thank the George Adams Gallery. It proves that instead of starting out as a second-class Voulkos, Arneson was always himself. Although both were equally committed to clay, Arneson loved the world’s cheap charm (and New York’s Pop)  too much to be entirely comfortable in Voulkos’ high-minded clay version of Abstract Expressionism. While Voulkos tore into his slash and burn, Arneson’s achieved his own kind of comic and forlorn lumpiness, a version of Ab Ex unknown at the time but later explored to great effect by Philip Guston.

Arneson, Egg Pot
1959
glazed ceramic
10 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

That pot eventually led to this glory: Pei-Pee
1964
glazed ceramic
9 x 19 3/4 x 14 inches.

Also terrific:

Richard Tuttle (drawings and installation) at Sperone Westwater. This must be a no-hard-feelings show, as Tuttle left SW for Pace. Tuttle is the 21st Century’s Paul Klee. Nobody else who’s now alive can take a line for a walk with such understated power.

Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone. Three large video screens, cheap jokes in the Richard Prince vein taken in another direction, haunting, heartfelt and unlike Prince’s, genuinely funny.

Glenn Rudolph at Bruce Silverstein, selected by Matthew Higgs.

Rudolph Cherry Picker 2002 Archival inkjet print 30 x 30 inches

Nice to see Rudolph in New York, especially because, living in Seattle, he no longer has a Seattle gallery. I’d love to see Rudolph’s train photos paired with Justine Kurland’s from This Train Is Bound For Glory.

Higgs:

I first saw Glenn Rudolph’s work in 2003 in Portland, OR. I was living
in Oakland, CA, at the time and I’d been invited to Portland by the
artist Harrell Fletcher to give a talk. The talk was held in a gallery
space where Glenn’s work was on display. I’d never heard of Glenn or
seen any of his work. I’d no idea where he was from, how old he was or
what he’d done before. His work immediately made me think of other
artists’ work – all great art has this effect. Glenn seemed to have
absorbed the history of American photography and then distilled it into
something uniquely his own. His work is profoundly local. This is
important to acknowledge. Even though I knew nothing of the people and
places depicted in his images, Glenn’s evident empathy for his subjects
made them strangely familiar. This is hard to pull off and it’s not
something that can be taught.

Catherine Opie at Barbara Gladstone. Opie at her most voluptuous. New York poet Eileen Myles is in this show, rounding out her life in photography. Robert Mapplethorpe shot her in the 1970s. On hearing she was a poet, he advised her to put together a band. The Mapplethorpe hangs in her tiny apartment in the East Village, in a bathroom too small for a shower, never mind a tub. Really good poet, but poets who do not form bands (and do not get tenure) tend to live large only in their spacious minds.

Obviously not a poet:

Jenny (Bed), 2009 Chromogenic Print; (37 1/2 x 50 inches)

Finally, Rina Castelnuovo at Andrea Meislin, documentary photos along the Palestine-Israel divide. Castelnuovo gives both sides full human weight, although the image of an Orthodox Jewish man casually throwing his drink at a cowering Palestinian woman whose only crime is to try to pass him on the street, upends the show. He is so casual in his contempt, and she is so afraid.

Via

Still the best word on art & DNA is Robin Held’s 2002 exhibit, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics at the Henry Gallery, my review here. 

Tongue, drool and/or vagina:

Ryan Peter

Or just tongue:

From This Isn’t Happiness

Dave Hickey introducing himself to his students:

I’m happy you’re all here. This is my e-mail, in case you have any questions, because I am paid by the university and I want to be a good employee. Personally, I don’t give a fuck.

Hickey didn’t write it, he said to his students in a class at the University of Nevada Las Vegas titled, LA Noir. We know this because student Simon Horning in the 2009 class took notes and published them with disclaimers:

Many sentences were reconstructed from fragments and memory. I did not use a recorder…This piece, therefore, is what I heard and not necessarily what Dave Hickey said.

I hope Horning got an A. As he remembered Hickey telling the class:

Get excited about telling a story. Make up the fucking material. When
John Ashbery was asked how he wrote so much, he said, ‘It’s like
television. There’s always something on.’

Hickey is the great tap-dancing art critic of our time. He can link any X to any Y and produce the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I remember the specific thrill of reading his connection between Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St.Thomas and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Lou, who is sticking a finger in his penis, in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. (Individual essay online here.)

Hickey no longer teaches art because, as he told Sarah Thornton who quoted him in her book, Seven Days in the Art World, he doubts the value of the process.

My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social
occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse.
They privilege unfinished, incompetent art…
If you’re not sick, don’t call the doctor…I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks
like it might have some consequences.

He moved over to the English department, where he hopes to do less damage but still be paid. Below, to give the flavor, a few quotes from the text. (Thanks to Nathan Lippens for the recommendation.)

On aging:

I haven’t had to look presentable for twenty years.

On non-rugged individualism:

I’m the one who stands on his own two feet, having no other available
feet.

Reading the Bible:

In the West, high art and popular art can be divided from each other like the Bible can be divided into Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The Proverbs tell you to be a good person, not to do drugs, be home before ten o’clock, and don’t listen to Jane’s Addiction at four in the morning. The prophetic books like Ecclesiastes are about death, violence, and protecting Israel, and this creates prophetic cultures that produce high art.

Understanding LA:

Los Angeles is a city of bubbles. You have body-builder bubbles, nudist bubbles, surfer bubbles, rich bubbles, poor bubbles. So, how do you write a novel about a city with all of these bubbles? Until Raymond Chandler came along and created the private eye, you really couldn’t. The private eye can move from one bubble to another and tie them together. He’s there to take you to all the places you can’t go.

This stuff is not morally redemptive. I mean, Keith Richards is not morally redemptive.

LA is a city of secrets. LA noir is kind of about privacy
because the private eyes are opposed to public eyes like the cops and
the press. The classic image of the genre is a room with the blinds
closed. This is important because of the decay of privacy we have had
since these books were written.

Detective
novels are designed to deal with people in stores.

If you lived in LA, you know it’s a new
world every day.

Referring to Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand:

Auden compares British noir novels with American noir and says that in the British novels, there is a snake in the garden, whereas in the American novels there is a presumption of the general corruption of everyone and everything.

Know your enemy:

I drive to think. I’ll drive out to Red Rock. Then I’ll drive to the
Mormon church to remind me of who the enemy is. Sorry, Mormons, but it
does look like America’s going to end the same way as Rome. A bunch of
crazy Christians are going to ruin it.

More on know-your-enemy:

My most famous colleague is a war criminal. So now
everyone in New York wants me to write something about Professor Jay
Bybee, who’s a Mormon, and this endorsement of torture. I’ll tell
you my opinion of Jay Bybee. I don’t think he just gave those torture
memos to the White House. I think he gave them to the UNLA
administrators and that people are being tortured somewhere on campus
right now.

Writing advice:

Leave questions unanswered and digress.

Enrich scenes with pressure of the story.

The trick is wherever it’s boring, put something weird. In students’ drafts, I have written, ‘Something crazy here.’

It’s really a matter of feeling the pace of the prose. Pay attention to the speed of things.

On teaching:

It took me a few years to realize you can’t talk to other English
teachers about literature. You can talk to them about their pets, though.
That’s why you want to learn all the names of the professors’ pets, so
when you see them in the hall you can ask, ‘How’s Roscoe?’ and they will
go on for half an hour, and you can nod along and think about whatever
you want.

Enter Douglas Unger, English department chair.
DU: May I please talk to you during your break?
DH: Yeah. That’s fine.
DU: Thanks. (Exit)
DH: I hope he got my ounce.

The point of tenure is to fit in. The point of
succeeding is to stand out.

Best blurb ever written, for Chemical Pink:

‘Your fingers will stick to the pages.’

Also true of Lady Gaga:

Everything about Chinese opera is great except for the music.

My hero:

I left the Reese Palley Gallery when my boss wanted to show art by Yoko, and I said, ‘Oh no.’

Life advice:

Stick with friends, and make good friends. In the early eighties, I was totally broke. I drove a ’72 Datsun. When I was forty-two years old, I lived in my car for ten months. I t is better to have a car than a house. I got on the phone, called friends, and took one-semester teaching jobs at Texas, San Diego, and Albuquerque.

You will first wake up frustrated with the noise and the pressure of living in a big city and want to move to a place like Idaho where things are quiet and calm. There is a reason things are quiet and calm. It’s because people are really fucking stupid. If you go, you will be the weird one. They will throw you in jail and say you’re a pedophile.

I don’t mean to bum you out. You can go from nowhere to somewhere, with eye contact, thank you notes, doing things on time, and avoiding dorkness.

The problem a lot of you had is that you made the assignment harder than it was. That’s because you’re doofuses. I do understand the ways of the doofi.

Outside the university, the cultural world is run by and for the young. The old feel insecure because they don’t have a place in the world, they don’t have the respect they feel they deserve, and they don’t have hair. My friend Billy Joe Shaver wrote, ‘I’m just an old chunk of coal, but I’m gonna be a diamond someday.’ He was one of those kind who, on acid, sees Jesus.

It really is all about us. (Via)

There’s a manual for their use and care.

Like a dead sun rotting overhead, Oscar Tuazon’s stained orb drips on the floor of his latest exhibit at Maccarone in New York. Although his broken concrete blocks, bare-bulb fluorescent light, steel panels and cracked glass are the essence of industrial, his rubble has an innate elegance, more akin to Cy Twombly‘s than anything produced by process artists of the 1970s, from Eva Hesse to Richard Serra.

(Tuazon images via)

These sculptures come with texts piped into the galleries. Vito Acconci
reads from his proposal for the Halley II Research Station, Antarctica
of the Mind, and Tuazon reads a monologue about another kind of
architecture, one that he could both climb into and carry in his body.
As Alan Ginsberg wrote in San Jose in 1954, yes, yes/ that’s what/ I
wanted,/ I always wanted,/ I always wanted,/ to return/ to the body/
where I was born.”

Meanwhile, in Seattle, his younger brother Eli Hansen is showing at
Lawrimore Project, and elegant is not the first word that comes to mind.
Tuazon has a brooding poetics with real muscle, but Hansen puts his
muscle to more practical use. His work evokes his youth on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where he and his brother and friends envisioned themselves as outlaw makers, using any x or y to get high, build a shelter, make a radio and reinvent their lives through scraps, discards and music.

Here’s a piece they built together – Home Brew Bottle Wall, 2008, glass blown by Eli.

Hansen talks about his work on Saturday at noon at Lawrimore. He’s showing at Maccarone in July.

Month in, month out, galleries try to move product. Even the desperate, hanging by thread, know they have to impersonate serenity to hope for success. Nobody wants to buy from a dealer too eager to sell.

Restraint is good, even when the art apes carnival. Dealer attempts to step into the conga line and shake a retail tail feather almost always falter. Case in point, Traver Gallery’s announcement for its May exhibit, opening Thursday night:

I draw your attention to the imperative at the bottom in capital red letters – PIMP MY GLASS! Difficulties abound. Where to start?

A. The whole “pimp my” is played out. To attach it to an artist’s work is to encase it in cliche.

B. The brothers Einar and Jamex De La Torre are Hispanic. The cultural implications are cringe-inducing.

C. Pimps are creeps. My heart goes out to sex workers, but those who most commonly mistreat them deserve contempt. Who’s the pimp in this construct, the dealer?