Archives for 2010

No one will suggest selling these dresses, suits, shawls, bandages and hats at Macy’s. Vogue will not feature them. Anna Wintour will not call. They are artworks with bodies inside them, and they come from a long and culturally diverse tradition. Below is a survey of lesser-known contemporary examples (not including the deservedly ubiquitous Nick Cave, for instance).

Jarbas Lopes

Carl Smool, a Joseph-Beuys suit worn by Michael McCafferty. (Beuys felt suit in the rear, collection, Seattle Art Museum. Photo, Robert Wade)

Tomiko Jones, from The Bunny Chronicles

Alice Wheeler, Self-Portrait as the Wicked Witch

Zack Bent, Clean Break

Elizabeth Jameson

Mandy Greer, Hazel River

Lastly, Michael Cepress, crossover artist. Anna Wintour might well call him.

Some sculptures tug on the public’s heart strings. Because they are insufficient, the public offers its assistance. However banal the sculptures themselves, the participation they elicit makes them memorable.

Gandhi, braced for winter, via

Waiting for the Interurban, image via

Excellent survey from Greg Kucera on art in Seattle on ArtSlant, here. I especially like Kucera’s action at the beginning of 2009, foreseeing collector paralysis:

My staff and I called a meeting of them on January 2nd last year and explained our feeling that we were all in for a tough year. We related our experience at ArtMiami 2008, just a month earlier, and the collector paralysis we saw there. My response to this was to set our artists free from their contractual obligations to send all local sales through the gallery. I advised them to sell work as they could to family members, friends, the postman, their plumber, whoever they could sell work to without any commissions coming back to the gallery. Still, though a few artists took me up on that permission, others sent sales back through the gallery.

Kucera has a great Web site, which wouldn’t be true had he built it or insisted on running it. He pays for it. That suggests he appreciates what online can do for him. Left to his own devices, however, he’s hardly in the forefront. Here’s what he said about arts coverage in Seattle:

We saw the press
and media coverage for the arts diminish. With the demise of
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, we lost print reviews by our most
active art critic, Regina Hackett. Her blog, Another Bouncing Ball,
can now be found on ArtsJournal.com.
The Seattle Times retired its art critic, Sheila Farr. The Seattle
Weekly hasn’t made a commitment to the visual arts in years. Jen
Graves, art critic for the Seattle Stranger is now the last critic
standing and still writing regularly for print publication. Her
writing also appears on The Stranger’s Slog.

Only because Kucera values writing that is printed on paper above all other kinds can he say coverage for the arts has diminished. Instead, it has never been more robust. Why?

The art blogs. (Go to my blog, look right just below the scroll of recent comments for a list.) Despite what he wrote, Kucera knows this. He mentioned them, but he composed his first draft in his email account, failed to save and accidentally pushed delete. His second draft, written in haste but admirable anyway, omitted these tributes only by accident.

And the other reason for the currently robust critical scene is not online but is printed in newsletter form – Matthew Offenbacher’s La Norda Especialo, a zine of artists’ writing. (Althpough not online, it can be downloaded as a pdf. ) Like Kucera, Offenbacher values print on paper, not quite ready to believe that what’s online only is the same real deal.

There are other lines he is loathe loath to cross. I asked him if I could write for La Norda, and he said no. Artists only. By way of softening the blow, he allowed that I could contribute my own drawings, if I wanted. Offenbacher’s zine proves once again that the best critics are not always critics at all but artists writing on the side, insiders looking at each other’s practices.

Other news:

Blake Gopnik on Brian Junger. Not just no, but hell no. Just because Junger’s work has wide cultural resonance doesn’t mean it lacks a primary connection with the Native North American experience.

Christopher Knight on LA City Council arts funds cuts, promised to be deep. Ditto government cuts in B.C., and ditto in Seattle at 4Culture.

The problem of art plagiarism, again. I’d say in this case, photographer Alex Brown has good reason to complain.

By planting clues to their location on facebook and Twitter, Patrick Skoff gives away his paintings to get attention, making his relational aesthetics the point and his non-too-engaging  paintings a byproduct. (Chicago Tribune report here, via AJ) Donald Young is quoted in this story. Does the Trib review Young’s shows? Rarely. Instead, it quotes him on an art party trick.

Finally, Tyler Green is unable to write the word dickish, even in a quote. He writes it, d*ckish. How remarkably arch of him. Did George Carlin live in vain? (On the subject of Green’s post, Jerry Saltz vs. John Yau, I side with Saltz. Yau’s slam that Jeff Koons appeals to rich people is boring, as well as a gross misunderstanding of the history of art.)

Back to Carlin. Tyler, this one’s for you.

This is for those of you who make comments that are never seen again. You
drop a rock, and there are no ripples. Your rock was deleted before it
hit the pond. The reason why is not mechanical malfunction. I am trying
to curate the comments within a loose frame of civility. Here are a few
guidelines, and those who sign their names get more license to push the
boundaries.

1. Personal attacks. Try to refrain.

2.
Unsupportable ranting. (You’re boring and/or scaring me.)

3. Non
Sequiturs. Comments that see the light of day tend to be about the
subject at hand. If yours is wildly entertaining, however, I might post
it anyway. I’d like to come up with a way for people to introduce topics
rather than respond to the ones I raise, but I’m not there yet.

4.
Falsehoods. As Senator Al Franken (D-MN) likes to say, everybody is
entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts. I will publish comments that contain assertions of fact I know to be errors and then reply to them, but not if the error is too ugly to air.

5.
Incoherence. (In not posting, I’m doing you a favor.)

Thanks to
everyone who reads the blog and everyone who comments, even those whose comments I
alone see. They are evidence of engagement, which I appreciate.

In response to other comments on this post, Dan Webb wrote:

‘To say that painting is dead, in the faintly apocalyptic cadences of deconstruction, is not so much to contest modernism as to accept its progressive and developmental narrative, and to say in effect that since that narrative is over with, there is nothing for painting to be-as if, unless it fell under the narrative, it could not really exist.’–Arthur Danto
In this era without a name we live in, free of modernism, or any ism at all for at least a generation, artists have the unprecedented freedom to make art in anyway shape or form we choose to make it. The result of that freedom means that painting is every bit as legit a path as anything else, unless the goal is to be fashionable, which is the replacement part for the avant-garde in our era.

After 1978, and probably well before then, there was no longer a dominant narrative in art. The ending of Modernism and a Greenbergian view of eliminating things as irrelevant because they didn’t fit into that narrative swept painting almost immediately back into the discussion (neo-expressionism, neo geo, etc.).
It kind of makes me think I should really take up painting.

Ken Johnson’s review
of the Outsider Art Fair in New York demonstrated the remarkable: Once
the category shed the unfortunate nomenclature of primitive and naive,
it has remained static. Johnson’s review could have been written ten,
twenty or even thirty years ago with almost no changes. Within that
consistency is slippage. No definition of it includes even a majority of
practitioners, but few in the audience fail to spot it when it’s in
front of them.

Photo, Michael Falco, New York Times,
featuring Bill Traylor.

Outside is the place
for the driven end of folk art. It has its stars, but they remain as
isolated from the mainstream as they are from casual whittlers and
house-proud quilters. Mainstream artists account for their time and
place. Outsiders don’t have to. For them, the action is inside their
heads. (Maybe it should be called Insider art.) Bill
Traylor’s paintings would have been equally at home and not at home
in any time in the last 1,000 years. That’s a freedom no other kind of
art achieves.

Update, 2/22: In the original piece, I left out the first part of the artist’s name. It’s Ryan Henry Ward, not Henry Ward. Second. Relying on previously published information, I wrote that his ambition was to paint 50 murals. He claims, to date, to have painted 70, for businesses that pay for the privilege. Even if I loved his work, 50 is too many. Seventy is insane. Public art is a little like books in a library. I don’t want to read about chemistry but don’t resent the chemistry texts housed there. If the public library was overwhelmed with chemistry books, I’d object. How much more objectionable is Ward’s work. It’s a mass of chemistry books I am unable to avoid. Bring back blank walls and let them erode in the rain!

Ryan Henry Ward wants to paint 50 endless murals in public spaces in Seattle. Because so many people are encouraging him, he could well succeed.

(Photo, Mike Kane, Seattle PI)

One mural would be tolerable. Even two. The number he has done is an outrage. If I wanted to live inside a sentimental children’s book, I’d be well on my way to starkers, and I’d ask him to paint the walls of my padded cell. Ward is whimsical. A sense of whimsy is fine in toddlers, but by the age of reason, children are ready to move on to more substantial fare.

Coverage of his project is uniformly positive from what’s left of the press. (Examples here.) As Ward spreads his message of brain-dead cheer across the city, will no one speak up for those of us who prefer blank walls and/or those graced with a collage of graffiti? Let Seattle be a city, and let Ward paint the inside of Barney’s rumpus room.

Some couples stay together by pretending the rest of the world does not exist.

Will Rogan

Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette recently asked if it’s fair to give an audience something it hasn’t shown any signs of wanting:

Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to new things, and that they should be convinced to give them a try. But is this true? I’ve observed before that classical music, particularly opera companies and orchestras, are unusual in that they repeatedly try to force things on its audience that its audience doesn’t necessarily want. Someone who comes to the movie theater to see “Avatar” is not necessarily going to be thrilled if I show him “Pan’s Labyrinth” instead, even if I’m convinced that he would really love it if only he would watch it. And yet this is what’s going on in classical music, all the time: audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone.
(more)

I thought of Midgette while looking at Isabelle
Pauwels‘ exhibit at the Henry Gallery titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/The complete ordered field. There is so little pleasure to be had from its stuttering films, dry photographs and fragmentary collages, the idea must be that viewing them is good for the audience.

I also thought of David Pagel’s review of Diana Thater in the L.A. Times:

Making a movie about movie magic is not the same as
making some of that magic. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Diana
Thater: Between Science and Magic” goes so far out of its way to
extinguish the magic that you can’t help but wonder why movie magic was
brought up in the first place.

The answer is that Thater’s brand of art is opposed to all forms of
entertainment, which it sets itself apart from. (more)

I don’t think the review is one of Pagel’s best. Instead of being specific to Thater’s work, it’s a generalized complaint about art that appears to disdain anything that could be called entertainment. At Pauwels’ show, however, I could see Pagel’s point. Pauwels is Exhibit A in audience neglect. The onus is on the viewer to prove worthy of the artist’s ragtag moments.

Should pleasing an audience be an artist’s responsibility? Artists who worry about how their studio work will strike others don’t get anything done. They repeat their greatest hits, if they have any. They temporize and shilly-shally. They lose their nerve and doubt their understanding of their own visual thread.

On the other hand, Pagel’s problem with Thater and mine with Pauwels is the suspicion that the artist has confused the didactic with the challenging.

And yet, there is something there. I’m going to take a fresh look with none of the above on my mind. After that, review will follow.

From Efrain Almeida‘s world view.

The few get lucky.

The rest keep a record of their tears.