Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
The Northwest sound continues to evolve.
Following William Blake, M. Ward turned Buddy Holly’s song of innocence into one of experience. I love how Ward lags slightly behind the beat, taking the plunge but knowing it won’t go well. The lyrics make more sense Ward’s way: “When you say, I love you, I say, rave on.”
Correction: The narrative in this post contains a crucial error. While Molly Norris published her cartoon – Will the Real Likeness of the Prophet Mohammad Please Stand Up? – she did not launch the Draw Mohammad Day facebook thread.
After Comedy Central censored an episode of “South Park” that featured Muhammad in a bear suit, The Simpsons responded:
Who were they afraid of? The usual thugs ready to kill anyone who doesn’t see the world their way. Seattle artist Molly Norris attempted to lighten the issue with humor. Can’t depict Mohammad? How about as a purse, a cherry or a spool of thread?
Thinking like would attract like, she opened a facebook page and invited everybody to participate in Draw Mohammad Day. She was right; like did call to like. There was humor, a significant amount of art savvy and a gentle protest against those who make death threats against cartoonists.
.
Then the haters showed up and filled pages with their contempt for all Muslims. Dismayed, Norris tried to shut it down. Too late, because hate also calls to hate.
According to a Sunday story in the New York Daily News, Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlakih has singled her out for death, calling her a “prime target.” The FBI told her they are taking the threat very seriously.
If that isn’t bad enough, Huffington Post columnist Eric Lurio weighed in with his own attack on Norris, saying that her interest in gentle satire makes her a wimp and her interest in staying alive makes her a coward.
Dear Mr. Lurio: If you’re so interested in getting murdered, why don’t you go taunt a killer or two? How about thousands of killers? Want your name in their rifle sights? I don’t know if you’re a coward, but I do know you’re a bully, a bore and a fool. Crawl back under your rock and leave Molly Norris alone.
Below, Norris in 2008, on the right. On the left, her collage, Nat King Cole, 2008, Paper, wire, gator board, paint, and glue, 60 in. x 32 in. x 9 in.
IMAGE REMOVED
Ries Niemi, commenting on this post, On Dale Chihuly’s tide, other boats can rise, wrote:
I am curious, “Pro-Chihuly”, and others – please name a single Chiluly artwork that you consider a masterpiece. Or even one that is a great work of art that deserves to be pictured in the next version of Janson.
Cause I have seen a lot of em, and they are all middling examples of production craft, from my viewpoint. And, having worked in the production craft world, proudly, for over 15 years, I have seen a LOT of production craft.There are, without doubt, Glass ARTISTS out there- Therman Statom, Richard Marquis, Larry Bell, Josiah McEleney, William Morris, Mario Mertz, Lucas Samaras, and lots more artists making sculptures from glass.
And there are quite a few excellent, unrepentant craftsmen and women who make objects of utility and beauty from glass.
A good two or three dozen of whom I would rank well above Chihuly in the “importance” scale, when it comes to glass art.Don’t get me wrong – I, like everyone else, wore that Chihuly oil in the sixties- I still like the smell.
But aside from his big assemblage pieces, not a single one of his works had any character, or soul, or presence to lift it from run of the mill production glassblowing, and to counteract its failings, it falls back on the old crutch of the essential beauty of the medium.The big groupings work, I suppose, in a classic Morris Lapidus, More is More kind of way, but compared to other artists who overwhelm with volume, like Tony Cragg or Armand, they lack all the cultural signifiers, history, meaning, and layers of information that make a good Cragg or Armand hold up.
As they say in Texas- All hat, no cows.
In other words, name that masterpiece. Masterpiece? If the word were a game, nobody would play. Not only is it freighted with internalized exclamation points, it has devolved into a sales tool. When auctioneers use it, they mean anything that opens at $20 million.
For the purposes of answering Niemi, however, I’ll say it’s a piece that rises from a significant body of work to achieve the artist’s potential. Since Chihuly is noted for his riotous color, the pair of chandeliers hanging at the ends of the block-long lobby in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall might seem an odd choice. They are muted yellow and white silver. But Chihuly’s power as a colorist is most evident when he dials down.
DALE CHIHULY
BENAROYA HALL GOLD CHANDELIER, 1998
15 x 10 x 10′
BENAROYA HALL, SEATTLE, WA
DALE CHIHULY
BENAROYA HALL SILVER CHANDELIER, 1998
20 x 10 x 10′
Detail, SILVER CHANDELIER
Pure as Communion wafers, these chandeliers have bawdy hearts. They push the idea of the decorative past beauty, past reason and past Surrealism, into a
kind of hydroponic glass-art gardening.
They reveal his extravagance for what it
is, the urge to make a life form. He wants to freeze the motion of hot
glass without stopping its molten flow.
The decorative remains controversial in contemporary art.
Kenneth Baker:
A fair-minded critic must ask why Chihuly’s work cannot be taken
seriously as sculpture. Sculptors of acknowledged importance have at
times made good use of glass: Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Christopher
Wilmarth (1943-1987), Barry Le Va, Kiki Smith. But all of them shunned
Chihuly’s forte: decoration. (more)
Baker is fair-minded, but he came of age during the height of Minimalism, honed his vision then and never expanded it. Why should he? Life is short. Baker is clean, but attacks on the plan to create a Chihuly fun house in Seattle Center tend to be dirty. They’re not about the man’s art. They’re about him.
The Stranger doesn’t bother with aesthetics in its unremitting campaign to discredit him. It expresses something ugly in the core of Seattle’s character, a desire to cut large-scale locals down to size. After Chuck Close first hit it big in New York, he stopped by First Thursday to say hello to old friends. Close said later that few would talk to him. We like to think we’ve changed since then, but have we?
Good piece on Chihuly by Tina Oldknow.
Zoe Strauss, from her as-yet unedited file of photos taken in the Gulf. (Story via, with headline from a comment on her site by rolopix.)
Being a British company, BP is best understood by British stand up. (Translation to American models is seamless.)
Clarke & Dawe, The Front Fell Off
Andrew Graham-Dixon on David Shrigley’s contribution to the Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, an indignant yet deceased feline on a plinth:
This defiantly ambiguous object could be seen in a number of ways. Is it
Damien Hirst redone as taxidermical stand-up comedy (its theme, after
all, is pretty well identical to the title Hirst gave to his original,
Saatchi-sponsored shark in formaldehyde, namely The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind ofSomethingSomeone Living)? Or is it Monty
Python’s Dead Parrot sketch reworked as a piece of Conceptual Art?
Then again, if Cedar Lewisohn is right, maybe Monty Python’s parrot
sketch was a piece of Conceptual Art in the first place. (more)
Walter Robinson loves the smell of napalm in his car.
Forest, 2008
MDF, Epoxy, metalflake
84″ x 62″ x 1″
Robinson is part of Txt at the James Harris Gallery.
In the 1960s, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth were key figures in the East-Coast text take-over, Ed Ruscha on the West. All advanced the idea that in visual art, text could stand alone. Today, sentence fragments, imperatives, questions and asides are more likely to serve as subject matter than a bouquet or a picnic on the grass.
Anthony Discenza
impersonates street signs. His idea of a directional assist is to point to everywhere at once.
Everything You’ve Heard, 2009
Vinyl on aluminum, Ed. of 5
24″ x 18″
Unfamiliar Sensations, 2008
(Installation View) Vinyl on aluminum, Ed. of 5
24″ x 18″
Who says the novel is dead?
Matthew Buckingham Narrative, 2001
Wall Text
Lauren Grossman
explores the mechanisms of blind faith
through its core imagery. Big steel birds, their feet fused into
cast-iron perches, their bodies cast in a blizzard of lettering, are emblems of fundamentalist love songs. They sing
to their own and are deaf to others.
Even Shorn, 2005
enameled cast iron, steel, rubber, brass
49″ x19″ x 21″
Finally, a jungle-fever designer object. (Note to the object in question: If he/she cared about you, you’d be called boyfriend, not black boyfriend.)
Brad Adkins
Black Boyfriend, 2006
Neon 4″ x 47″\
Through Aug. 20.
Back in December, 2007, Seattle Center announced its Fun Forest would close. Sixteen months later, Jeff Wright of the Howard S. Wright family revealed a plan for a Chihuly center near the Space Needle, funded by Wright with an initial outlay of $15 to $20 million.
How many other proposals were on the table?
None. There are eight others now, some of them excellent. None come with their own funding, which Jen Graves says is a question of timing, as the others didn’t have a “year to hone their proposal.”
This is, of course, untrue. Everybody had the same time, from late 2007. The prospect of cracked asphalt and weedy abandon was increasingly obvious to all, given the economy and the necessity of budget cuts. (More on those cuts here.) The Fun Forest was over. Given the fact that the city is struggling to mow its lawns and keep fresh water in its wading pools, what could have led anyone to suspect that the city could replace a former money-maker with a money drain?
Wednesday night, there’s a public meeting at Seattle Center’s Center House. Architects of all proposals will make their pitches from 4:30 to 6 p.m., followed by open comment.
I’ve already commented on the Chihuly plan, here and here. I’ll leave it at that, except to say the original proposal now includes additions. Wright plans to put up $1 million for the creation of artist-designed playground equipment, including fabrication and development of the site, as well as development of additional green/open space. The Chihuly team has also come up with a program to partner with Seattle Public Schools, Pilchuck Glass School, Pratt Fine Arts Center and the ArtsFund.
Team Chihuly is asking for a 5-year-lease. If the results fail to dazzle the public (and bring in from $300,000 to $500,000 annually to city coffers), its plug can be pulled, leaving the building that’s already there and a garden. (Even if he’s a raging success, the lease will terminate at 20 years.)
I’d like to see the Chihuly approved, partly because I’d also like to see one or even two of the other proposals given a chance as well. When museums sell art from their collections, best practices encourage them to use those funds to collect more art. If the city is taking in $300,000 to $500,000 from Chihuly’s project, why can’t a hefty share of that money be used to underwrite other uses of the former Fun Forest?
I’d give the nod to Open Platform and/or the Northwest Native Culture Center. The Fun Forest was 5 acres. The Chihuly center will be 1.5 acres. Math
is not my strong suit, but I believe that leaves 3.5 acres for other
uses. Think as well as, not instead of.
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