Archives for 2010

Alejandro Diaz knows how to refry a stereotype. He conflates art-world cliches with cultural stupidities and prices everything-to-go on beggar boards resting for pickup on a Mexican blanket.

Every 30 years or so, a sidewalk sale hits the spot. (David Hammons. Note the blanket. Image via)

Update: Sorry the link didn’t work. It worked on my computer, which misled me into thinking a similar bounty would be shared by all. Document now attached in full.

Superior Court Judge Richard J. Hicks of Thurston County, Washington, recently handed down a verdict that so ably parses the issue of the meaning of art as to be required reading in contemporary art issues classes.

When the Washington State Arts Commission culled its list of artists eligible to be selected for public projects, one of the culled was Simon Kogan. After his appeal was denied, he filed suit and won, with legal costs paid by the Commission.

(Spokesperson says the Commission has no comment till it determines if it’s going to keep the legal ball rolling with an appeal.)

Kogan, Vanity, all is Vanity (Self-Portrait) Medium: Lithograph
on silk tissue
Size: 18″x18″

The culling process was not capricious. The Commission assembled a panel to go through everybody’s slides. Kogan was eliminated because the panel felt his work was “not cohesive.” (The panel got that right.) Kogan objected, pointing out that cohesion was not part of the criteria for inclusion.

That’s a fact. If the Commission doesn’t have to follow its own rules, why have them? People like to bemoan the existence of lawsuits, but they provide a means for individuals to contest an injustice handed down by a bureaucracy.

Judge Hicks’ writing is a pleasure. If he tires of his role as adjudicator, he could be a contender as an art theorist. He could have simply noted the Commission’s nonexistent legal position. Instead, he waded into the tricky ground of aesthetics. I especially appreciate his astute use of poetry to bolster his position. Well played, Judge Hicks.

 
Judge Hicks Desision Kogan v WSAC

Thursday might at Vermillion Gallery, Jay Steensma and Ree Brown, partners in life, share a gallery space. 

Steensma died in 1994 of heart disease. He was 53.  Although he struggled with manic-depressive disorder for most of his life, it was under control for several years before his death, time he used to good effect. He painted solitude and weather, with small figures on barren gray plains, abandoned houses, ravaged trees. His grays were creamy, his whites begrimed and his blacks full of shadows. In the 1960s, he studied with Morris Graves, whose influence is detectable in his paintings of streaky birds and fish on brown paper bags.

Brown began painting to have something to do while Steensma was painting. He paints stark figures on blank grounds, usually cats but also lovely little ladies in frilly dresses. Brown will be at the opening.

The name of that link is Dan Rauch. The similarities struck me thanks to the photo accompanying a story about Rauch’s work for Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in San Francisco. (Traditional example here.)

Also innovating off the same deep source, Shawn Hunt and Luthier Rob Bustos of Paragon Guitars. (via)

If this is what you see, pull over. (From Reflective Dreams via This Isn’t Happiness)

(Get out of that state!)

4Culture is helping to fund artists to work with a Low Impact Vehicle exploration (aLIVe). The deadline was January.

Here’s the pitch:

A Low Impact Vehicle exploration, invites artists to submit ideas that will inspire and engage the broader community in a conversation about transportation. Produced in collaboration with artist Cheryl dos Remedios and Great City, the project seeks artists’ thinking in solving energy, transportation and livability issues facing us all.

 Following the application deadline, a selection panel of experts from the fields of art, applied design, technology, public health and transportation selected eight ideas for implementation of “low impact vehicle” design from a field of 21 submitted applications.

Here are the winners:

Michelle
Arab: A series of drawings made from sediment and debris collected
from
catch basin filter inserts into the storm drain system.

Vaughn
Bell: Sculptural walking sticks and a series of performances that
reinforce
the sensory experience of the traveler and the notion that the ultimate
low
impact vehicle is the human body.

Julia
Field, Undriving.org: A series of 6 short documentary videos that
chronicle
the choices made by individuals who have made an Undriving pledge and
received
their Undriver License.

Melissa
Glenn and Matt Inpanbutr: Bi(K) o garten – a kit that transforms
parking spaces into a temporary “park.”

Michael
Hintze, Alisha Dall’Osto, David R. Dall’Osto and Nadine Smith:
Magnetic Mass Assist table-top model that illustrates a mechanism to
harness
the kinetic energy of descending vehicles to assist the riders going up
the
hill, making bikes more practical for a wider range of riders on steep
Seattle
terrain.

Dominic
Muren: Production Cycle, a mobile, micro-factory in the form of a
pedal-powered sewing machine.  Muren will make reusable cloth shopping
bags for give-aways at local farmers markets.  The currency for the bags
will be information about other waste stream products that can be
recycled into
goods.  A website that employs Google mapping technology will illustrate
the sources of all contributed recycled materials.

Johnnie
Olivan: A fleet of 6-8 “Bike-Cars” that are constructed from
reclaimed bikes and other materials and designed to offer pedal-powered
alternatives for transporting goods and people.

Stokley
Towles: A one-person performance and temporary exhibition based on
interviews with individuals involved in transportation infrastructure
design,
storm water systems and public perception and behavior research.  The
goal
of the project is to stimulate ways for the public to engage in
“transpiration” – re-imagining how we travel around the city.

Some of these ideas seem too goofy for words. Others, substantial. Familiar with the work of a few, I’m in no position to assess. One thing strikes me, however. In Seattle, there is one artist who stands way above all others in his examination of a non-car life: Robert Zverina. If he didn’t apply, shouldn’t somebody at some point in the process have asked him to?  This grant had his name on it.

In 2001, Elizabeth Brown (senior curator at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery) wrote a catalog essay for an exhibit in Dallas titled, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century. She took the artist to task for the sexism in his work, which earned her a rebuke from The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately not online.

Brown:

No matter how deeply he observed, empathized with, and enthused about his female subjects, Moore had a decidedly phallocratic perspective that he never came close to shedding. Both women and landscape represented territory to be explored and appropriated to bolster the strength of the nation. In fact, the biggest obstacle to recuperating Moore’s reputation is his objectification of women. Intrinsic to his iconography and a product of his time, this male chauvinism needs to be reexamined, recontextualized, and read critically and deeply before we will be able to see Moore clearly once again.

It pains me to agree with The Wall Street Journal on anything. However, it is precisely the obsessively sexualized aspect of Moore’s production that keeps it in the game.

Adrian Searle made a similar point last month in the Guardian:

So used are we to Henry Moore, we hardly give him the time his art ­deserves. This aim of this exhibition, which takes us from the 1920s up to the 1970s, is to show us his morbid and ­sexual undertones. (more)

In art if not at a dinner table, morbid sexual undertones can be a good thing. Brown dislikes what she calls the phallocratic, but women whose work demonstrates an obsession with female bodies are A-OK.

Hence, her excellent exhibit currently on view at the Henry: I Myself Have Seen it: Photography and Kiki Smith. If there’s any objectifying to be done, women artists like Smith are the ones with permission to do it. Male artists can keep their objectionable desires to themselves, or, better, check into a feminist reeducation camp to become more enlightened citizens of the human community.

Does it need to be said that good people don’t necessarily make the best art, and that art awash in objectifying desire should not be censured for that quality? On the other hand, almost everybody has limitations beyond which subject matter is unendurable, popping him or her out of the art context and back into the world. At that point, the viewer doesn’t care about how, because what has become an insurmountable barrier.

Those who make a living looking at art need to be certain their barriers are low ones. If Henry Moore is a hurdle, the problem is with the looker, not the looked at. Let’s save the moral objections for those who earn them. Very few are artists.

Related: Review of I Myself Have Seen It here. (Where are the other reviews? Wake up, Seattle. This exhibit deserves attention.)

Chicago painter Hebru Brantley opens Friday night at Pun(c)tuation, the mystery meat in the Seattle art scene. To find its Web site, you have to know to look for Punctuated Life. What’s there is a dead zone. No wonder it has so little traction. Nobody would care, except it has something genuine to offer.

Case in point, Hebru Brantley. Judging entirely by images on his Web site, his Lions Disguised as Lambs promises to be an event.

Brantley is also an illustrator.

What’s the difference between art and illustration? The artist gets paid for the latter. When not painting, Brantley takes photos. That flash is the glow of him.

I’m stopping by Friday night to say hi. (705A East Pike St., 8-11 p.m. DJ in the house.)

Via

To her friend Robin Winters, Kiki Smith said:

I don’t think my work is particularly about art. It’s really about me, being here in this life, in this skin. I’m cannibalizing my own experience, my surroundings.

Clearly this is true, but after looking at her work for 30 years, what do I know about her? Nothing personal. I know she appreciates animals both real and mythic, and that she thinks of fairy tales as a mother lode from which she extracts a mutable range of meanings.

In the 1970s, feminism was for her decisive. Through its lens she became an
artist. Whatever it is that the official art world
rejected, she embraced: small works on paper, coy/lurid/loose subject
matter, unreliable structures, the homemade and the handy: what she
could put together on her kitchen table.

Like a mole burrowing into a hole, she digs into the specific experience of women and animals in the world. (When a male makes an appearance, he is frequently a corpse.)

She’s interested in paws and feet; in heads, bellies, hands and claws;
in tongues, eyes, blood and drool; in breasts and genitals, in skin
(both furry and bare); in ribs, breath and gesture: in lives lived under the
starry skies. Her idea of personal is treating herself as part of this image stream. When she appears in her work, it is as archetype
instead of individual.

Like a magician who can saw a woman in two without benefit of a box, she disappears in full view of the audience into her flagrantly candid depictions. In her youth she portrayed herself as a banshee girl, the one game enough to be wrestling on stage at the Kitchen in with David Wojnarowicz, or, as she put it, “beating each other up.” Before hitting 50, she rushed to embrace middle age, opening as it does the possibilities of the crone and harpy.

In his 2006 review of her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney, Holland Cotter found the essence of her gory yet exacting production:

The tone is at once light and grievous; dreamlike dramas recur. There are miracles and martyrdoms, bursts of cruelty and hilarity. In a kind of boomerang karma, humans merge with animals, and animals have spiritual lives. Crystal tears pile up in corners; bones and worms are served up for meals.

Fanciful as it is, Ms. Smith’s art is also deeply, corporeally realistic. Step off the elevator on the Whitney’s third floor, and you’re in a wonderland version of a pathology lab. Empty glass jars carry the names of bodily fluids they are meant to hold: urine, sweat, saliva, mucus, milk, semen. A rib cage hangs on the wall near sets of internal organs. What looks like a flayed skin sits folded on a pedestal.

 Each item has a freakish beauty. The ribs, cast in pale terracotta and held together by string, suggest chimes. The organs — male and female urogenital systems — are of a prettily patinated bronze. The folded skin looks plush and warm; it is made from panels of sheep’s wool stitched together with human hairs. (more)

Her approach to materials is inclusive, with no distinction between major and minor media, and yet, considering that she is best known as a sculptor, photography is a constant. Because it has always been there, at first incidentally and later with purpose, Elizabeth Brown’s exhibit at the Henry  Gallery stands as a core inside the artist’s core: I Myself Have Seen It: Photography & Kiki Smith.

More is more: Many hundred postcard-size photos line the baseboards of the galleries. There are just enough sculptures to hold the show together, in glass, ceramic and bronze. Amid the photos are prints, some large-scale. Small black harpies perch above doors and on moldings, easy to miss but essential once seen, drawing the eye upward to engage the space, ceiling to floor.

Smith likes to shoot at the edges of things, in her studio or at a foundry, in friends’ homes (never identifiable), in her yard. Her sculptures are just one element amid the smear of everything else: the worms on newspaper, the cat on its back, the hand of a sculpture, blue dusting its fingers.

In Brancusi’s photos of his work in his studio, he located the sculptures in a space they dominated. Smith uses photography to present her work as part of the wider world – an inflection instead of a narrative.

Within the fluidity of her range, however, she is the one who emerges, this woman who never lost a child’s awe and discomfort about the singular consciousness alive in her own body.

This is a show designed for repeat viewings, for skimming across the surface and for digging into particulars. I Myself Have Seen It runs through Aug. 15. It’s is a triumph for the Henry and a personal milestone for Brown, the Henry’s senior curator. Images do not by accident unfold with such inevitability, gallery to gallery.