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If painting is what John Russell called a “vegetable construct that changes in time,” there’s no reason a painter can’t accelerate the progress. Before Plank Lean Painting left Andrew Dadson‘s studio in Vancouver B.C., he retracted it.

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

Plank Lean Painting, detail

What symphonies of old-time push and pull are buried underneath the black? Leftover colors gather at the painting’s edge like clues at a crime scene. And this is the truth about painting. Dadson’s attempt to kill it gave it license to rise again in another form, from bloom to blight, channeling Rothko.

Voter’s Ink, 2008
Iraqi voter ink on canvas
framed with UV Plex
42 x 32 inches (reversible vertically)

Making a painting from Iraqi voter ink embraces accelerated change.  The piece will continue to develop in the light, losing purple and gaining gold, its specifics lost in an atmosphere over which the artist has no control. For someone who is not primarily a painter, his contributions to a medium that only momentarily has his attention are extraordinary.

Through June 26 at Lawrimore Project. Jessica Powers on Dadson here.

Say you are represented by the most innovative gallery space in the Northwest – simultaneously a  warehouse, salon, white cube and video theater. It’s your turn. You can do whatever you want there, take as much space as you want. If you’re Matt Browning, you want to burrow into the furthest corner of the deepest back space (in the salon), wall off the fireplace and use its top as a shelf for a miniature forest of palm-sized, reconstituted  trees whittled into cone-like wedges full of boiled pine sap. Other than that, the room is empty.

In the middle of the worst environmental disaster since the Ice Age, Browning’s modesty is appealing. Appealing and deceptive. It takes a major artist to pull off this kind of scale shift.

And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.

A. E. Housman

But begin the game anew…too little, too late, but imperative nonetheless.

Browning, detail:

Titled Tradition as Adapative Strategy, Browning’s foray into the world of back-porch whittlers builds the conceptual from a foundation of masculine craft. Each piece comes from one block of wood he carved into a cone suspended from a brace. He poured the pitch into the cones, which are also funnels.

And  time machines. Like oil in water, the pitch will continue to move at its own leisurely imperatives. (See Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland.)

Browning conceived of his show before the Gulf of Mexico promised to become a dead zone, but surely he saw it coming. A consumer society consumes itself. After eight deregulated years of the Bush administration, the self-consumption is an orgy. Browning’s adaptive strategy offers no solutions, save for the most basic.

In the face of ruin, the handy man make something. He jerry-rigs a repair and failing that,  fashions a memorial. Drawing on skills passed down from generations, he speaks to future generations with his actions: Take up your bed and walk, or, as Fergus said in The Crying Game, pick up your teeth with broken fingers.

Jen Graves on Matt Browning here. Through June 26.

Seattle artists Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park, the masterminds behind Aqua Art Miami, have booked the hotel on Ocean Avenue, the scene of their early success, and dispensed with the warehouse in Wynwood that never really caught on.

Chartier:

It’s what all the galleries seemed to prefer after many conversations, and the energy is already way better than it’s been for a long time.

Ben Beres, Seattle artist and part of the art team SuttonBeresCuller, catnaps in 2005 on the second floor of the Aqua Hotel during Basel/Miami. Adam L. Weintraub photo, Seattle PI

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

detail (2009)
color photograph mounted on aluminum and plexiglass
43 5/8 x 43 5/8 in. (110.8 x 110.8 cm)

Ron Tran‘s pigeons (The Peckers, 2004) are better musicians, but they have backup on piano.

The Peckers in concert here. It’s a NYT’s video and you have to watch a short ad first, but it’s well worth it.  This piece was featured in Michael Darling’s Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest at the Seattle Art Museum in 2008.

In what used to be the Henry Galllery’s gift shop but is now a gallery behind the reception desk is Céleste Boursier-Mougenot‘s wading pool for porcelain.

Céleste Boursier-Mougeno (France, b. 1961) Untitled (Series #2). 1999
Inflatable plastic pool, porcelain bowls, glass snifters, pump, immersion heaters, water, and Clorox Henry Art Gallery, gift of Kate Elliott


The sound’s the thing, a random clack-clack fused with bells. Reminds me of a fragment of a F. R. Higgins’ poem about Jezebel, whom the dogs of the street eat. “Though her ghost lacks a back, there’s music in the old bones yet.”

Some exhibits are so earnest and academic, so overcooked and underfed that when they are taken seriously by excellent curators, dealers and critics, I experience them as if they were tidal waves surging from a sewer. In their stink, I am momentarily but deeply sick of art.

A prime example of this sort of thing is currently at James Harris: Robert Davis and Michael Langlois‘ Into the Void: The Battle of the Martyr as Told by Ingres.

James Harris:

Robert Davis and Michael Langlois are collaborators who make paintings together, redefining the conventional notion that paintings are made by a single artist and embody a singular essence or “hand.” They met while at the School of the Art Institute and have worked together since 1997, each taking an equal role in developing ideas, choosing subjects, and executing the works.

Davis & Langlois:

For us, representational painting always includes a deferred
relationship to the painting’s event. In this sense, we see our
paintings as historical and symmetrical to our own relationship to the
past-defined by an ever-renewing dynamic between memory, its
representation and the synchronicity brought about in the object
itself. Our vocabulary is derived from popular and sub cultures and
while we use the oldest trick in the book (mimesis), we are committed
to making classical techniques viable options in contemporary art.

Both paragraphs are Grade A Prime nonsense, but hey, nobody’s perfect. The exhibit also comes wrapped in a ridiculous narrative: a resurrected Ingres narrates the tale of a 15-year-old Palestinian-American girl thinking of Chief Seattle when he was forced out of his land, text translated into Soundgarden lyrics translated into Arabic. Again, bad but not fatal.

What’s fatal is the work itself, the painting. It’s gutless, with all the gears of its machinery clogged and dry.

The Resurrection, 2009
Oil on canvas
40 ” x 50″

These people are going to make “classical techniques viable options”? Ingres would have laughed them out of his studio. They’re going for the silky sublime, of which the 19th Century French NeoClassicist was master. What they deliver is competent sign painting. From a distance and viewed from a moving car, their mimesis might pass muster.

Iman, 2009
Oil on canvas
66″ x 72″

In a gallery, a good gallery, it’s a disgrace. Painting is not limping along, needing an assist from whatever rotten crutch is on offer. Painting needs Davis & Langlois like a fish needs a bicycle.

Into the Void, 2009
Oil on canvas
96 ” x 104″

The core of this exhibit made a previous appearance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (September 5 – 28, 2009). That’s a big venue for a trifling product.

How Can You Buy Or Sell the Sky, 2009-10
Watercolor and silver paint on wall
Dimensions site specific

Through June 19.

The room around you is a house. Your house is your body bubble. Invaded by misfortune,  fortified by paranoia, your house is your thickest hide. It’s shaped in your image, if you have an image and aren’t just living there, having nowhere else to go.

Whiting Tennis MASTODON, 2010
Acrylic and collage on canvas
46 x 65 inches

Whiting Tennis builds and/or paints shelters that are spiritual containers for the thing contained. Their oddity derives from the inability of their inhabitants to focus their projections. His current exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery is called Walleyed, used in a sense that moves beyond sight into essence.

TRICLOPS, 2010
Paint on plywood
114 x 55 x 55 inches

STILL LIFE WITH BIRDBATH, 2010
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches

BROWN SHELF, 2010
Oil on cardboard collage
29 x 43 x 1.75 inches

Through June 26.

When Stu Smailes died in 2002 at age 69, he left a challenge to Seattle. If the city would commission an artist to create a  “fully articulated,
realistic male nude” and place it in a prominent public spot surrounded by a fountain, he’d underwrite it with $1 million.

Naturally, the city punted. (Where did Smailes think he was living, Florence?) The city passed Smailes’ proposal to the Seattle Art Museum, then in the process of creating the Olympic Sculpture Park. Lisa Corrin, then SAM’s curator of contemporary art, commissioned designs from three finalists, Anthony Gormley, Glenn Ligon and Louise Bourgeois.

Smailes was the kind of person who ate dessert before dinner. He wanted to leave behind him a lovely penis in a public place. Gormley entered in the spirit of the donor, suggesting a male figure from whose erect member water flowed.
Ligon’s idea was subtler, a male looking into a water pond and
seeing his own reflection.
Gormley’s design was possibly too explicit, even for Corrin. And
while Ligon’s was quieter, it came
with a less active water element than Smailes envisioned.

That left Bourgeois, who got the nod for Father and Son. Her design
features the family pair facing each other as water plays over the
surface of one body and then the other, forever separating one from the other. Bourgeois isn’t known for fountains or for realistic nudes, male or female.
But she’s recognized for the range and flexibility of her 
production.
She dealt with the figure in both sculptures and
drawings, leaning toward psychologically rich content with
Freudian overtones. She was interested in how family dynamics shape lives.
But most of all, she was interested in how she could use content, any
content, to create art.

Bourgeois:

The subject is only the subject. So it’s not a
mystery. The mystery resides in what you do with it.

Bourgeois died Monday at age 98. (New York Times obit here.)

Her achievement is towering, but not in Seattle. After looking at her fountain for several years, I think it stands as her worst work ever. Even water jets cannot animate her awkward father and son, nude for no reason beyond the patron’s stipulation. The water was supposed to cover one and reveal the other, but it tends to cover or reveal each together.

If only Smailes had harbored an interest in giant spiders.

(Image via)

If  Smailes were alive and allowed a vote, doubtless he would have gone for Gormley. I didn’t have a vote either, but I would have gone for Ligon. On the other hand, Bourgeois threw in two sets of eyeball benches in black granite, and they rock. Kids growing up in Seattle will remember sitting on eyeballs, which could be all they need to jump start their lifelong  interest in art.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, …

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
W. H. Auden

Poets matter to poets, musicians to musicians. Tributes to dancers come from other dancers. Rare are artists who inspire a legacy outside the arena of their endeavor.

Sixteen years after his death, the poet of power chords continues to matter to musicians, but the exhibition bearing his first name at the Seattle Art Museum isn’t about them. Curated by Michael Darling, it’s entirely about Cobain’s afterlife in visual art. Given the narrow theme, the breath of the work is astonishing: from robustly celebratory to tender, fierce to funereal, funereal to forensic. The exhibit opens with the artists who knew him, Seattle photographers Alice Wheeler and Charles Peterson. (Previous post here.)

Everyone else came after.

For Elizabeth Peyton, he’s a Russian icon remade in Oscar Wilde’s dandy mode: bloodless as an angel, lovely as a wilting wildflower. Cobain is her most consistent subject, and yet deliberately there is only one small portrait from her in the exhibit, a single piece given an entire wall for maximum impact. On it, painted silver, her colors glow. Derived from the thinnest of oils brushed onto heavily gessoed board and leaking in faltering streams, the painted molecules of her portrait appear ready to fall apart at the slightest touch.

If Peyton is the cooked, Scott Fife is the raw. His Cobain made of cardboard drilled with screws from a gun rests like a severed head on the ground.

Jack Pierson offers the artist’s name in mismatched metal lettering, like a ransom note. (Kurt Cobain, 1994, 40 x 56 inches)
The famous are their own tribe. They are interchangeable in their excesses and  anonymous in their particulars.

Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe 1996.

From  Heart-Shaped Box, the lyric, “Cut myself on angel hair and baby’s breath” inspired Joe Mama-Nitzberg and Marc Swanson‘s Untitled (Kurt Cobain), 2009. Wrapping the bouquet is part of a shirt from a French designer label Cobain favored after he hit it big. Turns out his flannel was not forever. Once the man had money, he wanted to look good.

Time slows around Banks Violette‘s Dead Star Memorial Structure (on their hands at last) from 2003.  Why do brights lights insist on burning out? The sculpture is a drum-set wreckage shellacked in place, as if that wreckage were the point all along, the price to be paid for creating youth’s most haunting cri de coeur.

 Jordan Kantor is having none of that. His paintings of the death scene are both exact and unknowable. They chart the aftermath of violent death. Be it murder or suicide, fatal violence draws the cops. The people who bent over his body did not love it. For them, he was a professional puzzle to solve.

Drawn from Gus Van Sant’s Last Days as well as images from Internets, Gretchen Bennett‘s colored-pencil drawings have a bleached intensity, the subject drained in the spotlight’s glare, a private figure made of public moments.

Jennifer West‘s film Come As You Are features her and her son jumping on a trampoline. Like Bennett, she’s interested in image decay as metaphor. Because for her Nirvana songs are all about expelling things from the body, she soaked her film in bleach, antacid, laxatives, mud and pennyroyal (all featured in Cobain’s lyrics) for a ruined celebration. (DVD
projection 16 mm film negative transferred to DVD. 2
minutes, 51 seconds)

Evan Holloway‘s Left-Handed Guitarist, 1998, is made of foam, paper, plaster and graphite, but mostly foam. The figure bent over a guitar looks as if it’s made of Styrofoam that washed up on a beach. Cobain suffered from largely untreated back, stomach and intestinal problems. When he bent over his guitar in this posture, the intensity of the music was not the only reason.

Rodney Graham‘s unassuming slide installation, Aberdeen from 1998, plumbs the shallows of Cobain’s home ground, its bleak nowhere. The effect, slide after slide, is hypnotic. It’s a place where nothing will happen. The night will never fall, the car will never make it to the corner, and the kids who live there will not graduate from high school.

And yet Cobain goes on. After his death, Alice Wheeler collected signifiers of his influence on the bodies of the young, including the dyed blonde guitarist kid who made his way to Seattle and pitched a tent on the outskirts of the city in 1999, wearing the flannel like a flag of his country.

Through Sept. 6.

Note from Greg Lundgren:

Dennis Hopper is dead.. At 74 years old, it’s kind of a miracle that he lived that long. For all of the crazy things he did in his life, for all the drugs he consumed with great enthusiasm, for the very address he resided at, it is amazing that something like cancer was what took him down.

Tomorrow most of us get the day off for Memorial Day. And I think Memorial Day should be broader than paying our respects to the military men who have protected our freedom for the past 234 years. There are those that defend our freedom with guns and uniforms. And there are those that defend our freedom through a life of art and action. We defend our constitution so crazy son of a bitches like Dennis Hopper can make films, take pictures, perform and generally test the limits of what freedom looks like. If our country was a jet plane, they would hire Dennis Hopper to stress test it. If our country was a piece of luggage, they would give it to Dennis Hopper to see if he could break it. What makes our country so great is that is permits people like Dennis Hopper to create and destroy and live in a way that most people don’t understand or endorse.

Come on down to the Hideout tonight and join us for a drink in honor of Dennis Hopper. I am going to play the soundtracks from Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider, and probably round it out with Gram Parsons, the Stones, the Doors and maybe even a little Jimi Hendrix. It just seems like the right thing to do.

From Flashback. He can’t get a word in vertical.