Archives for 2010

From Portland. I’ve never heard of her, and her website is mysterious – all flash, little info.  Administered by the Seattle Art Museum, the  Betty Bowen Award goes annually to a Northwest artist. The top prize is $15,000.  Two runner-up awards for $2,500 go to Elias Hansen and Barbara Sternberger.

Oct. 21, 6-7 p.m., there’s a reception for the three artists at SAM, followed by artists’ talks, 7-8. Free admission.

This image, filed under “writing,” is on her website. May or may not be her work. I like it either way, as the illusion to which the image refers is in all senses threadbare.

In my family, making something out of anything but words was a waste of time. Lumpy clay bowls and crayon drawings brought home from school were considered childish aberrations, akin to picking your nose and eating it. 

John Bankston comes from another tradition. He drew his way into the world and hasn’t, as an adult, shaken off the magic of turning a blank into an image or a  lump of clay into a man.

Following Glenn Ligon …. (Image via)

…Bankston investigates the push-pull of African-American traditions through the prism of a coloring book, minus, of course, the book. The weight of cultural assumption trails his figures like a suspicious clerk in a grocery store.

In his jaunty fun-house mirror, tragedy causes the distortions.

At James Harris through Oct. 9.

Considering that the online-only Seattle PI is such a streamlined and staff-starved operation, celebration ensues when it manages to deliver any journalism at all. On the site, Vanessa Ho’s elegant boiler-plate story about Seattle Opera‘s financial challenges nailed every aspect of what/when/why but failed to create any sense of who. Who is Seattle Opera, and why should anyone care about its fate? This failure accounts for the low quality of the comments, most of them either begrudging or outright hostile to the idea that the city extend any assistance.

This sentence stood out:

The (Seattle City Council) committee obviously was supportive of the opera and Seattle Center, but councilmember Sally Bagshaw said she wanted to ensure the deal would provide specific public benefits, such as vocational opportunities.

What an anti-art toad Bagshaw is. Art is not, for her, its own excuse. It has to provide socially redeeming value to earn support. Vocational opportunities? Why not reading groups for gang members and stage sets that reduce global warming?

Journalism tells stories. Even on deadline, even if, in Jonathan Lethem‘s phrase, it has to tell its story walking, it can’t afford to skip a crucial part of the plot.

The admirable Douglas Britt at the Houston Chronicle reports on a one-night show in a funeral home. What will these “visionary” Houston artists think of next?

Seattle’s Charles Krafft had a show in a funeral home in 2003, and not, as in Houston, by hanging portraits on the wall. Krafft’s art in a dead house was made from the dead:

He’s making urns from human ashes, following a formula Josiah Spode invented in 1797, producing fine English china glaze by adding calcinated cow bone to the company’s clay mixture. (more)

As Larry Reid likes to say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to Delft.” Then there’s Seattle’s Greg Lundgren, who has turned art & death into a business. Excellent Brendan Kiley story on Lundgren here.

On the other hand, when it comes to turning out the living for a show in a funeral parlor, Houston has Seattle beat. I don’t remember seeing any major collectors or curators at the opening of Krafft’s show at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Can represent the U.S. at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (image via)

From the Seattle Weekly:

On the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program–except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon. (more)

A couple of points:

One of Salman Rushdie‘s prime targets in Satanic Verses, indeed, the prime target, was the government in England during the Thatcher years. When Iran issued its famous fatawa on him because of its misunderstanding of a dream sequence in the book, the much-maligned-by-Rushdie English government stepped up with round-the-clock protection. Apparently, Molly Norris, who never maligned anyone, is not entitled to her government’s support. As an American, she’s on her own.

She never drew Mohammad. She drew a cup of coffee, a domino, a box of pasta, a spool of thread, a purse and a cherry, all claiming to be the prophet. (Image here.) Nor did she create the website inspired by her gentle cartoon, “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,”drawn by her to support Trey Parker and Matt Stone after the South Park brush with fanatics.

The Weekly, her former occasional employer, called her cartoon “infamous.” A standard definition of the word is “having a bad name as being the place where an odious crime was
committed, or as being associated with something detestable; hence,
unlucky; perilous; dangerous.”

I’ll go with dangerous. Clearly her cartoon has become dangerous to her.

Britain made it a precondition of restoring diplomatic relations with Iran that it discontinue its efforts to kill Rushdie. On Sept. 24, 1998,  Iran’s Mohammad Khatami said his government would “neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie.”

Norris has said she doesn’t want anyone to do anything, but I can think of one thing. Let your representatives know you want the FBI to fund Norris in hiding. And while I realize that moderate Muslims have their hands full these days, it would be wonderful if a few of them could try to explain this misunderstanding to those who are so easily and dangerously offended, so that Norris can come home and be herself again.

Pack up all my cares and woes….(previous)

Chiharu Shiota – Circle the suitcases!

Demetrius Oliver‘s Asterism – black stars on the move.

Huma Mulji – Arabian Delight
Robert Capa‘s long-lost Mexican suitcase
The Art Guys – Suitcase Wheel

Preston Singletary – Bentwood Box

Take your skin that’s smooth as a baby’s bottom and shove it. John Grade loves puckers, knots, sags, discolorations, ruts and rough spots.

Grade, pronounced Grotty, Circuit 2010 – Glazed ceramic bonded with gypsum polymer to corn-based resin embedded with marine netting.
9 x 24 x 24 feet

After its exhibition at Davidson Galleries, Circuit will spend a year on a mountain, accumulating changes as a fast-forward into old age.

Jerry Pethick mined the vein of weathering change before Grade. Time Top was Pethick’s last major work before his death in 2003. Granted, Grade’s work is more of a performance than Pethick’s.

Grade:
But Pethick had a better idea of what works in a gallery. He tended to keep the inside and outside separate. Not for him would be Grade’s forlorn and drab grouping of dark husks in a gallery. Disintegrating in nature (entirely biodegradable, by the way) Circuit is bound to produce a more interesting series of photos, at the least.

At Davidson till Oct. 2.

One step up from a Cracker Jack toy, Diana cameras entered the U.S. market from China in the late 1950s and were a novelty hit through the 1960s.

Wikipedia

The Diana is a very simply constructed box camera with a mechanical film
advance, spring-loaded shutter, and a plastic viewfinder of
questionable utility. It is constructed primarily of low-quality
phenolic plastics of the type commonly found in toys imported from Asia
during the 1960s. Because of wide variances in production quality,
combined with a poorly-designed camera body latching mechanism, Diana
cameras are predisposed to light leaks onto the exposed film.

In the 1970s, riding on a river of chance, Nancy Rexroth began to make the most of the camera’s unpredictable disadvantages. (1975, 8 x10 inches, vintage silver print)

Rexroth:

Diana images are often something you might see faintly in the background
of a photograph… sometimes, I feel I could step over the edge of a
frame and walk backwards into this unknown region. Then I would keep
right on walking…

Her figures are standing there, but they’re already gone.

Amy Blakemore began using the Diana in graduate school in the 1980s at the University of Texas. Unlike Rexroth, who stuck to black and white, Blakemore quickly switched to color.  And while Rexroth’s prints are otherworldly, related to late 19th Century Pictorialism, Blakemore’s have an internal precision inside the blur.

For her, clicking the shutter produces a rough draft. What’s important about her prints she achieves in the darkroom. There is nothing accidental about her compositions or her tonal orchestration. And while Rexroth’s landscapes and figures fragile, shot full of light, Blakemore’s are oddly sturdy. She makes them by hand, and her constructions favor the solid. One more thing: While Rexroth’s is a silent world, Blakemore’s tends toward the convivial. Her figures frequently face the camera and look as if they are about to greet the viewer.

Steph, 1995

A 20-year survey of her work is at the Seattle Art Museum courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curated by Alison de Lima Greene. At James Harris Gallery is a selection of recent work.

Green’s show is gorgeous, but its installation at SAM is a problem. The problem isn’t necessarily the corridor where it hangs. That particular corridor worked well for Everything Under The Sun: Photographs of Imogen Cunningham and the lovely little Tack & Jibe, art about sailing. But Blakemore’s photos look as if they’re still in storage. Why paid pay to ship 40 framed photos, take them out of a box and put them in another box? They need more room to breath, and so does the viewer.

Blakemore deserves more and gets it at James Harris – small gallery in the back but well-lit, well-hung and not crowded.

I love her historical resonance. Take, for instance, W. Eugene Smith’s A Walk To Paradise Garden, 1946.

Blakemore strips the image of its sentimentality, its holy hush. She lights the before of the passage as well as the after and lays a whip strap of a shadow across the boy’s back.

Boy in Woods, 2010
Chromogenic Print Ed. of 10
19″ x 19″

A shadow expands to cover most of her mother’s stoic face but everything is visible inside it. The composition centers on a tension-release narrative, as the hands of the man holding the wheelchair are white along their edges. (Although he’s the one driving her into the dark, she’s ready and he’s not.)

Mom, 2009
Chromogenic Print Ed. of 10
19″ x 19″

In spirit, her work is closest to Neil Goldberg‘s.

Goldberg, My Father Breathing into a Mirror
Single channel video
2005
1:00 min
Silent

Both Blakemore and Goldberg relate to the final lines of John Cheever’s Falconer:

Farragut walked to the front of the bus and got off at the next stop.
Stepping onto the street he saw he had lost his fear of falling (he had
forgotten how to walk as a free man). He held his head high, his back
straight and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought. Rejoice.

Blakemore through Feb. 13 at SAM; through Oct. 9 at James Harris.

As Christopher Knight pointed out, Lady Gaga’s meat dress is set firmly in repeat mode. Jana Sterbak sewed wet, raw red muscle into a garment in 1987. (Photos of both items on the Knight link.)

Knight:

Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic is now in the
collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris’ modern art museum —
an appropriate locale, given that city’s intersection of art and
fashion. Most recently it has been on view in the exhibition “elles@centrepompidou,” a changing year-long survey dedicated to women artists.

What’s striking about Gaga’s look is the shoes. (Image via John Perreault on facebook.)

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is unhappy, and best health practice is an issue too. (Art doesn’t have to be nice or good for you.)

Maggot infestation can happen quickly on raw meat at room temperature and will develop faster with heat, accelerated by being close to skin and under hot lights,” says Dr. Shawki Ibrahim, chief scientific advisor for Grow Green Industries. Plus, “the dress is definitely puts her at an E.coli risk if she had a cut on her skin, but otherwise it’s just the stink factor.” (more)

Aside from spectacular discomfort, dressing in crockery has no downside.

Li Xiaofeng

I also like the hat, via Evan Blackwell, artist unknown, from the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai.