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Joe Deal didn’t live in California but returned to it throughout his career to articulate its self-devouring growth, subdivision on subdivision. Deal died on Friday of cancer. He was 62.  St. Louis Beacon obit here.

Teacher: What’s 2 plus 2, Michael?
Micheal: 4.
Teacher: That’s good, Michael.
Michael: It’s not good, it’s perfect.

Joe Deal’s photos are perfect. They are what it is, images of an Etch-A-Sketch state that keeps erasing and repeating itself, without Bill Owens‘ hapless charm or Ed Ruscha‘s consolation of the cool.

Deal, Watering, Phillips Ranch, California, 1983
from Subdividing the Inland Basin
14 x 17 inches
vintage silver print (Image via)

Whoever the Seattle Art Museum hires to replace Michael Darling (why Darling left here), the museum needs somebody who likes a challenge. Money is tight, the work load (with three sites) is enormous, and payoffs on the national stage are elusive.

For the hiring committee, 10 suggestions:

1. Don’t limit yourselves to PhD’s. We all know PhD’s who get the job, sit down and rarely rise again.

2. Good contemporary is not skin deep. How well does the candidate know the permanent galleries at the Met? The Frick? Ask who has the best American historical collection on the West Coast. (It’s the de Young.) Make it/break it question: Who is Robert Farris Thompson? (Extra credit: What are his links to the SAM? Answers here and here.) In short, don’t pick a person who’s all about who’s hot and who’s not.

3. No divas. The Northwest flattens their feathers. They’re not happy, and yes, we talk about their huge egos behind their backs. On the other hand, glam’s fine. High-heeled sneakers and wig hats welcome.

4. Reach for the sky. When Max Anderson left the Whitney, who would have guessed he’d take a job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art? At the time it looked like a demotion, but he’s a bigger deal now than he was then. Get the back story, and pick somebody with something to prove.

5. Consider art dealers. Jeffrey
Deitch broke that ice. If he can be director of MoCA, why
can’t an art dealer be curator at SAM? Ask Donald Young if he’s available. What’s next for Scott Lawrimore? Greg Kucera?  Marian Goodman would be an amazing coup, and so would Paula Cooper. Maybe one of them is secretly sick of the commercial world. Thinking less commercially, on the commercial/nonprofit divide, how about the team of Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett? How about Matthew Higgs?

6. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to peers.

7. Don’t think you can’t get a big name. That person might have private reasons to make a move. But fame alone doesn’t mean he or she will have anything genuine to offer in the NW.

8. Pick somebody who
can find the global in the local. That person will get behind the
region and push. He or she will inspire donors and attract diverse audiences.
When she doesn’t have money for a necessary exhibit, she’ll be
someone others write checks for. 

9. Tough skin is a requirement. Nobody who collects grievances, please.

10. Without vision the people perish. Find somebody who has one and can make it matter.

When Michael Darling leaves his job in July as modern and contemporary
curator at the Seattle Art
Museum to become chief curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, it’s
good news for Chicago, bad for Seattle. He’s an extraordinary gifted
curator. Objects speak to him, suggesting patterns and relationships
that root and waken in his exhibitions.

(Photo, Mike Urban, Seattle PI 2007, accompanying my profile of him, here.)

A curator on the job for three years is cracking open the territory. Darling has the wit, energy and vision to connect part of what’s genuinely of merit in the NW to art globally. He is capable of breaking the isolationist bubble of regionalism to move artists who move him onto a larger stage. He’s leaving in part because he can’t do it alone. Having brilliant chops is not enough in the NW, either for artists or curators.

Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78 (June 27 to Sept. 7, 2009) is extraordinary by anyone’s measure. From my review in Modern Painters:

Target Practice focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world
and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40
talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged
what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the
best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.

None of William Ivey’s paintings have a title. All of Howard Kottler’s sculptures do. They’re either jokes or explication, the latter because he was a teacher.

William Ivey (1919-1992)
Untitled, 1976
Oil on canvas
Howard Kottler (1930-1989)
Portrait Vase, 1988
Ceramic with whitewash and luster

Ivey painted not what he saw but what he felt about what he
saw: windows, waters, hills and dales, bridges, tables,
ledges and restless passages of sky as they poured themselves out through the window in his
studio.
Like Joan Mitchell, he continued to explore the premises that first inspired him. He wanted to push
representation to the edge, hammer the hard contours of the world into
submission and infuse their shadowy forms with blunt yet atmospheric
radiance. He never became what Lester Young called a
“repeater pencil,” producing Iveys by the truckload.

Like the Bay Area’s Robert Arneson, Kottler believed in the
aesthetics of bad taste. Cheap consumer goods ignited flames in the fake fireplace of his imagination. Marbled contact paper stirred him more than marble, and simulated wood grain meant more than wood. He was part of a generation that dispensed with the high/low divide, which meant, in his case, that art history also drew his magpie eye. Portrait Vase is a tribute to Italian futurists, especially Umberto Boccioni. The fractures that were life and death for Boccioni became party favors for Kottler.  During his lifetime, some saw Kottler as trifling, which did not disturb him. When challenging the high/low divide, protests from its adherents are expected. At least he wasn’t barking mad like the  futurists. (Yeats: The best lack all conviction, while the worst
/Are full of passionate intensity.)

Because Ivey and Kottler are always high points, that’s what they are in
A Corporate Legacy – A Continuing Cultural Gift
at the Wright
Exhibition Space, curated by Beth Sellars.

Aside from the coma-inducing title, the exhibit is a fine time capsule for a certain kind of NW art: strong in painting, ceramics and glass, barely there in photography and nonexistent in video, installation and anything that rests uneasily in a specific medium.

The collection tends toward the conservative, bringing to mind Wallace Stevens‘ reflections on his neighborhood.

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers
In red weather.

Another thing about that neighborhood: Stevens lived there. Days, he worked in a managerial capacity for an insurance company. Nights, he reinvented the language.  Conservative is not a synonym for irrelevant. 

The collection from which the exhibit is drawn came from Safeco Insurance. The company began to acquire art in 1973 and did so with a regional focus. By the time Liberty Mutual acquired Safeco in 2008, its glory days in aesthetics were past, but as a final goodwill gesture the corporation donated 840 of the strongest works to the Washington State Art Consortium, a support group for seven art museums in the state.

Once abundant, corporate collections are now a rarity. Safeco’s rewarded artists, art at its source. In the 1980s, it was easy to take it for granted. Now, it appears to represent a better time.

(Show list after the jump.)

[Read more…] about Time capsule of Seattle art

Armando Mariño The Raft, 2000
Watercolor on paper
60 x 81 inches
Courtesy of The Farber Collection

 Harriet Saunderson Walking Wall, 2007

Christian Weihrauch Kleine Schritte (Small Steps), 2005
Colored pencil on paper
12.5 x 10 in.

Jon Michael Turner, from the Combat Paper Project

Do-Ho
Suh

Karen Ganz
Jennifer Campbell

1. Activate figure/ground relationships.

Jennifer Mao Figure Ground

2. Subvert verisimilitude.

Glenn
Ligon Malcolm X (small version 1) #1, 2001; painting; paint and
screen print on primed canvas, 48 in. x 36 in. (Image via)

3. No line unchallenged.

Sigmar Polke, Over the Rainbow, 2006 (obit here)

4. No dead edges.

Andrew Dadson, Plank Lean Painting #2, 2010.
(detail) Oil on canvas.
60 x 60 x 10 inches

5. Color needs a crew.

Robert Ryman (His white on white in white qualifies.) Ledger, 1982. (Image via)

6. How carries what.

Mark Mumford, Hold Still, 2003
Ink on paper

7. Ransack the past (be a chop shop).

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter –
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one
fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

John Currin

8. Let ripe go rotten.

Joan Snyder Rain, 2009
oil, acrylic, burlap, seeds, paper mache, on linen
39″ x 54″

9. Like a thermos, contain heat without radiating it.

Screens full of their efforts, all deleted, all in search of a free advertising platform, come in several times weekly.

Sample:

Not that trolls (and gnomes) don’t have their uses. Below, a fine one by Nicholas Nyland in the spirit of Tang Dynasty.

Erwin Wurm

Don’t tell me I’ve nothing to do.

Back Monday.

You draw, she embroiders your results.

Mao:

Map-making is an assertion of the finite – an attempt to physically embody knowledge of structures and boundaries…They are created with the implicit understanding that the depicted space holds a degree of permanence.
In asking individuals to map familiar places from memory and embroidering the results, I am interested … in creating a non-reproducible illustration of a subjective memory, inverting the traditional practice of mass-production associated with conventional maps. I am also interested in the points where memory fails – the blank spaces, unevenness, and skewed proportions that reflect our own hindsight biases and remembrances.

To participate:
Make a map of a familiar place from memory on a piece of paper up to 8.5″x 8.5″. Send scans/images to:
jennifer.s.mao[at]gmail.com
Or, if anonymity is preferred, by post to:
1140 18th Ave, Apt #205
Seattle WA, 98122

War

Adam Helms, image via

Byron King

Polar Brokers is a series of drawings where I took the bio pics of big
oil executives and morphed images of polar bears into their silhouettes.