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Two American classics:

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, opening sentence:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

 Zoe Strauss:

Charles LeDray debuted in Boston with a solo show at the ICA through Oct. 17. Sebastian Smee in the Boston Globe loved it:

LeDray is one of contemporary art’s brightest stars, and this show, organized by the ICA’s Randi Hopkins, is the most beautiful, poignant, and witty show the ICA has mounted since moving to its new waterfront home in 2006.
LeDray treats clothes as surrogates for human identity, particularly male identity, and for the many types of work that go into constructing it. As such — and unlike the fashion industry, which is founded on an unblinking faith in the potential of clothes to communicate power, beauty, and self-worth — his work is intensely alive to the pathos clothes can communicate, and to the many senses in which they just don’t . . . quite. . . fit. (more)

LeDray’s workworkworkworkwork travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art (the entire third floor, November 18, 2010-February 13, 2011) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (dates TBA). Although LeDray comes from Seattle and was a guard at the Seattle Art Museum, his exhibit is not scheduled for a Northwest stop.

From Portland. I’ve never heard of her, and her website is mysterious – all flash, little info.  Administered by the Seattle Art Museum, the  Betty Bowen Award goes annually to a Northwest artist. The top prize is $15,000.  Two runner-up awards for $2,500 go to Elias Hansen and Barbara Sternberger.

Oct. 21, 6-7 p.m., there’s a reception for the three artists at SAM, followed by artists’ talks, 7-8. Free admission.

This image, filed under “writing,” is on her website. May or may not be her work. I like it either way, as the illusion to which the image refers is in all senses threadbare.

In my family, making something out of anything but words was a waste of time. Lumpy clay bowls and crayon drawings brought home from school were considered childish aberrations, akin to picking your nose and eating it. 

John Bankston comes from another tradition. He drew his way into the world and hasn’t, as an adult, shaken off the magic of turning a blank into an image or a  lump of clay into a man.

Following Glenn Ligon …. (Image via)

…Bankston investigates the push-pull of African-American traditions through the prism of a coloring book, minus, of course, the book. The weight of cultural assumption trails his figures like a suspicious clerk in a grocery store.

In his jaunty fun-house mirror, tragedy causes the distortions.

At James Harris through Oct. 9.

Considering that the online-only Seattle PI is such a streamlined and staff-starved operation, celebration ensues when it manages to deliver any journalism at all. On the site, Vanessa Ho’s elegant boiler-plate story about Seattle Opera‘s financial challenges nailed every aspect of what/when/why but failed to create any sense of who. Who is Seattle Opera, and why should anyone care about its fate? This failure accounts for the low quality of the comments, most of them either begrudging or outright hostile to the idea that the city extend any assistance.

This sentence stood out:

The (Seattle City Council) committee obviously was supportive of the opera and Seattle Center, but councilmember Sally Bagshaw said she wanted to ensure the deal would provide specific public benefits, such as vocational opportunities.

What an anti-art toad Bagshaw is. Art is not, for her, its own excuse. It has to provide socially redeeming value to earn support. Vocational opportunities? Why not reading groups for gang members and stage sets that reduce global warming?

Journalism tells stories. Even on deadline, even if, in Jonathan Lethem‘s phrase, it has to tell its story walking, it can’t afford to skip a crucial part of the plot.

The admirable Douglas Britt at the Houston Chronicle reports on a one-night show in a funeral home. What will these “visionary” Houston artists think of next?

Seattle’s Charles Krafft had a show in a funeral home in 2003, and not, as in Houston, by hanging portraits on the wall. Krafft’s art in a dead house was made from the dead:

He’s making urns from human ashes, following a formula Josiah Spode invented in 1797, producing fine English china glaze by adding calcinated cow bone to the company’s clay mixture. (more)

As Larry Reid likes to say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to Delft.” Then there’s Seattle’s Greg Lundgren, who has turned art & death into a business. Excellent Brendan Kiley story on Lundgren here.

On the other hand, when it comes to turning out the living for a show in a funeral parlor, Houston has Seattle beat. I don’t remember seeing any major collectors or curators at the opening of Krafft’s show at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Can represent the U.S. at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (image via)

From the Seattle Weekly:

On the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program–except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon. (more)

A couple of points:

One of Salman Rushdie‘s prime targets in Satanic Verses, indeed, the prime target, was the government in England during the Thatcher years. When Iran issued its famous fatawa on him because of its misunderstanding of a dream sequence in the book, the much-maligned-by-Rushdie English government stepped up with round-the-clock protection. Apparently, Molly Norris, who never maligned anyone, is not entitled to her government’s support. As an American, she’s on her own.

She never drew Mohammad. She drew a cup of coffee, a domino, a box of pasta, a spool of thread, a purse and a cherry, all claiming to be the prophet. (Image here.) Nor did she create the website inspired by her gentle cartoon, “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,”drawn by her to support Trey Parker and Matt Stone after the South Park brush with fanatics.

The Weekly, her former occasional employer, called her cartoon “infamous.” A standard definition of the word is “having a bad name as being the place where an odious crime was
committed, or as being associated with something detestable; hence,
unlucky; perilous; dangerous.”

I’ll go with dangerous. Clearly her cartoon has become dangerous to her.

Britain made it a precondition of restoring diplomatic relations with Iran that it discontinue its efforts to kill Rushdie. On Sept. 24, 1998,  Iran’s Mohammad Khatami said his government would “neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie.”

Norris has said she doesn’t want anyone to do anything, but I can think of one thing. Let your representatives know you want the FBI to fund Norris in hiding. And while I realize that moderate Muslims have their hands full these days, it would be wonderful if a few of them could try to explain this misunderstanding to those who are so easily and dangerously offended, so that Norris can come home and be herself again.

Pack up all my cares and woes….(previous)

Chiharu Shiota – Circle the suitcases!

Demetrius Oliver‘s Asterism – black stars on the move.

Huma Mulji – Arabian Delight
Robert Capa‘s long-lost Mexican suitcase
The Art Guys – Suitcase Wheel

Preston Singletary – Bentwood Box

Take your skin that’s smooth as a baby’s bottom and shove it. John Grade loves puckers, knots, sags, discolorations, ruts and rough spots.

Grade, pronounced Grotty, Circuit 2010 – Glazed ceramic bonded with gypsum polymer to corn-based resin embedded with marine netting.
9 x 24 x 24 feet

After its exhibition at Davidson Galleries, Circuit will spend a year on a mountain, accumulating changes as a fast-forward into old age.

Jerry Pethick mined the vein of weathering change before Grade. Time Top was Pethick’s last major work before his death in 2003. Granted, Grade’s work is more of a performance than Pethick’s.

Grade:
But Pethick had a better idea of what works in a gallery. He tended to keep the inside and outside separate. Not for him would be Grade’s forlorn and drab grouping of dark husks in a gallery. Disintegrating in nature (entirely biodegradable, by the way) Circuit is bound to produce a more interesting series of photos, at the least.

At Davidson till Oct. 2.