Archives for 2010

On September 15, 2002, the painter Robert LaVigne discovered he was dead. His demise was announced in The New York Times, the paper of record, which gave the pronouncement weight. He felt himself – arms, hands, chest, knees – and took a deep breath. Still here.

The occasion for the error was an occasional column known as The Way We Live Now. The Times printed a photo that included Lawrence Ferlinghetti and asked for his commentary.

I am the only one in the picture still alive, because I work out all
the time. They didn’t work out except raising the elbow or rolling
joints. (more)

I remembered this story because the Times has once again printed the photograph.

From left, Bob Donlon, Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVigne and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

When was it taken? In 2002, The Times said 1955. Now, it says 1956. Also, although Bob thinks his last name is LaVigne, The Times currently insists it’s La Vigne. What does he know?

Not to quibble, which would be karmically unwise. If I have a bit of an attitude about The Times’ coverage of this event, however, it’s because Bob called me in 2002 to ask what he should do about his demise. I offered to alert the newspaper to its error, and he gratefully accepted.

Much to my surprise, The Times did not want to be alerted. After a long run-around, I finally got the editor of the section, who told me that LaVigne would have to prove he was alive to get a correction. I was going to ask how he would go about doing so, but she had already hung up. I admitted defeat, and Bob asked a more important friend, I think Daniel Sullivan, who got the job done.

This is not the only time I have hit a wall at The Times. I wrote to ask for a correction to the story on the link, and so did the Seattle Art Museum. Five months later, no correction. Maybe SAM should ask for Daniel Sullivan’s help.

To the left of the entrance of Western Bridge (designed by Roy McMakin, owned by Bill & Ruth True) is an over-sized domestic window. These days, it sports a curtain that opens and closes. Opens, and closes. Opens, and closes.

Standing in the parking lot, we’re sitting on the edge of our imaginary seats. As befits everyone’s busy schedule, we enjoy the beginning and end without having to suffer through the middle. The curtain offers what Paul Valéry wanted to convey in his writing, “the sensation of a story without the boredom of its conveyance.”

Martin Creed‘s Open/Closed, Big/Small, Full/Empty, On/Off is a recap of Creed’s magically mundane moments, for once given all the space they need. In the central gallery, there might be nothing at all. In that case, it means the art has wandered off to look for a treat, a walk, a meal, a pat on the head or a nap under the stairs.

Big/Small (Work No. 748)

In the video gallery, a lamp goes on and off. There’s also a balloon gallery, this time silver.

About that light going on and off (Work No. 227)  –
Maurizio Cattelan sensed a dark purpose:

We all have our bad days, when you just can’t get it right, like moments of loss and surrender. And we all have our good days, when everything seems to run smoothly, just perfect for no apparent reason. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. You wake up, things are okay, and the sun is shining. And then out of the blue, there you go again, down into the dark pit of depression. It’s not just a matter of mood swings. Its something more basic and perverse: the inability to preserve joy. The need to measure it against a black background. Art is no different. It’s a ride on the roller coaster of emotions. Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. I always thought Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off had something to do with this simple truth. It has the ability to compress happiness and anxiety within one single gesture. Lights go on, lights go off – sunshine and rain, and then back to beginning to repeat endlessly. I do not know what Creed was thinking about when he made it but to me it always looked like a swing, a mood swing. That’s why I never found it funny but frightening in its simplicity, it’s a sculpture for our lithium oriented, Prozac enhanced reality. Are we afraid of the dark or just blinded by the light? I see a rainbow and I want to paint it black.

For me, Creed’s work has always been about breathing, about in and out, compression and release; about space charged with a sense of moment, a space where dark and light do not contrast as positives and negatives but embrace as wide-open potentials.

Robert Creeley – Midnight

When the rain stops
and the cat drops
out of the tree
to walk

away, when the rain stops,
when the others come home, when
the phone stops,
the drip of water, the

potential of a caller
any Sunday afternoon.

Through Dec. 18.

Myriad methods present themselves.

By intrusion:

Erwin Wurm

By solitude:

Tim Roda

By force:

Regina José Galindo

By restriction:

Jack Daws

By projection:

Roger Shimomura

By an excess of self-regard: (USA! USA!)

Grant Barnhart

By bad choices:

Susan Robb

By malign intent:

Scott Fife

On view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Monk at the Moment of Enlightenment, Yuan Dynasty, 14th Century

Opening Oct. 2 at Kobo at Higo, Tommer Peterson’s Ordinary Household Gods, including, below, Rogue Monk, 2010.

Robert Gober – false evidence of an ordinary life

Kathleen Faulkner – shoes made of river stones, transforming your feet into a river

Matthew Barney – excess to bolster an excess

Iris Schieferstein – the jealousy of the flightless biped, grounding others

Marilyn Minter – glamour and nausea

Do-Ho
Suh – power corrupts

Jennifer Campbell – She did it to herself.

Dennis, from Relatives

Remember your old cousins,
Those fish who crawled from the sea
When the seafood was plentiful
And the land bare.
Think of the voices they strained to hear
As they chose to hobble on tender fins
Painfully in the sun’s glare.

Komada:

Via

The art that matters to you lives in your head. It emerges into consciousness whenever the world presents its echo. On a fine day, for instance, you note Fragonard clouds. In the rain by a pond, you see John Constable muck. Smashed glass on the street, Gretchen Bennett. White-out paint passages to cover graffiti, Matt McCormick. Open any old refrigerator, and you remember a video of a wolf chasing down dinner. (Vanessa Renwick, Hunting Requires Optimism.) See a pit bull cock its head to note the approach of a stranger, and Michael Spafford‘s Minotaur and the Maiden series from the 1980s comes to mind. (The long jaw, the barrel chest, the spring in the legs, poised to strike.)

Wrong Distance made the same point quite nicely: a random photo of a room instantly evokes German painter Matthias Weischer.”It’s far busier than something he would ever do, the colors are not quite, it has a person in it, it’s a photo. and yet…”

Artist Trust announced six finalists for the Arts Innovator Award for Washington State artists, funded by the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation. Two of the six will each receive $25,000. Good work panelists! I’d pick Leo Saul Berk and Akio Takamori but can’t say any of these would be a mistake in the top spot.

The six are:

Leo Saul Berk (His website here, my most recent review here)

Detail from Spider Hole, 2009

Margie Livingston (Her website here, my latest review here)

Lead Pencil Studio (Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo) (Their website, Jen Graves’ review)

Maggie Orth Barcode Man, 2009
Hugo Solis, Metaphors for Dead Pianos (video image/sound on the link)

Akio Takamori (more, and my latest review here)

Winners announced Oct. 7.

No matter how grounded any particular piece of art may be in the authenticating experience of any one viewer, art is, in the end, a leap of faith. While I was not willing to take it for Ben Waterman when he graduated in 2009 from the University of Washington with an MFA in clay (Elizabeth Bryant called his work at the time, sympathetically, half-baked), a year later, it looms large, and the leap is effortless.

He makes mud shine. Despite the title of his installation at 4Culture Gallery, The Grand Rooms, those looking for finish won’t find it. If he’d called it, Laboratory in a Corridor, we’d have truth in advertising, but he isn’t interested in advertising, truthful or otherwise. 4Culture Gallery is a long corridor that hooks left and continues. And Waterman’s material experiments contain in their shoddy manifestations a suggestion of grandeur around the corner of his next effort. (We can’t go on. We’ll go on.)

He fails. Attempts to graph the vigor of wild plum with the sweetness of the domesticated do not hold. His thumbprints on bits of unfired clay do not add up to a bloom. The joints of his efforts swell and leak. His plans collapse under the weight of their execution.

Nevertheless, he sets the table…

…and sets the floor on fire with his desire.

The Northwest has a robust tradition of handyman poetics, from Buster Simpson to Elias Hansen. Waterman stakes his handyman poetics after the fall, with no possibly of making it work. And yet he goes on, shouldering the weight of never-say-die America. While in search of a true thing within the bare, ruined choirs of bombastical idealism, he leaves behind him a rare and vulnerable beauty.

Through Sept. 30.