Archives for 2010

Scoli Acosta …Day Was To Fall As Night Was To Break, 2006

Gretchen Bennett, Williamsburg Bridge 2006

Matt Browning Portrait of the Outdoors, 2008
Aluminum cans, fiberglass, epoxy
Robert Zverina, 1,000 flattened cans as a rising sun

Claude Zervas Log and Beam, 2009

Vaughn Bell, Personal Landscapes (Don’t leave home without one)

Via

Today’s changes won’t be noticed by readers.

(Story via AJ)

Reaction quote of the day, from Roger Ebert, same story:

RIP, schmucks.

Yves Klein Leap into the Void 1960 (Image via)

Have leaps into voids lost their exuberance?

Has I-can-fly become I-can-die?

Grace Weston, Current Events (G. Gibson
Gallery)

Jonah Samson, On the Rock, 2008

Gratitude needs helium to stay afloat.

Sean M Johnson
Thank You
2008
lawn-chair, balloons, string (via Howard House)

I am lonely, lonely./ I was born to be lonely./ I am best so!

Joel Biel Tap Dancer, 2004

After Bladerunner…

Mike Simi, Hummingbird Sneeze, 2009 (Play video here)

The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past. (William Faulkner
)

Jack Daws Strange Fruit, 2007

At least we can still throw our hats in the air.

Barbara Noah Eureka, 2007

Robert Mirenzi in earlier days:

In baking tins and
cardboard boxes painted to resemble baking tins, Robert Mirenzi’s loony assortment of
doll heads, doll hands and toy innards rise, as if full of yeast.
Some dolls are doubles of themselves, pink plastic casting plaster white
shadows. Some have lips sewn shut. Some are smeared with pale primary
paints. Tiny hands pop out of pull toys. Some heads are veiled, as if
wrapped to cool on a kitchen counter.
What distinguishes them from a century of similar surrealisms?
Their rigorous code, the structure that charges these oddball materials
with formalist rigor.
Mirenzi likes to start in the middle of a fairy tale and blunt all
suggestion of coherent narrative. The birds have eaten the crumbs
leading out of the forest. This point of paralysis inspires his art,
which is inventive, absurd and unforgiving. (via)

The toys are gone now. What’s left is what was there from the beginning, an industrial approach to aesthetic rigor inspired by the process artists of the 1970s. What he brings to their base is a comic air of insufficiency, a refusal to take up more space than he absolutely needs, an inclination to subtract rather than to add. Now that the dolls, frog’s legs and other broken toys are not there, it’s easy to see how unnecessary they were. For Mirenzi, the plainer, the better.

Nearly all of his current sculptures are small, from palm-size to arm’s length. Some sport some
kind of old metal frame or industrial pipe serving as frame.

Untitled mixed media construction, 2009
6 x 7 x 1¼ 
inches

Whatever polish he brings to bear never obscures the down-and-out nature
of his enterprise: funk on the cheap, industrial process sculpture
produced in the shadow of dying industries. 
Color, usually an exhausted primary, is used sparingly.

Untitled mixed media construction, 2009
15 x 45½ x 7¼ inches

Detail:

He is a poet of comic insufficiency – toys gone bad,
hobbies ridden off the deep end and work a delusion.
As a theme, insufficiency has inspired its share of art, but not often
visual art. Writers have claimed it (Dostoevski, Kafka, Samuel Beckett,
Richard Wright, Donald Barthelme) and actors have embodied it (Buster
Keaton, Peter Lorre, Al Pacino, Lily Tomlin) but even the most humble of
physical materials acquires authority when structurally organized into
an artwork.
Artists seeking to glorify the shabby, from Kurt Schwitters and Louise
Bourgeois to Robert Rauschenberg, invariably transform
it into focused beauty, even elegance. And art made from coarse
materials that does not rise to elegance usually lacks a compositional
imperative and for that reason is hard to consider art at all.

Untitled mixed media construction, 2009
8 x 19¼ x 1¼
inches
Here’s where Mirenzi shines. He can
manipulate his unlikely combinations of crafted and found objects into
sculptures whose aesthetic power never undermines their projected sense
of powerlessness.They limp along out of anyone’s spotlight, even their own.

At Francine Seders through March 14.

Because I live in Seattle and hadn’t seen Dina Martina, I tended to lie about it. I nodded at the tottering pile of appreciation always coming her way and added mine, falsely. Grady West, who created her, is easier to know. Soft-spoken, smart and thoughtful, his ability to listen distinguishes him. If I hadn’t already known that he’s an art collector, I could have talked to him for years without finding it out. He never asked if I’d seen his show. He doesn’t look like someone who’d be at his show, the show that I hadn’t seen. (Image left, the Stranger. Image right, Seattle Times.)

On Sunday, I became the person I pretended to be, shoe-horned into the camp locker room that passes for a theater at the Re-bar. It’s a holding tank for enemy insurgents, rimmed with pink tinsel. Said Dina, looking around with admiration: “Who doesn’t love mid-century modern?”

Space is limited. How much space is there for portly men impersonating glam women? Not much, and that’s where Dina begins, with nothing to prove and no apparent consciousness that such proof might be required after Divine, Leigh Bowery and Eddie Izzard; after the less-portly lovely ladies in Paris is Burning, from Pepper LeBeija and Dorian Corey to Anji Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja; after the adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Honey, we’ve seen it. And yet Dina Martina shines in her Goodwill high heels. Admittedly, the greatness she seeks is out of her reach. She’s more like the principal of a nursing home donning drag for the annual fundraiser. She wants to cover the world in radiance but has none to offer. She’s queen for a day on a broken TV. She’s a fish being clubbed on a pier that imagines it’s swimming free.

What is drag but over-sized desires? Although modest, Dina’s are unattainable.

Mother of an enraged teen, she wants more children. “I have child adopting hips.” She’d like to lose weight. (Her new diet, only-eat-while-driving, is working, she said, her search-light smile faltering as she looks down at her blubbery self.)  Almost instantly, her demented optimism engages anew in her search for a one-true-love.

At the Re-bar, she found it. A request for hands revealed few first-timers. Dina’s been holding court at the Re-bar since 1993. In Seattle, she’s a lot like a fundamentalist church. Believers would crawl through glass to get to her. (To a Sunday afternoon crowd, she said, “Thanks for choosing me over the Lord.”)

Some jokes are chestnuts. Most are new. The show constantly renews itself without breaking new ground, except in its videos. Dina grows older, still snapping her fingers to the beat and looking for gold in dumpsters. But the videos that began as scene changers have evolved into real scenes. Dina pasted her painted fish face over Rhett Butler’s. That’s her ogling Scarlett O’Hara as the Southern beauty climbs the stairs. Dina is the new kid on the block visiting The Brady Bunch. To its lobotomized cheer she brings crazed relish. She’s Shirley Temple dancing with Bill Bojangles as American racism squirms in its seat.

The melancholy undertow rarely breaks the surface of her gay patter. For that act of bravery, for the perfect timing of her shrill songs and brazen dances, the audience continues to love her, and not just in Seattle. Dina has taken her bad act on the road, achieving success across the country, in Canada and Europe.

March 20 and 27, she’s at the Re-bar. Have a drink with her during the show (“As they teach you in AA, you can’t change anything, so why bother?”) and salute what Hunter S. Thompson called the broken chromosomes of the American dream.

Plenty of artists tell stories. Michael Schall‘s interest in a narrative quickens once it’s over. His drawings could be closers at a movie, coming up as final credits roll.

Snow Tracks
graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches, 2009

His drawings are not a final scene but what comes after, either as summary (Snow Tracks)  or coda (Untitled below, 8 x 11 inches, graphite on paper 2009). Even if an ending proves grim, lead balloons can still lift a dump truck into the air – heavy things joining to defy gravity.

At Platform Gallery through March 27.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds
Chris Boyle, Spotted Lake, Canada, via Slow Muse

The process to which the French word collage refers was invented by the Japanese more than 500 years ago. They tore strips out of old paintings, calligraphies and colored paper patches to reuse in new work.

Born in Japan, Seattle artist Paul Horiuchi (1906-1999) used collage much as his forebears did:
to set a meditative mood and to orchestrate color, form
and texture into a harmonious composition.

Horiuchi fused the sensibility of the Japanese rock garden with Western modernist expressive abstraction.
Seattle artREsource is host to a small but fine survey of his work, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Run by Jena Scott, artREsource is a gallery devoted to the secondary market. Rarely has she a chance to organize an exhibit, but once she had half-a-dozen first-rate Horiuchi’s, she sought more to make the show.

Horiuchi came to the States in his teens. He was working for the railroad in Rock Springs, Wyoming, when FDR signed Executive Order 9066. Because he, his wife and two young sons weren’t on the West Coast, they escaped detention. Instead, isolated from other Japanese-Americans and hearing rumors that they would be arrested or even killed, they burned a collection of old Japanese books and prints that had been in their family for generations.

Fired by the railroad for being of Japanese descent, he and his family lived in their car and later in a homemade house on a
truck, making a living through janitorial and gardening work.
The paintings and drawings he made during and before this period were stored in a friend’s basement and lost in a flood.

By the time he arrived in Seattle, he was a 40-year-old railroad man, auto mechanic, sign painter and artist. Mark Tobey was for him a catalyst, although when Horiuchi began making collages in 1956, Tobey told him to stick to watercolors, because his watercolors were so spare and beautiful.

In 1962, he created the 70-foot-long Mural Amphitheater for the World’s Fair in Seattle.
During his career, he was awarded prizes and purchase awards from the Ford Foundation, the Rome-New York Foundation and the Carnegie Art International. Japan designated him a sacred treasure.

The tumult of his life does not appear in his work. Instead, there’s a serene balance of color and weight with a strong, underlying vitality, a sense of dynamic forces being brought into line.

Through May 8. (Extended through May 29.)

Hat hip to New York Times’ critic Ken Johnson for his Viola Frey review, which challenges conventional opinion by pretending it isn’t there. Why not? It’s his review. He can use all his space for what he’s thinking.

Viola Frey’s giant ceramic sculptures of men and women are among the underappreciated wonders of late-20th-century art. Rising 11 feet and higher, wearing business suits and ties and nondescript dresses, they have a spookily imposing physical presence and a clunky, cartoonish ugliness.

Roughly glazed in strident colors and made in sections that fit together like blocks in a stone wall, they could be mistaken for a species of Outsider art. Because of their size and their blank or seemingly angry expressions, they may remind you of what it was like to be a child among grown-ups troubled by incomprehensible problems. (more)

I share the conventional view, that her work was the same thing over and over, that she was a kind of folk artist living in the eternal present. Viewed in the context of mainstream contemporary art, she had nowhere to go and didn’t manage to get there.

Although he calls her a “true original,” he locates her among her peers, where her work falters. On the other hand, besides the artists mentioned below, he throws in Joan Brown and Robert Crumb.

Robert Crumb? I’d love to see Crumb and Frey together in a gallery. Crumb would be the kind of excellent sideman who makes a questionable soloist look good. Johnson’s review doesn’t change my mind, but thinking about the Crumb-Frey combination begins to. Stranded in her own company, she’s like a lonely person talking to a mirror. (No was all she said.)

A resident of San Francisco for most of her adult life, Frey belonged to a generation of artists who made ceramic sculpture a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s and ’70s. Peter Voulkos started the revolution in the late ’50s with his raw, nonrepresentational clay works made in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. Robert Arneson’s jokey narratives and Ken Price’s small, adamantine abstractions expanded the field.

Putting her work in a room with that of the endlessly inventive Robert Arneson or the “adamantine” (good word) Ken Price would do her no favors. Who else in West Coast clay from the 1960s and 1970s could use the Crumb assist?

Not the Rabelaisian Howard Kottler. He belongs with Robert Arneson, who would not be able to wipe the floor with him. (Image via)

To Crumb and Frey I’d add Patti Warashina…

And Lauren Grossman. (Like Warashina, at Howard House.)

Grossman was just starting out in the 1970s, but she would not only shine in a Crumb-Frey-Warashina exhibit, she’d make the others shine too. She’d bring out both the mournful melody of the collective theme and the relish in its depiction.

Some artists do best alone. Others need a crowd. Most need the kind of curatorial and critical attention that allows them to be the best version of themselves, to make the case that they do not deserve to be forgotten. In seeing past the opinions of others, Ken Johnson has begun the work necessary to keep Frey’s legacy alive.