Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
Whitney Biennial curators aren’t the only ones skipping Seattle. Skipping Seattle has deeper roots in the cultural landscape.
Below, Jack Kerouac. “NIGHT NOTES & Diagrams for ON THE
ROAD.” Manuscript notes for the novel, November 1949. New York Public
Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive, via.
Or so it says on the cake.
Lee is this year’s winner of the Stranger’s Genius Award in visual art, which.comes with a cheap cake and a sizable check: $5,000. Lee is the essence anti-spectacle. Her Frequency Map (2007) at Lawrimore Project was a room empty save for the sporadic sound of soft knocking, answered by barely audible raps. When visitors left, the room tried to whistle them back, as if it were a void with needs. The room grew louder as it shuffled through its pickup moves, hoping to score.
In Fugue State, hands play across a cast resin pillow, slipping in and out of each other’s embrace. A force drives a fuse in Conjugal, thumping through the cotton batting of a mattress interior. Lee tracked oil drops swimming through water in Wake Up as she played Bach on the piano.
Conjugal, 2006, video
Lee has also served as curator, focused on what a devotion to the muck of clay does to contemporary artists. (Wet and Leatherhard at Lawrimore Project, review here.) Her videos here. Jen Graves on Lee’s selection here.
In the mid-1990s, Charles Krafft and Larry Reid decided to do something about the past-tense reputation of Krafft’s personal hero.
Enter the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves, Lodge No. 93.
In draping a mantle of irony and subversive humor over the spiritual head of the Northwest School, Krafft and Reid were pushing what Krafft called “resurgent regionalism through mythomania.” Graves’ profile had become fogged with the dewy breath of his mythy-minded admirers, and Krafft and Reid hoped to clear it with satire.
Satire and strategy. Like a Stephen Sondheim stripper in Gypsy, they got nothing against a gimmick.
You can pull all the stops out
Till they call the cops out,
Grind your behind till your banned,
But you gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get a hand.
You can sacrifice your sacro
Workin’ in the back row,
Bump in a dump till your dead.
But you gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get ahead.
Krafft:
We’re taking out the sanctimony and adding a bit of titillation. The
Northwest mystics were an urban movement, not a bunch of remote
dreamers. They didn’t have master of fine arts degrees. They learned on
the job.
Besides membership charters, wristwatches, calendars, trading cards, ashtrays, portable shrines and even a theme song written by Krafft and sung to the tune of The Beverly Hillbillies, what has the Mystic Sons done for us lately?
Reid is glad you asked.
Thursday night, 5:00 to 8:00 at 3 galleries in the
Tashiro Kaplan compound (Rock/DeMent, the Corridor, and Angle galleries
at 306 S. Washington St) is a Graves’ tribute invitational, with a Graves séance on August 28, what would have been Graves’ 100th birthday.
Morris Graves, Self Portrait, (left); John Ohannesian, Morris Graves (right)
(Reid’s press release after the jump.)
This post is dedicated to the insanely great Dil Se, especially the dance sequence below and on the link. In the West, if two or more people encounter each other on top of a moving train, one of them will die. In Bollywood, there are other options:
Using posters from a Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry, artists throw in Indian
miniatures, traveling carnivals, folk paintings in a florid vein and Mexican shrines with an occasional touch
of anime.
Below, Bollywood fellow travelers.
Timothy Siciliano Torture in pastel shades.
Donald Fels Even the Wizard of Oz is working for a living.
Lari Pittman Remote but dreamy. The veil covers nothing.
Also Lari Pittman:
Cheryl dos Remedios Chinese dragon (five claws for the emperor) in a girl’s girl narrative.
Manish Arora Who needs to sit down?
Maki Tamura– Everything together.
Angela Fraleigh. Overheated romance, anyone?
Finally, more Bolly than Holly, a fake movie campaign from Eva and Franco Mattes.
A handful of solid shows open in August. More on them later. Meanwhile, reliable venues are taking the month off, including Platform and Ambach & Rice.
Platform opened with four partners. Stephen Lyons is the only one left, and he runs it by himself. Even though he no doubt he needs a vacation, why pick August? Seattle collectors tend to stay in town, plus it’s high tourist season, attracting those who are sweltering where they live.
Ambach & Rice has been lights out since June 27. Its website reports it will reopen August 14, but with what? That space is a blank. No news is not necessarily good news. I’d hoped the gallery would use its time out to upgrade its website, adding, for instance, images to its list of artists represented. Alas, no. Under each artist’s name is the caption, “More information coming soon.” That’s soon in turtle time.
Lawrimore Project has scheduled nothing past the close of its Isaac Layman show, ending August 14. (Click the Layman link for more on LP’s still mysterious plans.) Fetherston Gallery’s last scheduled exhibit closed June 12th. Grey Gallery closed its Capitol Hill space on June 19 and is still looking for a new one. Ohge is out May 15-Sept 1.
The open-with-bells-on crowd includes:
Soil: Xanadu: A Stately Pleasure Dome. Group show including Amanda Manitach‘s Glory, Utopia (the head of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the body of Terpischore) Charcoal and pastel. Opens Thursday night, 6-8.
Ouch My Eye is having a yard sale 5-11 p.m., also the opening for a group show.
Punch Gallery: Orange Crush. Yes, gallery artists explore orange. (Wasn’t Punch artist Ries Niemi recently deploring the prevalence of cute curatorial ideas?) Thursday night opening, 6-8.
Traver: Dante Marioni, opening Thursday night, 6-8.
Francine Seders: Juan Alonzo and Marita Dingus, opening August 13, reception August 15, 2-4 p.m.
Alonzo:
Dingus:
Greg Kucera: Tim Bavington opens August 19, reception that night, 6-8
.
Winston Wachter: My Summer Vacation continues through Aug. 27, including:
and Buddy Bunting.
Ries Niemi objected to my post, Art & golf in a gallery:
As an artist, I always resent these stupid theme shows.
Only one step removed from those plastic cows that “artists” decorate for charity, or the inane competitions on Work of Fart on TV.
Mini Golf, in particular, is a recurring curatorial cop out.
It keeps cropping up, for well over 30 years now. First one I remember was in NYC, in the 70’s, but there were probably some before that….Why is it only visual artists get subjected to these idiotic themes, these “fun ideas”?
How come famous poets aren’t asked to all write poems about
Cupcakes for an anthology? …
Good art does not come at the request of a curator to fit into a “fun” category that everyone can relate to.
Sure, once in a while some of these show produce interesting, or at least amusing, shadows of what the artist could really do if left unmolested.
But by and large, they are an example of intellectual laziness on the part of exhibiting spaces and curators, and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Now, I gotta go, and make my piece for the upcoming show about Tube Socks…
Yes indeed, except of course, it depends. Even the most unpromising premises can deliver, given the right artists. The right artists are usually those who are there already. It’s the difference between a curator who thinks about corners because she notices artists are working there, and a curator who asks artists who’ve never done a corner piece to make one for her. The former has a better chance of scoring than the latter.
Back to golf. An easy way to sink the art ball is to invite Charles McGill (aka Arthur Negro) to participate. Not only does he make his own golf bags….
…he’s founder of the moving golf course known as Club Negro and the website, ArtNegro.com.
McGill:
Arthur Negro, the clubs first and only Golf Brofessional, has fulfilled his dream of creating a secluded and tranquil place where former black militants can focus on things more personal to them; A place where the daily pressures of changing the world can be left on the practice putting green and where their inherent desire for individuality can be realized, somewhere between the first tee and the 18th green.
From Oliver Sacks, A Neurologist’s Notebook, A Man of Letters, The New Yorker, June 28, 2010:
On the morning of July 31, 2001, Canadian novelist Howard Engel awoke and discovered that he could not read the newspaper. His room looked normal, and he could still read his clock, but his books were all unintelligible….
Buzz Spector (second Spector image via)
The heavyweight in the field is Jay DeFeo’s The Rose (1958-66), tipping the scale at 3,000 pounds. DeFeo didn’t intend gargantuan. Over the years, as she added and never took away, it grew. Most painters are content to work with a flat surface, but there are artists for whom flat is a synonym for starting gate. Once they blow through it, they go for volume, volume, volume.
Peter Fox (via)
Margie Livingston
Peter Tollens Untitled
2005
oil on wood
3.75 x 3 inches
Michael Toenges
16-07-32-28
2007
oil on linen
15 x 13 inches
Andrew Dadson To Be Titled, 2010.
Oil on canvas
20 x 15 inches
(detail)
Tomory Dodge Survivalist, 2007. Oil on canvas.13 3/4 x 16 inches
Joan Snyder Life of A Tree, 2007.
Oil, acrylic, cloth, berries, paper mache, glitter, nails, pastel, on linen
48″ x 68″
Alexander Kroll Untitled, 2009
Oil on linen over panel
14″ x 14″
Back to flat. Paint doesn’t need to be thick to be thick.
Angela Fraleigh, in this moment, 2007, oil on panel, 72″ x 96″
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