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Fallsapart is Sherman Alexie’s website address. Things Fall Apart is the title of Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece and also the title of the Mario Van Peebles’ upcoming film about a football player with cancer, starring 50 Cent.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion at her brilliant best. Dan Savage tips his hat to it in Skipping Towards Gomorrah.

When law professor Elyn R. Saks wrote about her illness – “paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation; prognosis: grave” – she titled it, The Center Cannot Hold. Paul Krugman went to the same well this morning to explain the problem with Obama:

Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction.

Lawrence Lemaoana,
Things Fall Apart, 2009
Textile
49 x 32 inches

Just as I feared. It’s not just Jerry Saltz. Bravo’s Work of Art is deteriorating the discourse. Jen Graves’ post on the last episode is devoted entirely to what she thinks of the artists’ personalities. She ended with:

May the winner not be a douchebag.

Jen. Shake your usually admirable head to clear it. We care about art, remember? Look down and check the color of your jersey. You’re on the art critic team. Art critics don’t care who’s a douchebag, not that they would  would presume to judge based on the edited clips of a reality TV show. (My last posts on the show here and here.) The question is, who’s making the best art, as far as the audience can tell, given the format. It’s Miles Mendenhall followed by Peregrine Honig and Nicole Nadeau. They’re not necessarily the best artists, but they are the best reality TV artists this sorry season.

Bravo’s Work of Art and Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance head for the finish line with opposite problems.

The former arrived at the gate packing a fatal flaw: Of the 14 candidates, at least 9 were unsuited to the format. Week after week, we’ve seen weak after weak. Last night Jerry Saltz woke up to the problem and started blaming the victims, hurling insults at the artists. This show does not represent contemporary art, artists or how people talk about art. And yet, yes, I’m watching it. (Tick, tick: the sound of me wasting my life.)

The latter, SYTYCD, opened with 10 terrific dancers and one struggling to keep up, Jose Ruiz. During the season, Ruiz accomplished the impossible. He transformed himself into a professional, not that the judges appear to have noticed. The real problem is the risk to the talent. Three are out with injuries. Of the six left standing, Billy Bell is nursing a knee injury, Ruiz pulled a groin muscle and Lauren Froderman was hospitalized last night with what early reports call dehydration. This year the show’s on speed-up, with dancers being asked for more and more daring-do by choreographers. Will SYTYCD become known as dance’s chain gang?

Appearing last night with Ade Obayomi in a Stacey Tookey piece about two childhood friends who bump into each other as adults, Bell was breathtaking. Watch him on the link.

Work of Art does little for art, but SYTYCD has attracted a new generation of now passionate dance fans. Yes, it’s ham-fisted, but still glorious to watch.

“Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!

This body dropped not down.

Heather and Ivan Morison, Frost King at Open Satellite

Some exhibits end early, even at major venues, earning from procrastinators lasting enmity. Rarer are the exhibits that trail behind their closure dates, still in place when they promised to be gone. They reward those who believe despite repeated evidence to the contrary that anytime they show up will be time enough.

Curated by Eric Fredericksen, Heather and Ivan Morison‘s Storm King was supposed to end July 17. It’s still there, and there it will remain till after Aaron Flint Jamison‘s opening Aug. 11, 6-9 p.m. Yes, after. All the space Jamison needs is between his ears. He can deal with a burnt slab of ship casting its ribbed shadow across his enterprise. 

Somewhere between art…

(Lorna Green)

…and miniature golf courses…

…is the Links Invitational at the Kirkland Arts Center, curated by Cable Griffith. Twelve artists turned the galleries into 9 holes of playable golf, with courses running down the stairs, across a table top and through a passel of sturdy constructions.

Putt through the stove top into the sink, rattle through the pipes to land on the ground. If you’re going to get a hole in one, this is it. Ben Hirschkoff & Jason Wood, 7 Ways to Enjoy Washing the Dishes

As Robert Morris liked to say, simplicity of shape does not equate to simplicity of experience. Jason Hirata, When I was in sixth grade, I designed a golf course for school

Hirata, detail:

Drive low under cliches to rise through the hole: Kristen Ramirez, How Green Was My Valley

Tee off at the top of the stairs, bank left and free fall home: SuttonBeresCuller, Pigeonholed

Through Thursday.

On all the reality shows remotely connected to art – Bravo’s Project Runway and Work of Art,  So You Think You Can Dance on FOX – the judges are identified by full names, and the artists by first only. Why? The artists are the chicks, an idea reality TV did not invent. June Wayne explored the cute-little-artist theme in a 1973 essay titled Male Artist As Stereotypical Female, unfortunately not online.

I haven’t read it in years and don’t have a copy but remember it as conclusive. When Donald Kuspit claimed in a lecture in Seattle that artists create but need the intelligence of critics to animate that creation, he illustrated Wayne’s point exactly. Critics are male stereotypes, opening the door for the little lady.

Not to pick on Kuspit, but he tends to wade into his own muck and root around as if he’s dining with the queen. Take, for instance, his take on glass in his 1998 tome on Chihuly:

When it is soft, it can be identified as female, and when it is hard, as male.

The opposite, he wrote, is also true:

At the same time, when it is hard it is static, a trait often
traditionally considered female, and when it is soft it is dynamic,
supposedly a male trait.

Kuspit would be fun on Work of Art. When being fed nonsense, I prefer it to be elegant nonsense, like Kuspit’s. With the exception of the only-fleetingly-there Jerry Saltz, Work of Art judges tend to vacant.

They seem to believe that if artists can’t (or won’t) explain their work, that work can’t be valid. It’s the reason Nao Bustamante was axed from the shock-art episode, even though her piece was the only one that came close to shocking AND even though guest artist Andres Serrano tried to save her. (Judges who don’t listen to Serrano on this subject are beyond dim.)

She sat amid her rubble like a demented street person, plucking at herself as judges discussed her. She lost the race because she could not keep so slow a pace. And because she refused to provide cue cards. As Dave Hickey put it:

I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.

Bustamante had the best line on her reluctance to explain, from the first episode and now a t-shirt available via.

The judges aren’t the real problem with Work of Art. It’s a combination of weak challenges and too many weak artists. Apparently weak artists. Hard to say when given the odd glimpse of their artificially-produced output through a TV screen. Of the artists remaining, Peregrine Honig, Miles Mendenhal and Nicole Nadeau have managed to master the eccentric format. The rest are just puzzling.

Back to Saltz for a second. His running commentary on the show is better than the show, although his foray into art-critic stand-up is worth watching on the screen. There’s the time he told guest artist Will Cotton that he was a girly-man (Only girls draw unicorns in their youths.) Cotton brushed him off with dignity. And there’s the time Saltz dipped into AA for art-crit lingo: “Keep it simple, stupid.”  Yes, he’s flailing about, and his attempts to distance himself from the Work of Art herd don’t always ring true.

Saltz:

No one in the art world calls themselves a “figurative” or “abstract”
painter. They just say they’re an artist or a painter. It was a sign
that the producers didn’t know the art-world lingo.

No one uses the terms figurative or abstract? Saltz needs to tell his wife. She used the offending language in her recent obit on Doug Ohlson:

By the time Mr. Ohlson died on June 29 at 73, after a fall in front of
his loft building on Bond Street in Manhattan, he had fulfilled his
determination with considerable effectiveness, making abstract paintings
that experimented intuitively with the color spectrum regardless of
fashion.

Great obit, but I’ll bet the lead was ruined by some dead-literal editor. When I read it, I did not miss working at a newspaper. Remove the first five words, and the sentence is a winner.

It could be said that Doug Ohlson’s determination to be a painter came out of the blue.

Project Runway opens its eighth season on Thursday night. Its judges are far better than Work of Art‘s, and yet a tedium hangs over the enterprise. Its much-imitated format is now old hat. More importantly, uninspiring contestants in recent years haven’t offered much of a reason to care about them.

That leaves So You Think You Can Dance. Of the judges, Adam Shankman is both likable and savvy. The others are frequently intolerable. Nigel Lythgoe is a self-aggrandizing ass. Mia Michaels has virtues as a choreographer, but as a judge, she’s strictly from the feelings school, specializing in her own. Her praise curdles with emotional excess, and her criticisms are personal attacks.

As the show (slowly, grudgingly) gains legitimacy in the dance community, better choreographers are widening its reach, but what makes this show compelling is the dancers. Although it’s painful to watch them be milked like production-line cows, every week they turn whatever they’re given into gold.

About that production line: Three artists this season have been felled by injuries, including the brilliant Alex Wong, whose injury is serious enough to be career threatening. Each season dancers are asked to do more. Top cows at dairy farms are treated better. (On the link, Wong in a hip hop routine with tWitch. Below, with Allison Holker. Watch to the end and note that final step.)

Peter Gabriel’s version, mutated to Seattle art blogs.

Shaun Kardinal on Translinguistic Other:

Andy Warhol, Ann Buchanan’s Screen Test on Best Of:

Joey Veltkamp on Best Of, deer, all the time, deer:

Except, of course, for Joey, there are also bears. (Eye of ownership, eyes of ecstasy.) Joey on Getting to Know You Better:

Staring over the burn: Ariana Page Russell on Getting To Know You Better:

Staring at nothing: Diane Arbus on Jouissance:

Fishtown artists had the vibe, but few produced the goods. It’s tough to work in a leaky shack. For every James Castle, using spit and soot on discarded bits of cardboard, there must be hundreds of artists who could have connected if they had a creature comfort or two. Below, 10 non-Fishtown painters (and one photographer) who’ve covered the Skagit. All could retreat to  rooms somewhere, far away from the cold night air. 

Richard Gilkey A 1955 weather report: muck with the certainty of flowers.

Guy Anderson, not dated. (Yes, the earth moved.)  It’s depressing how few good Andersons are online.

Also Anderson:

Norman Lundin He can imply rain without painting it.

Kathryn Altus The Asian influence. Water becomes another shade of sky.

Clayton James The jeweled earth.

Jay Steensma  Alone, even when he’s with someone else. His idea of shelter is like a dirty lung, struggling to expand and contract.

Alice Wheeler The air leaks blue.

Ray Hill Father figure to Alden Mason. Peel back on Hill’s serenity and you have Mason’s jitterbug forms.

Alden Mason Life in a junkyard invaded by farms.

Thomas Wood Tulips become clouds.

Paul Havas Like the barrier across the road in Lundin’s Skagit roadway, Havas’ thicket gives the viewer work to do.

Starting in the late 1960s, a motley group of young poets and painters took over abandoned shacks bordering the mouth of the Skagit River within walking distance to La Conner. They lived there for a decade without the burden of rent, running water or electricity.

As a fellow-traveler from that time observed in the catalog for Fishtown and the Skagit River, an exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art, through Oct. 3:

I never lived in Fishtown. I couldn’t afford the rent.

Yeah, I know, the place was well beyond the reach of landlords and realtors, but let’s face it, the wages of Zen are not inconsiderable: all that chopping wood and hauling water.

Fishtown disappeared as property values rose, bulldozed out of existence in 1980 and leaving a number of curatorial choices for its examination. Curator Kathleen Moles chose inclusion. Anybody with mud on his (or more rarely her) cracked boots who lived lean and wet on that river has a place in the show, if anything he made happens to survive, even on a postcard.

Right choice, because Fishtown was not about hierarchy. Instead of sanitized, the Fishtown story unfolds at the museum as if emerging from a long hangover. A faint air of river rot pervades galleries stacked with paintings, photos, drawings and poems, nearly all celebrating Eastern philosophies and sharing a fetish for bad framing.

Photo, David King
 
Charles Krafft stands out in spite of himself. While he was trying to free his mind from the wreckage of his body, he made art that stumbled along paths cleared by others, from Morris Graves and Guy Anderson to Li Po and Gary Snyder. Huffing volatile solvents and drinking incapacitating amounts of alcohol are not paths to greatness. Krafft hit his stride only after he sobered up and moved away. Fishtown is for him the scene of the crime, but it’s also part of his personal roots music. He continues to play it on the keener, deeper instrument he allowed himself to become.

Beyond Krafft, there are the liquid-light paintings of William Slater, the clarity of (visitor) Mary Randlett’s photos, Hans Nelsen’s woodwork, Paul Hansen’s watercolors and Tom Robbins’ Buddha-joke drawings.

Beyond them and more than equal to any are the poems of Robert Sund, rendered in calligraphy, typewriter and pen. He is the heart of Fishtown, the soul of old La Conner and a giant in the Northwest’s poetic tradition.

My favorite Sund isn’t the show but should be. It’s printed on a leaflet whose facing page shows a photo of the artist as a boy, arm around his infant brother.

ANSWERING, FOR MY BROTHER (1974)

What do I do?…
I show you barns in the air over Porter Creek,
tulips that drop from the trees in Venezuela
and fall to the ground bursting into roosters.
They whip the dust out of the small valleys
        under their wings.
Under the arches of their clawed feet,
mountains blossom,
        distant but clear.

At the edge of ploughed fields
the surrounding sunflowers
       march weary-hearted,
heading into the cities of the sun.
Impossible not to follow them
and go
with strange-shaped footsteps
that may slowly turn bitter as green seeds.

Thin floating webs glide on the upper winds,
flash once or twice a dry silver fire,
then return to their invisible journey.
        It is easy to see
that among the insect world
many pilgrims have fallen to their knees.

More on Fishtown here, here, here and here. More on Robert Sund. More on Charles Krafft, who is featured through Saturday in a solo exhibit at Lucia Douglas Gallery in Bellingham and a Fishtown update show at Smith &Vallee in Edison through Sunday.

Because the past is a sealed world, what we know of it we’ve replanted in our own soil and viewed through our own strange light. Canvases rolled up and left in the attic or discarded by relatives hoping to forget the dead are lost. What of the loyal who guard their own family’s past? Sentimental attachments do not long survive each generation’s efforts to define itself. In a capitalist country, an artwork’s only hope is to have attracted monetary value, but even the cash-worthy have a tough time avoiding time’s edit.

When photographs fade, paintings crack and sculptures crumble, the living give up on them. Exceptions are artworks stored in museums. There they’ll remain till they go out of fashion and can be later lost (deaccessioned) in a larger forgetting.

Enter art  historians. Although the Northwest has had few, one of the best is currently alive: David Martin of the Martin-Zambito Gallery, specializing in American art from the 19th century to the 1940s, with a focus on the Northwest.

Whatcom Museum senior curator Barbara Matilsky wisely consulted him for her Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880-2010, which is why the exhibit’s early years are so compelling.

Compelling but disjointed. There is no way to create a narrative that spans 130 years of Northwest art. The picked-over past remains remote, and the present top heavy. If this exhibit were an essay, its lack of transitions would cause it to crumble.

Part of my reaction can be attributed to my mistake on the entry path. Instead of turning left along the corridor along a series of Margie Livingston‘s whorls of paint and Victoria Haven’s wall painting, I turned right from Livingston and Haven and dumped myself into the exhibit’s endpoint, in the past.

Livingston, Lacey Yellow Loops, 2009
Acrylic
12 x 15.25 inches

Victoria Haven, Site-specific wall painting for the Whatcom Museum, 2010
(Unlike many artists devoted to geometries, Haven never slips into formula.)

The clean lines and rigorously pale tonalities of Louise Crow‘s Eagle Dance at San Ildefonso, 1919, softened the fall. This painting was a tiny step from a dumpster till rescued at the very last minute.

Seattle has the Northwest School, reduced in many minds to Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Vancouver has Emily Carr. The world keeps Tobey and Graves alive, while the Northwest continues to support the remaining three.

Emily M. Carr (1871-1945)
Untitled, c. 1920
Oil on composition board
12 15/16 x 16 in. (board)
Henry Art Gallery, gift of Mrs. Viola Patterson

Helen Loggie was a briliant printmaker, attracted to nothing but trees.

Loggie, King Goblin, 1939

The 1940s through the 1980s look pretty good, with Helmi, Maude Kerns, Margaret Tomkins, Sally Haley, Patti Warashina, Mary Henry, Doris Chase, Karin Helmich, Gwen Knight, Norie Sato, Fay Jones and  Elizabeth Sandvig.

Sandvig, Broken Columns, early 1970s

Working off Kandinsky, Leo Kenny is much better than Maude Kerns. While he trusted his forms, she cluttered up her background, but, hey, this show is girls-only. (In a Northwest art exhibit spanning 130 years that wants to rescue some of the forgotten, picking only women makes as much sense as picking only the left-handed. Everybody’s forgotten.)

Which brings us to the unruly present. Operating under the bloom-where-you’re-planted rule, Matilsky probably felt she had to include local fave Susan Bennerstrom, but, like Seattle’s Kathleen Gemberling Adkison, Bennerstrom is a dead spot where the ball won’t bounce. There are better choices close to the WA/B.C. divide, such as Jasmine Valandani.

Sheila Klein, however, is a fine choice. Stand, 2000

South of Seattle, so is Gail Tremblay. An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace, 2009

Even so, Seattle dominates the present, which didn’t have to happen. No exhibit is fair. We seek them out not for justice but for impact. On that latter score, this one suceeds.

Take it away, Seattle.

Claire Cowie, Rhinoscape, 2006

Alison Keogh, Newsprint series #4, 2007

Sherry Markovitz, Mourning You/Morning Ewe, 2007

Susan Robb
Gentlest Gesture, 2008
Crystal, Sakura branch, muscle wire, circuit board, Mylar, powder-coated steel shelf
8 x 24 x 17 in.

Through Aug. 8.