Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
For every artist who elaborates on the outer edge of experience, there’s another burrowing away at root causes.This is a small survey of root diggers and bone lovers, those who bring complexity to simple forms and would rather strip bare than decorate, even when they’re painting on a plate.
A suspiciously simple sense of life is that it is in any one man conclusive. (Robert Creeley)
Desiree Edkins (at Photographic Center Northwest through Jan. 15)
Elizabeth Sandvig‘s paintings have a willfully awkward quality, an insistence on the particularity of their visual experience. From her you’ll never see the sort of polish that takes the edge off everything and calls attention to the intricacy of its smooth and flawless design.
She favors the raw over the cooked, the crooked over the straight and the fantastic over the factual.
Sonogram of the Blue Jay Monoprint, 2005, 12 x 10 3/4 inches.
Although her paintings often have an odd and weightless delicacy, they are never finished to the point of refinement but seem instead to have been pulled into view, dirt still clinging to their colored roots.
Off and on for nearly a decade, she has painted birds surrounded by the visual equivalent of their song. No one else has brought melodious plots to life by means of oil paint on canvas and monoprint on paper. (more)
Sandvig is one of the artists featured in the first part of a homage to her dealer, Francine Seders. At 76, Seders has been at the helm of one of the best galleries in the region since 1966, focusing on painting.
Part one runs through Jan. 10 at the gallery and features, besides Sandvig, Jacqueline Barnett, Dina Barzel, Dina Bolinger, Alfonse Borysewicz, Jeffery Burgert, Dan Carmichael, Lauri Chambers, Caryn Friedlander, Emily Gherard, Jon Gierlich, Philip Govedare, Juliana Heyne, Anne Hirondelle, Denzil Hurley, Robert Jones, Diann Knezovich, David Kuraoka, Spike Mafford, Merle Martinson, Robert Mirenzi, Ben Frank Moss, Joanne Pavlak, Julie Shapiro, Michael Spafford, Margaret Watson, Guy Anderson, Michael Dailey and Boyer Gonzales.
Part 2 runs Jan. 15 to Feb. 14
Dan Torop, Birthday Party
Mark Takamichi Miller Thieves: Man At Party
Sean M. Johnson, Five Drinks In
Jenny Heishman, Bogie
Elizabeth Sandvig, Ice Cream
Mark Mumford, We Are All In This Together
Alice Wheeler, Collins Ave., Miami, 2007
While we’re on the subject of no, there’s always Peter Schjeldahl on Richard Prince:
The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. (more)
Those people who make lists of the three or four artists who matter amid the multitude who don’t? Few include Bruce Nauman,
whose nonchalant profundity continues to be pioneering. List elitists
are almost invariably thinking of the market, as if art were just
another stock.
Roberta Smith’s review of Nauman’s current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is splendid:
Even
after four and a half decades, Mr. Nauman still turns out videos,
sculptures, installation works and sound pieces that tend to be
stripped to the bone, no-frills, unfamiliar and even alien in form.
They don’t “present” as art, yet they lodge in the mind and won’t let
go, disorienting, irritating, inundating and exhilarating the senses.
And with time, the best Naumans make clear their art-ness, laying bare
life’s basic experiences, distilled and compressed.
(Small
gripe about the NYT: Its links policy is absurd. NYT links lead only to NYT stories. There’s no way to click through to something else, as if once
you’re in, you need nothing else. Yes, NYT, you are the best, but you’re not the only.)
More on Roberta Smith: John Perreault is absolutely right about her review
of Roni Horn. Smith missed Horn’s meaning by miles. Perreault is also
convincing on his thoughts about museum installations in general. (In
short: go lean.)
Horn – Pink Tons
I’d
love to see the above 5 tons of pink glass in Seattle. That girly-girl
hit of Minimalism would be the elephant in our living room.We might stumble upon it and learn something.
Home team: Jen Graves’ essay on Miami topped anyone else’s.
But the annual art-world migration to Miami is not really about art.
It’s about the art world. About money, people-watching, and tropical
escape (the water is so salty off Miami Beach that a body floats
uncomfortably high in the cool December air). About rich people trying
to look smarter and vice versa. About, as Ben Davis has written, the
endless asking of the question “How are sales?” It almost feels beside
the point, like a bonus, that this is pretty much the only way to get
this much contemporary art in one place at one time–a painting in the
shape of a trench coat, a bin of musical garbage, a sculpture
consisting of an endless supply of white wrapped candies, fireworks
momentarily spelling the word “RECESSION” in the night sky, documentary
photographs of Texas prison lifers, a New York Times dipped in 24-karat gold, a video in which a young Iranian prostitute is tormented by men without faces (Shirin Neshat’s Zarin:
unforgettable), electronic billboards with messages such as “Confusing
yourself is a way to stay honest,” mesmerizing three-dimensional mirror
mosaics by an 85-year-old Iranian woman (Monir Shahroudy
Farmanfarmaian), a male mannequin with a lifelike crotch, a performance
in memory of the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico, graffiti on the
streets and in the galleries, drippy ceramics (by Seattle’s Jeffry
Mitchell), droopy textiles (by Josh Faught, based in Eugene, Oregon,
and recent Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award winner), shoe-shine
stations painted like shrines, geometric abstractions made in thick,
silvery pencil. That and Picassos, Warhols, Duchamps, Ruschas, Flavins,
Richters, and even, this year, a religious painting by the
turn-of-the-20th-century Belgian James Ensor, whose retrospective this
year at the Museum of Modern Art was a sleeper hit. And paintings
(primary-colored, splashy) by Sylvester Stallone.
I hope the male mannequin with a lifelike crotch is Charles Ray’s. Otherwise, do your own work, anonymous artist mentioned in passing by Jen Graves.
What artists read: This month Tyler Green began a series on what featured artists read. Great idea, but sometimes I don’t want to know. Reading that Kate Shepard values most a book by Mary Baker Eddy handed me a problem that I don’t need. When looking at Shepard’s work, I’m going to have to force myself to forget that she’s a fall-for-anything fool. If artists I admire vote Republican, drive a Hummer, believe that civil rights need not include gays and lesbians or that the faithful can pray away cancer, I don’t want to know it. Jackson Pollock had the right idea. He kept what he was reading locked away, lest visitors drawn from that information conclusions that distract them from the work.
Hey Hey We’re the Monkeys: On a hopeful note, Terry Pratchett, wine glass in hand, held forth on stage about the state of things:
We
are shaped by the universe to be its consciousness. We tell the
universe what it is. …I find it more interesting (than religion) that
a bunch of monkeys climbed down from their trees to build this and
build that, to build everything. We’re monkeys. Our heritage is (when)
in difficulties to climb a tree and throw shit at other trees. That’s
so much more interesting than being a fallen angel…The story of
evolution is more interesting than anything in the Bible. It teaches us
that stars are not important. Street lamps are important. As far as we
know, there are only a few million of them in the universe. And they
were built by monkeys. Admittedly, we do err, as when we made Tony
Blair prime minster. But given where we started from, crawling up some
beach somewhere, we actually haven’t done that badly.
Very
nice about street lamps, but Pratchett might want to reread Milton.
Christianity doesn’t claim that we are fallen angels. The fallen angels
are devils, the greatest being Satan, the hero of Paradise Lost. Landing in the abyss, he asked, “What do mine eyes with grief behold?” A monkey wrote that. Impressive, for a monkey.
Back to street lamps. Sheila Klein’s Vermonica.
Installed in 1992, it predates by 16 years a similar piece in the same town by the great Chris Burden. (Story here.) Monkeys have the unfortunate habit of copying each other and giving the more famous monkey all the credit. Los Angeles has room for both, but for LA critics to treat hers as if it doesn’t exist is weird.
At the edges of art, energy moves inward. It clears plaque from arteries and makes way for new images to hit us in the heart. Two exhibits roto-rootering into the new year in Seattle are Rattle My Cage at Vermillion and This Is The Future The Rest Is History at TARL.
Rattle
All the artists in Rattle (curated by Sierra Stinson) were students of the dazzling Gretchen Bennett when she taught at Cornish. Rattle has no duds although possibly a few too many toenails. The artists include: Amelia Layton who paints the unraveling world (geometries that trail off into recycling, birds who’ve wandered out of their forests, hipsters who’ve forgotten their lines in the play); Michael Rioux, who has a fresh appreciation of decay, and Brett Walker , who is hilarious. (Also, Morgan Johnson, Joel Kvernmo, Rosa Lazzarini, and Mckenzie Porritt, along with a sculpture and colored drawing from Bennett, both worth the trip all on their own.
Rioux:
(Taking over from Chris Crites, Stinson will be curator of Joe Bar starting in January. That’ll be fun.)
The Future
TARL is the underground version of the recently demised Crawl Space, which, as its title suggests, knew its way around the back entrances to things. TARL currently exists basement of Jessica Powers and Matt Browning‘s Capitol Hill home but looks forward to a nomadic existence.(TARL organizers are Powers, Browning, Rebar Niemi, Anne Mathern and Brendan Jansen.)
First up at TARL are Raymond Boisjoly and Ryan Peter. Their charmingly insufficient back-to-the-future installation starts with a musical question: How else to build a future but from a child’s version of the past? It features a plywood dinosaur with a tape playing the sound of a garbled human voice freely impersonating a dionosaur’s as a tribute to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) at Seattle Art Museum.
I’m in love with their wood-grain prints of similar ancestor figures, some of which are sliding off the wall.
Now that Yoko Ott is winding up her tenure at the Hedreen Gallery (She left to direct Open Satellite), Seattle University needs a Hedreen Gallery director. I nominate Powers. She’d be perfect.
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